Wonderful Movie

Absolutely Fantastic

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

A young boy whose birth father is a "contaminated tomato" from Italy he insists, rejects his family and escapes his meager existence into his own thoughts, shelterly painted on his diary. He longs for his paramour Bianca, believes his grandfather is the source of his family's little tragedies amongst other things, and insists of being called Léolo Lazone, instead of his French-Canadian name.This is an indescribable comedy, textured with bizarre characters and unusual observations from the narrator of this film, young Léolo. Witty, bizarre, and completely unique, this film takes some very strange turns along the way as we see how his family life effects him negatively to the point where he feels he doesn't belong anywhere near them. He holds on to what little proper sanity he has left by clutching his yearnings for Bianca. If he loses her, then perhaps the final life-string will be forever severed.This film is beautifully photographed, but despite it's centering around a child's thoughts and meanderings, this deals with very adult material. It can also be hard to watch, though at times the absurd black comedy, done completely straight, is brilliant and realistically accurate.

I have seen this movie on DVD, and I was a bit confused. I always thought that I am somehow intelligent and able to understand even complicated plots and thoughts, but this time, I failed. Or can it be that this movie is really not as good as so many people tell us? The story is weird, and I cannot believe that it is a proof of intellectual level that we see a young girl eating an old man's toenails, while a young boy watches her and "plays with himself". And also the rest of the story is only weird. Frankly speaking, this movie is also boring and did not touch me, at all. Everything only seems to give me the impression that the director wanted to talk about some severe problems that he might have had during his childhood!? If he wants, he should go to a psychiatrist. But he should not bore audience with his thoughts.

What an odd story. It was a good one for the first two-thirds of the film but the last third got so sick - at least to me and what little standards I possess, it lost favor with me. I got rid of it for that reason: overall - just too sick and too strange.It gets ugly because a 12-year-old kid, whom the story is centered around, starts to lose it. He tries to kill his uncle, begins using way too much profanity, and says and does things that no 12-year-old boy would say/do. The story just gets out of hand. Everyone in this film except the boy's mother is very odd with most of them winding up in a mental institution. I often laugh at dark humor but this is way too black, way too dark. People think Hollywood is morally bankrupt....well, the rest of the world, especially in the film-making business, is worse and this is a prime example.

OK I saw this film in my Canadian Film class last week and I thought it was horrible! I am a very open minded person when it comes to movies, but I don't know what to do with this one. Leolo was disturbing and the end made little to no sense. There are characters added at the end who have no need being there, no is the end explained well. I was told it was a beautiful little film prior to seeing it, but I saw no beauty, I only saw an obsession with feces and other bodily functions. I was revolted and by the end was terribly disappointed and unfulfilled. It was the worst film by far that was screened in the class and I will never get one image/sound out of my head for a long time. That scene with the cat is the most useless and out of place scene I have ever been witness to, not to mention the most disturbing. I give Leolo a 2 out of 10.