A hot young celebrity discovers fame can be a toxic substance in this independent drama. Gray Evans (Giovanni Ribisi) is a successful actor in his late twenties who would seem to have it made. Gray is married to an attractive actress with a solid career of her own, Mia Lang (Franka Potente), he's got several projects in the works, he gets lots of fan mail, and he gets to hang out at ritzy parties with his heroes. But Gray is far from happy; his marriage to Mia is starting to fall apart, and he's
being driven to distraction by his obsessive belief that a fan is stalking him. As Gray struggles to separate his delusions from reality, he finds himself indulging in a bit of stalking of his own, as he begins following John (Joshua Jackson), a clerk at a video store who is a big fan of his movies. The way Gray sees it, John is happier than he is, John's pretty wife, Jane (Marisa Coughlan), loves him while Mia doesn't care for him any more, and all in all he'd just as soon trade lives with the guy. In the midst of all this, Gray has recently run into Shana (Christina Ricci), a former flame he'd like to reconnect with. Directed by actor Adam Goldberg, I Love Your Work features a number of major stars in cameo roles, including Vince Vaughn, Jason Lee, and Elvis Costello. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi
At last, Adam Goldberg has given us his 8 1/2. It's an ambitious rumination on fame, reality, love, loss and regret that falls so far short, he should have called it 2 1/8.
Working with a self-consciously urgent, neo-noir style, Goldberg seems intent on expressing a meaningful message of some kind. It's too bad, then, that he has chosen such a shallow subject.
I Love Your Work gets the dissonance of the celebrity lifestyle to a T. But the self-reflexive strategy of Goldberg and co-writer Adrian Butchart is too brainy by half.
It's an intriguing mish-mash, a meta-textual stew that Goldberg, unfortunately, paints with a big, thick brush and then underlines with fat charcoal pencils.
So many questions are raised from both sides of the celebrity fence that the film could only have been made by someone as on-the-edge of stardom as [Goldberg].
A crisp impressionistic look at stardom while pointing out the allure of being common. Very strong in direction, script and acting, but struggles to finish.
Goldberg takes his message really seriously, abandoning a satirical edge early on, as if he were the first person to ever discover that celebrity is hollow.
I personally believe this movie is way underrated, I suppose to like a movie of this calibre one needs to have an acquired taste to it. It flies beneath the radar because it tackles I suppose what you could call the 'truth' of the movie business and even the human psyche as a whole. The first time I saw simply the end
of it, and it awed me...that I recommended it to Dij but hadn't seen the film in its entirety to earlier today.In this movie we learn of an actor, Gray Evans [Ribsi], who is married to actress, Mia Lang [Potente] and their marriage is suffering terribly. On top of this he finds that he is slowly losing his grips upon reality and the entire story becomes his entire paranoid obsession with a young film student, John Eckhart [Jackson]. This young character seems to remind him of himself before he caught the famous bug and became a completely different person.Various things occur where he tries to mend his relationship with Mia, or when he tries to portray their relationship to the public as completely normal whilst the tabloids proclaim them being 'stormy and tempestuous'. There are some parts in this film that get extremely confusing as it shows how easily his dreams become lucid and although he thinks they are real they just devour him completely.The finale, which I'm not going to share is quite something indeed. An ironic metaphor in itself.What drew me to this film was the dark premise of the story, Franka Potente [who is one of my favourite actresses] and Ribsi, of course.This movie simply shows that Ribsi is quite believable in playing yet another role where one is masquerading as 'normal' person whilst facing turmoils within themselves.Not for everyone, and I've noticed many actually aren't interested at all in this. I find this story quite deep and utterly terrifying.
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