Gadjo Dilo’s Peccadillos #2: Big Nose Special

Yeah, in this latest instalment Gadjo Dilo plumbs the depths of his depravity and reveals that he finds women with big noses quite attractive, and he makes neither apology nor justification for this. Was it not Blaise Pascal (or was it Asterix?) who said "Cleopatra's nose, had it been shorter, the whole face of the world would have been changed".

He’s chosen to present this latest divertissement by way of films he’d like to see made – it could have been another SomeChance film festival - as there’s nothing the camera loves more than a big conk:

Barbra Streisand in Yentl: Diesel Dyke

I watched the original with Mrs Dilo the other day; I’d seen it before and knew she’d lap up every adorable, schmaltzy, Talmudic nanosecond of it, which she did, including where Streisand, disguised as a man so she can study in the yeshiva, has to get through her wedding night with the woman she's married. The film ends with Yentl now in women’s clothes sailing for the scholarly freedoms of America. I’d dearly like to think she continues to have her pretty nose stuck in a book, perhaps going on to become the world’s first lady rabbi; but she’s already grasped the fundamentals of Feminism and she’s sailing to New York for heavens sake, anything could happen. It may come as a surprise to some that I’ll still be more attracted by Streisand’s Schnozz than by anything she might get up to there, but there’s no accounting for taste.

Sofia Loren: in The Fall of the Roman Empire #2

The Italians have foisted some rubbish on us over the years: unjustifiably expensive clothes, frothy operas, Charlie Cairoli and Joe Dolce. But the Italians I’m least fond of are footballers, people like Claudio Gentile, Romeo Benetti and Marco Materazzi, who turned our Beautiful Game into cynical gamesmanship, the plods who man-marked talented players out of the contest, fouled them when the ref's back was turned and called Zidane’s sister a slag. My punishment is to put them in a house with Sofia; she spends her time walking fragrantly from room to room, the light from the windows catching her profile most exquisitely, and making sumptious, aromatic Italian food. Punishment?? They’re locked in the attic. With (my old schoolmate) Vinnie Jones.

Rossy De Palma in ¡Tie Me Up Tie Me Down Again!

Rossy’s a big girl, has a funny face with a big nose, and she can’t really act; (she’s therefore, incidentally, the ideal gay icon). For me, ¡Tie Me Up Tie Me Down! is Almodóvar’s most enjoyable film, not because of any S ‘n’ M vibe - which is not what it’s about - but because, for all of that, it’s somehow so healthy. For one thing you have Victoria Abril and a young Antonio Banderas to look at, there’s the underlying Reichian thesis, and then there’s Rossy, looking for all the world like a Picasso painting. I envisage the sequel to this film featuring Rossy as the star, Banderas as her househusband, and Madonna (who “made” Banderas’s Hollywood career and is a greater gay icon by the can’t-act-criterion) nowhere in sight.