Avoid this movie! (It's All About Love - spoilers)

SteveGon · 03-28-2006, 03:12 PM

So I'm at the video store and see a new movie starring Joaquin Phoenix, Claire Danes and Sean Penn. It's called It's All About Love. Some sort of futuristic suspenser. What's this I thought? Never heard of it before. Sounds suspicious. My fingers twitch - should I pick it up? I see it's rated R. Hmmm, maybe Claire gets naked? Worth a shot I guess.

So Joaquin plays this Polish dude (with an on/off accent) who is enroute to Canada but stops over in New York to have his wife sign their divorce papers. Claire plays the wife, a famous also-Polish figure skater with the same accent problem. The year is 2021 and people are dropping dead of a strange heart malady. Most affected are the lonely and heart-broken. Joaquin steps over the dead body of one such victim while walking through an airport. Meanwhile there are news reports of a strange loss of gravity in Uganda.

So Joaquin meets his wife only to discover that she is at the heart of some sort of conspiracy. She wants to retire. This would leave her entourage out in the cold. Since it's snowing in July and the media are theorizing the advent of a new ice age, I guess they'd literally be out in the cold as well. Anyway, they've replaced her with a clone. No, make that two clones. No, make that three. Or maybe they're just doubles? Whatever. They also plan to kill Claire and Joaquin. So a hitman (not Tonya Harding) shows up, but since his wife likes Claire, he kills the doubles (I think that's the reason). Then Joaquin, Claire and her hanger-on brother run off to Canada where they're stranded in the wilds during a blizzard. And they all freeze to death. The movie ends with a shot of a bunch of Ugandans floating in the air.

Oh yeah, Sean Penn plays Joaquin's brother. He spends the entire movie in an airplane waxing about love. He also has a bad accent.

Claire didn't even get naked. When does Shopgirl come out?

Haggai · 03-28-2006, 03:57 PM

Well, that sounds...er, not so good. Too bad, I see it was directed by Thomas Vinterberg. He also did The Celebration, which I liked a lot, although I only saw it once, about 6 or 7 years ago.

Good line about Tonya Harding.

Brook K · 03-28-2006, 04:17 PM

Damn it Steve, I thought I was almost done with new movies for awhile. Flying Ugandans? There's no way I can't rent this. (plus I just watched the much-maligned Dear Wendy, also by Vinterburg, and thought it was very good)

Better make sure George sees this post. Sounds like this would be right up his alley.

If it's celebrity nudity you're itching for, check out Manderlay for a full frontal Bryce Dallas Howard.

Holadem · 03-28-2006, 04:20 PM

Sounds like a winner, someone find Brook K!

EDIT: erm, nevermind

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H

Rich Malloy · 03-28-2006, 04:29 PM

Haven't heard of this film (Vinterberg, eh?), but your description... has me interested! So I looked around, and nearly everything written about the film (at least by critics worth reading) bear the same tone. Consider Dennis Lim's writeup:

Quote:

It's All About Love is, by any measure, a colossal folly—ridiculed at its Sundance '03 premiere (where, to this viewer at least, it seemed like a lone beacon of nutty integrity), supposedly disowned by its stars (rumor has it Claire Danes burst into tears upon seeing the end result), and jettisoned by original distributor Focus. But this $10 million Danish-British-French-U.S.-Japanese-Swedish-Norwegian-German-Dutch co-production is a film maudit for the ages — rapturous and inexplicable in equal measure.

Vinterberg's 2020 New York looks an awful lot like 2000, but the city (and, it's soon revealed, the world) is suffering a bizarre variety of ecological and metaphysical ills. Snow falls in July. Once a year, all freshwater turns to ice. Unfazed pedestrians step over corpses on the sidewalk ("lonely or sad people" periodically drop dead from a mysterious heart condition). In Uganda, gravity-deprived villagers tether themselves to their huts to stop from drifting off into the stratosphere. Perhaps strangest of all, the world's dominant form of big-business entertainment is . . . ice dancing.

Like recent globe-trotting bewilderments Code 46 and demonlover, It's All About Love luxuriates in an intoxicating vapor of jet-lagged dissociation. There's also some of the foul-weather romanticism of Mauvais Sang and The Hole, and of course, a trace of the cloned-love original Vertigo. The deadpan weirdness occasionally slips into daftness, but with its brittle rhythms and puzzling ruptures, it's the sort of movie that could haunt your dreams for weeks. In the end, it is, as promised, all about love—this brave, foolish, improbably moving film's great achievement may be the utter sincerity with which it lives up to its title.

If it's as bad as all that, someone needs to lay the real smackdown so I don't waste a Netflix rental...

**HTF Ads**

Michael Reuben · 03-28-2006, 05:05 PM

I wouldn't put the film in the same class as Code 46 and demonlover, both of which were watchable despite their flaws. The only thing that keeps you watching It's All About Love is the trainwreck factor. SteveGon's plot summary is very accurate, and much better than anything I could have done.

M.

Brook K · 03-28-2006, 05:32 PM

I was tickled by this excerpt from a review at Netflix:

Quote:

Not one of Joaquin's or Sean's best movies. I would recommend Ladder 49 or I am Sam.

I added it to my queue. It's All About Love that is, I'm not touching Ladder 49.

SteveGon · 03-28-2006, 06:52 PM

Quote:

If it's celebrity nudity you're itching for, check out Manderlay for a full frontal Bryce Dallas Howard.

Guess I'll be shelling out for that Russian DVD after all.

Quote:

The only thing that keeps you watching It's All About Love is the trainwreck factor.

Pretty much.

Quote:

Not one of Joaquin's or Sean's best movies. I would recommend Ladder 49 or I am Sam.

I'd sooner sit through this again than attempt to rewatch i am sam. Ye gods that movie made me want to retch (had to shut it off halfway through).

I imagine this has only been released due to Joaquin's rise in stature after Walk the Line.

It's All About Love has the dubious honor of receiving my first BOMB rating of 2006 (though it's not nearly as offensive as the recipient of my last bomb award, The Exorcism of Emily Rose).

Mark Schmitt · 03-28-2006, 07:08 PM

I worked at a test screening of this once, oh, about 3 years ago or so, and although I didn't watch it unitl the last ten minutes, I saw the audience reaction. There was a lot of snickering, for lack of a better word. That is, until one guy yelled out, "This movie sucks!" at the very end (when the Ugandians were floating) and everybody cracked up.

I don't think they ever released this in theaters anywhere. I always had wondered what had happened to it, but after seeing the comments afterward (about 80% or so absolutely hated it), I wasn't surprised it was shelved.

Michael Elliott · 03-28-2006, 07:42 PM

Hmm...Manderlay just opened here last weekend.

As for this film, thanks Steve!!!

I rented DIRTY LOVE after reading Ebert's "No Star" review so I'll do the same with Steve and this film. It can't be any worse......