It is lucky that Its All About Love is called Its All About Love, because if it wasn’t called Its All About Love you might be tempted to ask “What’s it all about”. No, that is too glib. A film which has benefited from the adverse advance publicity with reviews calling it preposterous, pretentious and stupid are red rag to a bull like me. Since preposterousness is generally a good thing, pretentiousness can be positive and stupidity is frankly the secret to a film like Dude, Where’s My Car – I was happy. And with the oddly stilted accents, the lack of scientific rigour and the elliptical screenplay was actually really enjoyable.
It is possibly the best Phillip K.Dick film made since Cypher. And since neither were based on actual Dick books that seems like a slur on Phil K. But what this, and Cypher, recognized was that a good sci-fi conceit is most interesting when dealt with as an aside almost. Get the characters and emotions right and you don’t need decent special effects. (This does have decent effects by the way, but it could have got away without). There is more than a degree of obtuseness obscuring the action, though anyone looking for Lynchian non sequituers will be disappointed. It is actually rather sweet. The Sean Penn monologues are stupid, the Hitchcock moments don’t convince but there are strong central performances and the whole thing hits the warped dislocated feel it quite clearly is aiming about., It is not really all about love, its actually all about 11 minutes.