CommentsXp Best movie ever!

Teringer An Exercise In Nonsense

TrueHello Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

Jonah Abbott There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

jzappa Matteo Garrone's deeply morbid subjective reflection from Italy is an insightful musing of two characters, and then a third which works as an agitator. The short man finds the tall man at the zoo, where he is watching a vulture. The short guy, named Peppino, is a sweet talker. He's about 50, balding, under 5 feet tall. The tall guy, named Valerio, is a head turner, about 20, attractive, over 6 feet tall. As they struggle to recall where they've met before, the perspective periodically shifts from the humans to the vulture, a bird that survives by detecting dead meat. The picture is mangled, the sound is dampened, and we get an inverted look of the bird blinking its eyes. Valerio says animals are his strongest interest. Funny, says Peppino, they're also his. He is a taxidermist.Peppino, with a light manner and a genial grin, is a beast of prey who likes to entice young men with his money and favors. Valerio, who is told extraordinary things about his Adonis-like looks, is not very smart, and likes to be charmed. Peppino works by artifice, taking Valerio to clubs and hiring hookers for parties; the two friends end up in bed with the girls, and Valerio doesn't see that for Peppino, the girls are the snare and he is the sitting duck.The Embalmer is adept at camouflaging its real essence and rattling us with the shifts of the plot. Among the movie's charades are not all overstated, but eerily implicit. Does Peppino see himself as a homosexual, or as a philanderer who likes good buddies and is open-minded in bed? Does Valerio know Peppino wants him? Does Valerio favor Peppino's money or Deborah's abundant sexual skill? Is Valerio totally retarded? Twice he infuriates Deborah by standing her up; he continues go along with Peppino's insistence upon just one more time. Is it a defect or an advantage of the film that we don't always know what occurs? Another intended question I think, as we ponder over Valerio, a babe in the woods who, when he's not with the one he loves, loves the one he's with, if he loves at all.This incredibly unsettling and implacable experience takes place largely in Italian beach towns, but in a gray season, against chilled, steeled skies. The sea is nonetheless far away and dejected, and Garrone's images bleed the life out of some scenes. The music is a sobbing, deeply haunting jazz abstraction. This is not a comedy or a sexploitation pic, but a prurient matter concerning two obsessed pursuants and their prey, whose physicality may have made life such a breeze for him that he never got the dexterity to live it.It may sound absurd that a balding old midget could seduce an apparently heterosexual young Apollo out of the arms of an insatiable woman, but after Deborah checks Peppino out, she knows she has to take him seriously. What the short man wants, he goes after with skill, guile…and desperate longing. And it's compelling to watch him maneuver.

rhinocerosfive-1 Everybody wants to be adopted by a rich uncle. Everybody wants to pick up a girl who just cleaned out her boss's register. It's fairy godmothers and runaway princesses. But fairy tales are grim affairs. Remember the one about the maid who switches costumes with her mistress and gets stuck naked in a barrel riddled with nails and tossed in the river? Nobody wants to be the maid. There isn't much free in any life, heaven or hell or where we are. There are consequences to any act. Newton's third law applies to every tale, fairy or straight.The action is a monster who can give you what you want. The opposite reaction of L'IMBALSAMATORE is that in return, Rumpelstiltskin wants more than your baby. He wants you. That's what he always wanted anyway, and there's not much in the world sadder than an aging troll. An aging troll is a desperate animal, like a junkie in his impossible obsession, but junkies can clean up. A troll is what God made him, and it doesn't end well for most of them. Peppino Profeta can maybe see the future, as his name implies, but also as his name implies he's a little short-sighted. Like most men he can't see past his erection. He gets in over his head and that's where people drown, but sometimes they take you with them. This little monster, pathetic as he is, could do a lot of damage. Matteo Garrone photographs this character from odd angles, relegating him to the corner of the frame much of the time to accentuate his marginalization.Add to that the movie's grim look (the film is grainy and underexposed, packed with pore-opening closeups on the world's dirtiest beach) and its cringe-fetish situations (nearly every scene portrays an awkward or unpleasant social encounter) and you've got a prime downer of a story. It is creepy and nasty and willing to go places that horrify most people. I like it. When Valerio sleeps with his troll, the movie does not exploit his charity or contempt or self loathing, nor do we even know whether he feels any of these things. How often in life do we have complicated motivations to explain our acts? Much of the time, for me. People who are 100% sure about every choice they make live in an atmosphere immensely less textured than mine. Living in America I get very few straightforward portraits of weird worlds. North American directors who shoot ambiguous stories tend to be stylists like the magi David Lynch, Todd Solondz, or Todd Haynes. We get occasional fine entries by Gus Van Sant, again usually heavily personalized, and David Cronenberg keeps trying but only made me happy once. It's nice to see a 3-dimensional neo-realist take on the asymmetrical universe. Where better than Italy to find such a thing?

latinese It's a noir, no doubt... you even have the dark lady. Take three excellent actors, a well-chosen setting, a young and talented director, and you have L'imbalsamatore. Once again, when an Italian director is really good, like Sergio Leone, he can take an American film genre, turn it upside down and make a great Italian movie. However, Garrone proved how good he is not just by filming this, but by making another masterpiece, that is, Gomorra. If you like this one, try also the other movie. Basically one of the plots of Gomorra is set in the same places where L'imbalsamatore is set.Another important element of the film is the landscape. When Italian directors are at their best, they can render landscape like no one. Garrone can do this with the wastelands of Northern Campania. Hats off, then, to Ernesto Mahieux, who delivers an impressive performance that you won't forget easily...

jotix100 Peppino, the taxidermist at the center of this story, is a man who nature has not endowed with many physical attributes. He is a short homely man, who might repel many people. Yet, what he lacks in stature, and good looks, he compensates with a larger than life personality.When he first spots the handsome Valerio, he decides he wants to see more of him. Valerio, who is working as a cook, is offered a job by Peppino, even though he is not experienced in that line of work. What he doesn't realize is that Peppino, in addition of stuffing animals is also an expert in stuffing dead bodies with drugs. He works closely with the local mafia boss.Valerio and Peppino develop an easy relationship, but the younger man doesn't have a clue about the little man's affection for him. Peppino, who knows he can't force himself on Valerio, gathers prostitutes to go to bed with the two of them because that is the only way he can be with Valerio without coming out to him.When Valerio meets Deborah, the dynamics between the two friends change; Peppino senses it, but he can't do anything to separate them. Deborah, who becomes pregnant, proposes to go home to Cremona and Valerio accepts. Their lives appear to be getting in the right track until one day Peppino appears at her parents' home. It's clear by now that Valerio must make a decision that will change his life forever.Director Matteo Garrone, who also contributed to the screen play, shows he knows how to deal with this sordid situation with great taste and he is never in the viewer's face. By presenting the main character as physical handicapped and the object of his desires as a handsome young man, Mr. Matteo achieved a coup because of the possibilities in the strange relationship, aggravated by a third party, in this case, by Deborah.The best thing in the film is Ernesto Mahieux, who as Peppino gives one of the best performances in an Italian film in recent memory. His Peppino is a complicated man who is trapped in a body that no one wants. Yet, his need for love is something no one can satisfy. Valerio Foglia Manzillo is awkward as the handsome man he is portraying. In part, the character, the way Mr. Foglia Manzillo played it, makes sense because Valerio's loyalties play a trick on him. Elizabetta Rocchetti appears as Deborah, the woman who is able to get Valerio away from what she senses is a threat to her own happiness."The Taxidermist", is a great collaboration between its director, Mr. Garrone, and his star, the larger than life, Ernesto Mahieux.