This is a film directed by Thomas Vinterberg, whose credentials are mostly with the Dogme-95 crowd (his film 'Festen' is supposed to be one of the best, and one of the few to really attempt to follow the rules), and this is certainly not apart of that previous group of films and filmmaker. It's a dark-but-whimsical romantic fantasy made up of parts of science fiction and tragic romance, sort of like if Philip K. Dick tried his hand at doing soap opera.Indeed the word 'opera' is quite appropriate for this film. Much of Vinterberg's style here is operatic, such as sequences where one of the main characters (emphasis on 'characters') are ice skating to some very bombastic music, the lighting striking like out of a shadowy dream... indoors on an ice rink.But what about the film you might ask? What makes it such a cult-film object to be discovered (as I did through a friend who wouldn't stop raving about it, how 'weird' it gets)? It seems a straightforward sort of sci-fi premise: a man is married to a woman (Joaquin Phoenix and Claire Danes respectively) and the former wants to divorce the other as they've been split apart for a while and he doesn't see the relationship going anywhere (this is mostly inferred, and mostly early on). But she won't sign, and so he goes to New York city to confront her, amid her ring of celebrity and media that surrounds her. A good lot of time he's just waiting in a TV studio looking at monitors, some of them about new in Africa of some devastation going on.Oh, what kind of devastation? It's actually the future. That I neglected to mention is not entirely by accident. Vinterberg doles out information sparingly, and one can just grasp the ring of the plot by the end of the first half hour, and then it turns into a chase movie. Sort of. Nefarious figures, such as a "Mr. Morrison", are on their trail, or rather on Elena's trail as John tries to keep her safe. From what? Well, so it goes, she's a clone, or she has a bunch of clones made up from her.I would want to keep much of the surprises of the film spoiler-free, but then how much can be really spoiled here? Vinterberg's style is more concerned with the mood of the camera, how emotional the actors get, than with the story. He seems to almost be kindly (or just bizarrely) mocking storytelling in a sense, and by this he also has Sean Penn's entire role in the film being that of a guy on a plane, once close with John, speaking into a tape recorder he hopes for John to hear. Well, it's like poetry, it rhymes. So there.There's also dead bodies here and there in the film. It takes having to look at the back of the video box (or sticking with the movie till the last shot, which is posted below) to fully understand that it is a post-apocalypse kind of environment. It doesn't appear to be. This and other little moments in the film, or even how Vinterberg's cameraman ace-Danny Boyle collaborator Anthony Dod Mantle go about making certain scenes disorientating with dutch angles and see-sawing in a scene with a shot, that make it such a bizarre item. But Vinterberg also trusts the audience to try and keep up with him, and for the most part he's successful.By the end it is moving, if sometimes a little silly (the many clones and how they're 'taken out' so to speak make for unintentional laughs), and it has been an experience. It will turn off people who may not expect such twists and turns and performances that go just *this* high (::puts fingers an inch apart::) from going over the top. He also has the trust of an actor like Phoenix, who does some of his most subtle and perfectly forceful work as Polish-émigré John, and Danes who gets some chances to be hammy but barely takes them.It's All About Love is the kind of movie I would recommend only to certain people that I might know personally, or to those looking for a loopy art-film that is glad to be as sappy as it wants to be. Or those who will savor a closing shot like the one above. Or those who want to get a gage on who their 'other' is on a first date.

Cosmic disturbances are causing a new ice age, spontaneous heart attacks and Ugandan levitation, but John still takes time out from flying to work in Calgary to stop over in New York so his champion ice skating soon-to-be-ex-wife Elena can sign divorce papers. She is so good that her performances earn enough money to support an entourage of 50 in luxury hotels all over the world but they have discovered she is dying of heart failure and so have ordered 3 clones from Eastern Europe so they can kill her and work the clones in continuous 8 hour shifts, but the hit goes wrong and the assassin shoots all 3 clones instead by mistake. With their old friend Michael's help John and Elena flee to Russia by train but get off at the wrong station and freeze to death. Meanwhile John's brother Marciello is trapped in the sky, unable to land his plane anywhere because of the ice age and an overdose of anti-fear-of-flying drugs, and so cannot deliver his report to the UN on the cosmic disturbances, which due to brain damage caused by the drugs overdose he believes are caused by a love shortage.

Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Ingenious. Masterpiece!

This film is poor, unconvincing and boring. What a waste of good actors! What were they thinking to take part in this drivel? There are plot holes to drive a train through and contradictions such as "is there a telephone?" when he uses a cell phone in another scene. Among other inconsistencies there are poles who don't appear to speak Polish and a champion ice skater who smokes. Does the director really think that, in the future, smoking won't be a thing of the past?Having said all that I can think of about this truly dreadful waste of time, I have to add that Joaquin Phoenix is one of my favorite actors and was the main reason I began to watch this garbage.