What a beautiful movie!

I didn’t really have many expectations going into the movie (good or bad), but I actually really enjoyed it. I really liked the characters and the banter between them.

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

One of those movie experiences that is so good it makes you realize you've been grading everything else on a curve.

I never got it! How could you even tell he was a movie star? Where was the set he worked on? Besides the trailer! I never got the impact that he was a really big movie star or what it was he did, etc. Did I miss something? But eh, really like RIBISI anyway. So he liked this girl who's boyfriend worked at the video store? Stalking? I could not even tell what was going on.. No good character actors. Why do you need 10 lines to review a movie? This is dumb rule with a movie that shows little.Peace Dirk

Gray Evans (Giovanni Ribisi) is an internationally acclaimed movie star, and so is his beautiful wife Mia Lang (Franka Potente). In a wild ecstasy of fame and alcohol, he is getting more and more unable to differentiate between fans and stalkers. His marriage starts to suffer from his obsessions. In a video store, he meets John (Joshua Jackson) and his attractive girlfriend Jane (Christina Ricci) with whom he falls in love. But she seems to be unreachable for him, because John and Jane are a happy couple. Gray even engages a detective to observe days long each step of the life of John and Jane, pretending their were stalkers. The detective delivers Gray binders of photographs, transcriptions of what they speak in their apartment and what they eat for dinner.But this highly underrated movie is not about the film star's dream of possessing the girlfriend of someone else. It is not simply a movie about the difference of having what you want versus wanting what you have either. It goes much deeper. The film deals with the dissolving of the borders between Grey's wife Mia and John's girlfriend Jane on the one side and of Grey himself and John on the other side. It also deals with a very special kind of "imitation of life": Grey controls the life of John and Jane in order to be a part of their life, hence imitating it, fully unaware of the fact that their life is not his own. In Grey's fantasy, Mia and Jane fall together, he turns two women into one who has both the qualities of Mia and of Jane.From the standpoint of metaphysics, the borders between subject and object are transgressed. Therefore, the logic of the story of "I love your work" does not follow classical Aristotelian logic, in which this border can only be crossed by death. One remembers R.W. Fassbinder's "Despair – A Trip into the Light", where the protagonist Hermann Hermann also abolishes the borders between him as subject and the fair-grounder Felix Weber as object. Like Hermann, Gray, too, looks at himself having exchanged his position with the position of John and having become Jane's boyfriend, so he changes the subject-object relation twice and abolishes in the end the individuality of Mia and Jane by merging them into one fictive personality. Like Fassbinder's "Despair", also "I love your work" is a trip into the light – but while Fassbinder's movie ends with showing the insanity of the protagonist in a bright alpine village, where he assumes to be a movie star, the protagonist in Adam Goldberg's movie is in fact a movie star. Like in "Despair", at the end, the police arrest the protagonist, but in Goldberg's movie it is not the sunlight in which Gray's trip into insanity ends, but the floodlights on the roofs of dozens of police cars.Rating: 10 points.

The life of the so-called celebrities is at the center of this film. Adam Goldberg, an actor himself, directed and contributed to the screen play. It's a good thing he decided to stay behind the camera this time, something other novel directors don't seem to understand in their attempt of making their own statement in the movies.Gray Evans, appears to be a paranoid actor. On the one hand, he welcomes his status as a leading man in the business. On the other, he sees stalkers with most of the people he comes in contact. Gray, who is married to his idol, Mia, an actress, who he has greatly admired before their marriage. Mia is the source of what appears to be his own self-destruction. After all, how many premieres and red carpets can one take and still stay sane? Gray, who can't walk the Los Angeles streets without being recognized, suspects one of his fans for stalking him. The casual visit to a book store puts him in contact with a man who he also suspects is the source of all the bad publicity about him that starts appearing in the tabloids. The gossip is that his marriage is about to end. Gray also starts reflecting on his past relationship with the mysterious Shana, as he mixes reality and illusion. He has to rely on an Israeli security man named Yahud to protect him from the danger lurking outside.Giovanni Ribisi, who plays Gray, is a young actor who has proved he has what it takes to do good work. His work suffers because of the demands on his playing his obsession. Franka Potente, a good German actress is seen as Mia, the object of Gray's affections. Jared Harris has some good moments, ditto Joshua Jackson, and the rest of the cast. Vince Vaughan and Elvis Costello appear as themselves.Perhaps Mr. Goldberg will find the right material on his next time directing.

I wouldn't call "I Love Your Work" terrible, but I would agree that it doesn't really go anywhere. Portraying director Gray Evans (Giovanni Ribisi) descending into madness and desperation, I guess that the movie is supposed to be a look at the unpleasant situations inherent in the Hollywood lifestyle, but the whole thing is too confusing to logically make that point. Ribisi, plus Christina Ricci, Jason Lee, Franka Potente and Vince Vaughn (and even Elvis Costello as himself) do the best that they can, but there's not really enough to work with. For a better look at the vicissitudes of the celebrity life, check out Carl Reiner's "The Comic", starring Dick Van Dyke.