Prenom Carmen

 (1983)

Prenom Carmen, or First Name Carmen, is a Jean-Luc Godard film "based on" the familiar Bizet opera.

Carmen is either a concert violinist rehearsing Beethoven quartets and daydreaming, or she is Jean-Luc Godard's niece who holds up a bank to raise money then hits on the idea of pretending to make a film and kidnapping either a wealthy man or his daughter. Jean-Luc Godard, playing himself,  is living in a hospital, his choice, but is willing to help Carmen make her film. During the bank robbery, she is caught by a young policeman who falls in love with her and they escape together. He is arrested then acquitted, but the two are star-crossed, and the relationship is not destined to last.

I think I am now supposed to write about how Jean-Luc brilliantly deconstructed the Carmen story, creating one of his most accessible films, full of social commentary and wry humor. If you need a collection of flowery and pretentious verbiage like that, IMDb's linked reviews and comments will build your collection in no time. Unfortunately, even pretending that I understand what the above means, I am not sure I agree. Most honest people find it a difficult watch, and are not sure they completely understand it. But I have included the requisite flowery phrases apropos to French period art films, so that I can then finally talk about the film's true merit: Marushka Detmers shows everything, full frontal and rear, as does costar Jacques Bonnaffé. Also daring was a scene where Jacques Bonnaffé joins Detmers in the shower than jacks off on her.

So is the film really a retelling of Carmen? Well ...

Carmen	Prenom Carmen
Young gypsy	Young thief/concert violinist
Soldier	Cop
Bizet Fiery Latin score	Beethoven and a Tom Waits song
Doomed love affair	Doomed love affair

... you tell me.

Whatever it is, it is damned strange, and would be unwatchable in my opinion were it not for the nudity. Bottom line: If you enjoy that "WTF?" feeling, or really want to see Marushka Detmers very naked, this is your film.

It is now available at RLDVDs.com in a new transfer with optional subtitles in 8 different languages and a couple of image galleries.

• IMDb 6.4
• The genre is vintage French art films, and this is thought of as a good one, and is hence a C on our scale.

Scoop's note:

Why, I can't believe Tuna found this pretentious:

"He is searching for a point of equilibrium between the made and the found, the ordered and the chaotic--a point from which to define an aesthetic for the 80s."

 

Marushka Detmers

A few pre-DVD images from the past

 

 

 

A film clip of Diane Kruger in Mon Idole. Diane is the beauty who played Helen of Troy in the recent version of the story. (Brad Pitt as Achilles.)

Title

Fiona Horsey is a favorite of mine, and I admit part of the reason is probably because she seems totally comfortable doing nudity, but I also happen to think she's a good actress, and she seems to have a very feisty personality that projects into her character. This 2004 horror/thriller is a good case-in-point.

Julia (Fiona Horsey) works two jobs to support her worthless musician boyfriend, who uses the money to feed his drug habit. When dealers threaten to kill him over a debt, he once again turns to Julia, and she gets in trouble at her hotel maid job when a guest claims she stole money. Actually, the guy propositioned her for a blowjob, but when she gave him a hand job instead and then ran away, he went to the manager claiming theft.

The hotel manager is a lonely loser who cares for his sick mother, waiting on her hand and foot because she owns the hotel, and he hopes to inherit it. When Julia finds him passed out drunk in public, she helps him home, then tells him they slept together, so she can start a sexless love affair and take his money. Unfortunately, things backfire rather badly.

Fiona makes this movie, as does the rest of a very good cast, but it's also a cool and creepy story, and stays interesting right up to the end.

Fiona Horsey

The Comedy Wire

Comments in yellow...

Thursday at Harvard, the Annals of Improbable Research gave out their 2007 Ignobel Awards for the most ludicrous scientific breakthroughs.  The Medical prize went to researchers who studied sword swallowers and found they can suffer "major complications" if they're distracted or try to swallow more than one sword at a time.  The Physics winner was a study of how sheets become wrinkled; the Biology prize went to a census of all the mites, bugs, spiders, bacteria and fungi in mattresses; the Chemistry winner extracted vanilla fragrance from cow dung; the Economics prize went to a device that drops a net over bank robbers; the Literature winner studied the word "the" and how it makes things harder to alphabetize; the Aviation prize went to a study proving that Viagra relieves jet lag in hamsters; the Peace prize was won by researchers who are trying to create a bomb that turns the enemy gay; and University of Barcelona researchers took the Linguistics prize for proving that rats sometimes can't tell the difference between someone speaking Japanese backwards and someone speaking Dutch backwards.

*  These people can't tell the difference between a scientific study and someone speaking Dutch backwards.


Thursday, a Minnesota jury handed a victory to the recording industry, ordering single mom Jammie Thomas to pay $222,000 for illegally downloading 24 songs off the Internet.  That's $9,250 each for songs by Journey, Aerosmith and other artists.  She denies ever downloading any songs, but the judge ruled that the RIAA didn't have to prove that she was at the keyboard or shared files with anyone else or even had a filesharing program installed at the time they inspected her hard drive. With new stats showing that album sales fell 14 percent last years, it's expected this will embolden the music industry to file lots more lawsuits.

*  So she can be found guilty, even if there's no evidence she downloaded the songs, had the software or even used the computer...Yet there wasn't enough evidence to convict Phil Spector. 



University of New Mexico researchers report in Psychology Today that on average, strippers make more tips on the most fertile days of their monthly cycles. They visited strip clubs and found that when lap dancers were at their most fertile, they made about $70 an hour in tips, compared to $35 when they were menstruating and $50 in between.  They also discovered that strippers who take the birth control pill make only about $37 an hour in tips, while those who don't take the pill average $54 an hour. 

*  The biggest tip should go to whichever grad student convinced the grant committee to fund this study.