{"id":2530,"date":"2010-01-26T13:46:57","date_gmt":"2010-01-26T18:46:57","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2010-01-26T13:46:57","modified_gmt":"2010-01-26T13:46:57","slug":"my-imaginary-french-movie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/my-imaginary-french-movie\/","title":{"rendered":"My Imaginary French Movie Girlfriend Is an Actress"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe class='youtube-player youtuber' type='text\/html' width='425' height='355' src='http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/KP-nVpOLW88?rel=0&amp;fs=1&amp;ap=%252526fmt%253D18' webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen frameborder='0'><\/iframe><br \/>\nFrench actress <strong>Charlotte Gainsbourg<\/strong>, whose acting talent, no-frills sex appeal, and overall European sense of <em>cool<\/em> in foreign films suited to subtitlephobes (eg, <em>My Wife Is an Actress<\/em> and <em>The Science of Sleep<\/em>) should already have been enough to gain your attention, has released a new album, <em>IRM<\/em>. In case you&#8217;re not already hip to this woman&#8217;s charms, the album is getting heavy coverage as something more substantial than the typical actor&#8217;s vanity record release. Understandably, this may be in equal parts because the album was produced and written by <strong>Beck<\/strong> and because Gainsbourg is the offspring of <em>kitsch appeal-gone-horribly hipster worshipped<\/em> pervert\/Svengali <strong>Serge Gainsbourg<\/strong> and <em>his<\/em> actress\/model wife <strong>Jane Birkin<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p>I could live with those reasons, but the slew of reviews, interviews, and concert reviews I&#8217;ve seen on this release go way over the top and tell a story that&#8217;s really not that interesting. Meanwhile the publicity machine for Gainsbourg&#8217;s new release fails to examine two important details:<br \/>\n<!--more--><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>I&#8217;ve had a crush on this woman for some time &#8211; and it&#8217;s cool with my wife.<\/li>\n<li>Her parents &#8211; and their kitsch counterparts <strong>Lee Hazlewood<\/strong> and <strong>Nancy Sinatra<\/strong>, for that matter &#8211; are not significant musical figures from the &#8217;60s!<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><iframe class='youtube-player youtuber' type='text\/html' width='425' height='355' src='http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/sHiMDB19Dyc?rel=0&amp;fs=1&amp;ap=%252526fmt%253D18' webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen frameborder='0'><\/iframe><br \/>\nIn case you&#8217;ve had the good fortune to not yet read any of the cookie-cutter articles on Charlotte&#8217;s new album, let me spare you the torture of publicist-fed repetition and fill you in on the key points:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>In a recording career that &#8220;spans 25 years,&#8221; as writers have the nerve to write, this is only her third release, the first of which was a recording she made with her father when she was 13 years old.<\/li>\n<li>Gainsbourg is the daughter of famed &#8217;60s French talk-singer Serge Gainsbourg and his beautiful British wife and fellow talk-singer, Jane Birkin. <em>Blah blah blah.<\/em><\/li>\n<li>Beck, whose least-successful albums owe a great debt to the works of Charlotte&#8217;s father, produced and wrote all the songs for this album. <\/li>\n<li>The album title <em>IRM<\/em> is the French abbreviation for MRI. The title refers to a life-threatening head trauma and Gainsbourg&#8217;s voluntary, multiple trips to the MRI to ease her worries following her scheduled MRI.<\/li>\n<li>This music and lyrics of this <em>highly personal<\/em> album were composed by Beck before he knew of Gainsbourg&#8217;s travails. &#8220;It was as if he was inside my brain,&#8221; laughs Gainsbourg. <em>Ha ha ha.<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Listen, I don&#8217;t need all these pointless details to maintain my crush on Gainsbourg. In fact, I&#8217;d prefer not to think about any of this. I don&#8217;t buy the Genius of Serge Gainsbourg. Yes, the man had great taste in his actress\/model collaborators &#8211; Birkin and Brigit Bardot were super hot and surely helped him sell lots of albums. In the America of my youth, the America that was comfortable knowing that Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra were a nepotist&#8217;s response to <strong>Sonny &amp; Cher<\/strong>, it could be argued that Pere Gainsbourg had exquisite taste in women and a knack for a catchy, kitschy tune or two. Nothing more. That&#8217;s not what it&#8217;s come to today. How many years did music-loving mankind have to whack off to yellowed &#8217;60s issues of <em>French Vogue<\/em> before reaching the conclusion that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/index.php\/2008\/02\/04\/the_look_france_gall\">any one of those French pop singers<\/a> was anything more than Sonny &amp; Cher? <\/p>\n<p>You guys are going to ruin it for me and Charlotte! I&#8217;m content with maintaining my wholesome crush on her for her work in films and her resemblance to our best friend from the year we spent living in Hungary. I&#8217;ve only listened to this new single in the video that kicks off this post once before writing this, but I still can&#8217;t shake the memory of hearing her terrible version of Bob Dylan&#8217;s &#8220;Just Like a Woman&#8221; from the <em>I&#8217;m Not There<\/em> soundtrack. In his <em>Insta-Review<\/em>, my close personal friend <strong>Townsman KingEd<\/strong> put it succintly:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Oh my god, this is worse than I&#8217;d imagined. Can&#8217;t sensitive, intellectual guys be satisfied dreaming they&#8217;re screwing beautiful French actresses without sticking a mic in front of their mouths or thinking they have to appreciate the results of their recordings? Godawful.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>After seeing another one of my current-day movie crushes, <strong>Zooey Deschanel<\/strong>, in way over her head as a &#8220;musician&#8221; being interviewed on <strong>Elvis Costello<\/strong>&#8216;s <em>Spectacle<\/em> show, it&#8217;s more important than ever that I manage the vibes I&#8217;m receiving from these imaginary love interests. I&#8217;m too old to go any younger than Deschanel, so can we please put a halt on promoting these women in ways that demean their true talents? The kids are all right!<\/p>\n<p>If you&#8217;re wondering, I have yet to see the <strong>Lars Von Trier<\/strong> film <em>Antichrist<\/em>. In fact I have yet to see any film by this guy beside the disappointing <em>Breaking the Waves<\/em>. Although Charlotte and <strong>Willem Dafoe<\/strong> would be <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/index.php\/2010\/01\/07\/six-pack-or-shotgun\">welcomed with a six-pack<\/a> at my back door, I don&#8217;t feel compelled to see them fictionally engaging in rough satanic sex, or whatever the big selling point is supposed to be to that movie. My imaginary French movie girlfriend is an actress, and that&#8217;s enough for me.<br \/><iframe class='youtube-player youtuber' type='text\/html' width='425' height='355' src='http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/olgftAHFBb0&amp;feature?rel=0&amp;fs=1&amp;ap=%252526fmt%253D18' webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen frameborder='0'><\/iframe><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>French actress Charlotte Gainsbourg, whose acting talent, no-frills sex appeal, and overall European sense of cool in foreign films suited to subtitlephobes (eg, My Wife Is an Actress and The Science of Sleep) should already have been enough to gain your attention, has released a new album, IRM. In case you&#8217;re not already hip to <a href='https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/my-imaginary-french-movie\/' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[342],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2530"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2530"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2530\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2530"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2530"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2530"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}