It's All About Love (2003)

You won't be disappointed!

One of my all time favorites.

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

This was so mediocre that I stopped watching after half an a hour of suffering. The movie is a collection of juvenile ideas that remind me of silly crap I would come up with back when I was a teenager and think it was ingenious but reflecting on it now only makes me cringe. Silly stuff like floating Ugandans and that TV report with that man saying something like "we are not angels we didn't choose to fly, we want to be on the ground just like you" with super dramatic music playing in the background was the epitome of stupid. Also that crap about everyone dying around because they lack love is equally retarded. The plot is a joke and I figured most of it just from the half hour I saw (I actually was very surprised how accurate I was after checking IMDb, however, that had more to do with the laziness of the script writers than my "plot-guessing" abilities.)To be avoided.

I rented "It's All About Love" last night. When it was over, I hit "play" and watched it for a second time.This is a bizarre, ambitious, and uncompromising film. It is like a David Lynch film but without the horror. It is a basically a filmed dream.The director does not condescend to the audience by explaining everything or anything, which is probably why it got such bad reviews.From my viewpoint, the title explains what is happening in the movie. In this science fiction world, love is what holds the world together. Without it, the fabric of the world starts falling apart and people drop dead in the street, it snows in July, and people in Uganda start floating.This is definitely not a film for everybody. But if you are open minded and willing to go along for the ride, it is unlike anything you have seen before.If you are looking for a coherent plot and a linear story, this film is probably not for you.

Lars von Trier, who invented the minimalist film movement Dogme, followed up his own Dogme film with a musical. It's a sign that the ideas of the movement sprung from a general interest in how films are made, rather than a commitment to minimalism per se; and the same thing can also be seen in Thomas Vinterberg's post-Dogme film 'It's All About Love', which does have a certain minimalist aesthetic, but which is made with all of the tools available to the modern film-maker that the Dogme movement so consciously abandoned. And in spite of it's dreadfully uninspiring title, it turns out to be an interesting movie: stylised, beautifully constructed, and engagingly mysterious. Vinterberg proves himself to be a master of mood, creating scenes of a tender, haunting beauty but backed by a vague sense of menace. But judged purely as a thriller, the film is less good, because the menace and mystery never coalesce into something more certain, what we have here is images of a storyline, but no real story: things happen in sequence, and sometimes we are allowed to understand why, but it's unclear that there is a larger whole waiting to be discovered. Instead, we are presented with the illusion of fragments, beautifully executed (and Claire Daines in particular plays her role well), but without any necessary (visible or invisible) connectedness. The overall result could not be called great; but it is ambitious, distinctive, and directed with no little skill.

We all want love after all. We want family bounds and people to rely on, friends who support us and stick with us when we are in trouble.This was all about love. The separation was a disease and Eleana (Clair Danes) who worked hard to gain a successful career as a ballerina, got weaker and weaker as the result of not having the love she desired in her life, the love of being a white bride, purity, youth and togetherness with someone she loved.... May be she realised it when it was too late, when she was no longer wanted by the media, corporations who made money out of her talent; when she felt she was missing that long wanted link, to be attached to someone she loved.When John (Joaquin Phoenix)came back to get his divorce paper signed, it was too late, her heart already was weak, the disease was in an advanced stage. She tried to cure it, she tried to quit her job, but the people who used her including her brother betrayed her behind her back.So from Eleana's point of view, all she wanted was her life and happiness back. From David and Arthur's point of views, it was all about making money, no matter how many lives would be ruined; they were using people as their business tools. But from John's point of view, it was all about love. You could see in his eyes when he was watching Eleana that how he cared and how he longed for her, and that was the reason he left, because he loved her and he wanted her happiness and success. And finally that was the reason he got involved in the end.The Ugandans were symbolic to my view, something in John's imagination... He saw them on television screens and when he was dying. He saw them attaching themselves near each other to the place they were born so that they stay as a family and not to separate, to keep love! The fact that John's brother lived in aeroplanes and always in the sky showed the result of this family dis-attachment and confirmed that even when people leave each other, they still think about each other all the time, in their isolation and they still try to make sense by keeping contact...At the end... we hear John's brother (Sean Penn) trying to communicate with John .... "You are probably somewhere in snow... you are probably somewhere sleeping." So deep inside family members have this connection and that is why by separating families and disconnecting people from love, the world is going to be a very cold place to be and people finish their lives in isolation and from a cold heart somewhere and this would become so natural that no one will care after all.This also proved that even when these four family members tried to get together at one point, they did not really make it and that killed John and Eleana. In distance Michael, Eleana's brother died in storm and John's brother was in a plane that could not land anywhere at all as everywhere was snowing... so he was going to die as well...Love is something that has to bound all of us humans together and if we are not connected, sooner or later, the life stops metaphorically and in this film symbolically.