Primo Amore

I work in a video store and there are loads of foreign movies that are totally great and I struggle hard to recommend them to customers. Why is it so hard? Because there is this thing called Channel 4 and their partner in crime BBC 2. Together they hunt down all the most boring, dullest, pretentious, unfathomly long foreign art films to put on around nine o'clock every other night. The casual viewer channel surfs and comes across some such dinosaur and is immediately put off anything not in English for life. "I want to watch the film, not read it, " is a phrase I hear all too often. Primo Amore is the kind of movie that gives foreign films a bad name.

Vittorio (imagine Right Said Fred with the stringiest, most spaghetti body ever) and Sonya meet up at a bus station (where the Gator often picks up the chicks) for a hot date. They've met on the internet, a dating service or through a pal and have never set eyes on each other before. Vittorio instantly makes a comment about her weight and how he's disappointed. Charming.

Obviously hurt by his bluntness, she tries to escape, but he won't let her. He wants her anyway, even if he has to bully her to lose weight. She's not even anywhere near fat, anyway. And I have an eye for these things.

The next 90 minutes are made up of dragged out shots of nothing going on, with the bald Right Said Fred guy pissing about and moaning. And um...that's it.

You know you're watching a dull movie when you begin to undress the female cast in your imagination, even if they're not that hot. And that was a waste of time, anyway, because Sonia was stripping off every five minutes. Normally this would have been okay, but I prefer the Bruce Willis to the David Hasselhof/Knightrider era look, if you know what I mean.

Hey, if you wanna see some ugly, definitely NOT too sexy-for-his-shirt dude fall in love with a below average girl, while standing around mumbling sparse dialogue with bad, off-centre camera angles and lengthy scenes of little happening, then go right ahead. I'll be on the other side of town watching The Grass Growing Channel.