Rome, Danger Mouse, and the Soundtrack to an Italian Daydream

Danger Mouse & Daniele Luppi — Rome

Clearly, Danger Mouse can do no wrong. He can, however, attempt too much, which somewhat mars Rome, an otherwise fine and low-key musical trip. The hype cloud surrounding this album is intense, that it took five years to make, that it reunited most of the people who worked with Ennio Moriccone on his seminal movie scores, that it used only period instruments and production tools. This creates certain expectations, and let me get this out right now: Rome lives up to none of them. But that doesn't mean it's not worth a listen on its own.

Very little in Rome sounds Morricone. Maybe it's the choice of rocker Jack White and crooner Norah Jones to front the album, who give a very modern, very Danger Mouse feel to the vocals. But there is also the songs themselves. There is none of the wild, barren patience of Morricone, or of other Italian soundtracks of the '70s. The changes feel like rock changes, the bass feels restrained and over-produced and many tracks seem like they could be on a Broken Bells album (another Danger Mouse collaboration.)

But if you take the album on its own merits, it's very good. "The Rose with a Broken Neck" has a Nick Cave-esque darkness, with White and Jones' voices playing over each other like hunter and hunted. Or "Two Against One," a Jack White solo that could play over a very sexy fight scene. In "Problem Queen," Norah Jones is so good you almost forget about "Come Away with Me." Almost. Rome is halfway between a collaboration album (the usual Danger Mouse or Dan the Automator fare) and a soundtrack album. So the usual inconsistencies of a collab are smoothed over, and the usual boringness of a soundtrack is perked up. This also means the stand-out tracks which usually dot a collab are also toned down.

Rome is low-key and unspectacular and mostly one-note, but it works. It's an experience, a small, same-colored musical journey. And it manage to capture the danger and drive of a '70s soundtrack, with moments of quietness and moments of action, crescendos and small climaxes. And if you play it through while driving, you're almost guaranteed an adventure.

Midnight in Paris, Nostalgia, Didn't Owen Wilson Try to Kill Himself?

Midnight In Paris

You know when stepping into a basic Woody Allen film that you're entering a particular sort of universe. It'll be charming and whimsical, there will be a slew of colorful supporting characters played by the best actors in the business. The bad guys will be pretentious blowhards, the good guys will be confused overthinkers speed-talking their way through a crisis. And a few minutes before the credits, there will be a small epiphany. Not a world-shattering realization. Just a little one, merely there to assure you that the movie you just sat through wasn't just silly fun.

It's a solid formula for many of his movies (Match Point only slightly excepted), and Midnight In Paris seems the perfect vehicle. Owen Wilson plays Gil, a frustrated writer trying to turn from hack screen writing to real literature. He has an overbearing fiancée who is probably having an affair with the pretentious blowhard du jour (a very funny Michael Sheen, who gets all the pedantic cadences just right). They are on vacation in Paris, which leads Gil on a wave of Lost Generation nostalgia, which doesn't interest his girlfriend in the slightest. Oh, and if he sits on a particular corner at midnight, a taxi pulls up and takes him to 1924.

This is where Woody gets to be Woody: having his sad-sack protagonist wander through the streets and parties of 1920s Paris, rubbing elbows with many of the great artistic and literary figures of the time, listening first-hand to Cole Porter, giving advice to Louis Buñuel, doing the Charleston with Djuna Barnes. The fact that all of these fabulous figures are played by equally fabulous actors turns the movie into a sort of guessing game: "Who will show up next? T. S. Eliot? Adrien Brody... as... Dali?" And this is where the strength of the movie lies, in this nostalgic wish-fulfillment. If you went back to 1924, what would you say to F. Scott when he complains about Zelda? What would you say to Gertrude Stein's critique of your novel? 

The nostalgia scenes are the strength, certainly not the predictable and uninspired scenes in the present, which proceed like clockwork, every snag and relationship argument telegraphed from the beginning. And certainly not Owen Wilson's character, who, try as he might, is never much more than the shoulder we have to look over to see what we want to see. The Paris of the roaring '20s is too interesting to have the Paris of today be so boring, and so the movie sags whenever we are not in the presence of Hemingway et al.

So Midnight In Paris is a slight pleasure, but a pleasure nonetheless (Adrien Brody as the bombastic Dali is almost worth the price of admission itself.) The epiphany moment, which concerns nostalgia, is particularly underwhelming, since it's not only obvious, but also in a way contrary to the spirit of the movie. We all know nostalgia is unproductive and illusory, but then again so are movies. And movies can fun and useful too. This one is more fun than useful, but fun nonetheless.