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.

Award Season Round-Up 2011!, Speed Reviews, High Expectations and Surliness

Right, it's Oscar time again, and as you may know I usually try to watch as many Oscar-nominated movies as I can in the days before the ceremonies. So these reviews are speedy and harsh and above all biased, since there's a certain expectation that comes from being an Oscar nom. Many of these movies might be fine on their own, I'm only interested in how they stand as Oscar movies.

It's only a few hours to the ceremonies and there are still three of the ten Best Picture nods that I haven't seen, 127 Hours, The Kids are All Right and Winter's Bone. Toy Story 3 I have no desire to write about, since you can tell pretty accurately what it is from the title and the Pixar logo (it was a tad darker than most wholesome movies within limits, but I've been all bawled out since Up). Inception I saw when it came out and have written about it a bit in other places. It's been over-examined to death already so I'll sum up my thoughts with this: thpppbbbt.

Inception was, sadly, the movie with the most substance of these noms, though it drowned that substance in action movie tropes and obviousness. So, here are the rest:



Black Swan

There's one movie Darren Aronofsky has been trying to get right for the last two decades, in Pi, in The Wrestler, even in Requiem For A Dream to a lesser extent, a movie about how an person (mathematician, pro-wrestler, whatever) manages to, just once, do something right. In typical cinematic pessimism the way to get to that rightness is through movie-lengths bouts of self-destruction, paranoia, egotism, evisceration and various power tools. But what makes these movies different from your typical Hollywood tortured-artist story (and Hollywood hates artists more than anything except maybe single females) is that in the end the Aronofsky folks do get things right in the end, somehow. There's a mad triumph at the end, and you say, aha, at least it's possible (even in Requiem, for one character). So it’s e a big thumbs up to hard work and perseverance, and a big fuck you to life in general, which, if not particularly healthy, is at least fun to watch.

Black Swan manages to do this well, and at the same time fails in the way his other movies also fail. There is a lack of subtlety here (obvious just from the casting of Mila Kunis alone). Natalie Portman's overworked ingénue is hardly likeable (and also, at pushing 30, a bit older than we're supposed to believe she is). It's still a solid performance, she's wrung out like a wet towel in varying degrees of wrungingness for two hours, and it's impressive that she could maintain that intensity without getting the giggles.

But above all there is a tendency toward the overdramatic. It's this more than anything else that has caused Aronofsky to shoot himself in the foot over and over again (let's not even mention The Fountain). I had hoped that The Wrestler, which was low-key in all the right ways, marked a turned toward the more honest and understated. But with Black Swan we're back to all the old bad habits. If the movie had slightly less drama it could have been a fable about the trials that any performer has to go through to get that great performance. But instead we're left with a cinematic ending, which, after an exhaustingly satisfying third act, smacks more of spectacle than truth. The Wrestler had more heart, even if there wasn't much else in it, and because of that I'd rather have watched that movie twice than one this once.



The Fighter

The first, and main, failing of this movie is the title. Boxing movies have a long history of singular men and singular titles, beefy man-children punching away at fame until it gets old or they do, Rocky, Raging Bull, Ali, The Great White Hope, The Hurricane, Million Dollar Baby – note how all these titles are singular, with just one dude (or ladydude) at the forefront, everything else being about or against them. So with The Fighter, we expect, mainly, a fighter. One. What we get is two, the washed-up crackhead Dickey Eklund and his sullen, boring half-brother Mickey Ward. Which one is this movie about?

The writers tend to think it's Mickey, since he gets (sadly) the most screen time. But all the buzz is about Christian Bale's nod as best supporting actor, not about Mark Wahlberg's as producer. And for good reason, Wahlberg's Mickey is about as interesting as a can of Boston baked beans with boxing gloves on. One suspects that if Wahlberg weren't also in that producer's chair, a savvy director would have seen the obvious and either a) fired Wahlberg and got someone more lively in the role, or b) restructured the movie around Dickey. Because it's almost all about Dickey anyway, he has charisma, humor, an effortless manic energy. Because of that Mickey has to be played relatively straight, so the brothers can bounce off each other. But Wahlberg loses us in the process. His Mickey is a big child, constantly pushed around by his mother and sisters and even his girlfriend (a feisty Amy Adams, who will probably win best supporting actress for her fake Boston accent even though True Grit's Hailee Steinfeild did more work). Even when Mickey does stand up for himself it's more like a child stamping his foot in petulance than a grown man taking rightful charge of his destiny.

Thoug if the movie had been rewritten with Dickey as lead, Colin Firth would have a tough time getting his Oscar this year.



The King's Speech

The trouble with trying to write a light-hearted buddy movie about a historical person in the midst of a historical crisis, is that when faced with a historical person in a historical crisis the last thing people want is a light-hearted buddy movie. The biopic lights start flashing, we see Churchill and Hitler go by and suddenly we are expecting one of those Serious Movies about Serious Things. You know, the sort where the movie poster has the lead, dramatically lit, looking off into the middle-distance with a half-weary, half-resigned look. The sort of movie that usually makes it to the Oscars every year (though not this year). That is the movie The King's Speech exasperatingly dangles in front of us, and I know I don't need to see another serious movie about Britain in World War II, and yet, and yet…

So The King's Speech is at best half a movie, taking the bromance that usually occurs on the sideline of your usual biopic and putting it center stage, with all the predictable tiffs and spats and reconciliations of the bromantic drama. The fact that Firth is so good in the role, that Helena Bonham Carter is so regal, that the sets are so lush and comfy and make you really want some tea, makes it that much sadder that these things have ended up in a plotline more suited for Will Ferrell and the cast of SNL than the best of Britain.

The rest of the cast drops off in quality, and I shan't say anything about Geoffery Rush but to ask why he is playing an Australian while Guy Pierce is the one with an accent. And Churchill, who let Scabbers into parliament?

The half a movie that we get do in The King's Speech is still good, and quite watchable, but still disappointingly incomplete.



The Social Network

Has anyone ever noticed that Aaron Sorkin doesn't make good movies anymore? Yes, a brilliant screenwriter, yes The West Wing was the best thing on television since Alf, yes A Few Good Men and American President. But The Social Network and Charlie Wilson's War were both structured like tv pilots: bring in some good characters, have them verbally abuse each other, end abruptly. Of course Fincher did for The Social Network what was wholly lacking in Charlie Wilson, that of breathing life and realism into the characters and set pieces. Everything is lush and dark and velvety, clearly in the 90s Harvard was only lit by streetlights and laptop screens.

Mark Zuckerberg is played with that confidence-bordering-on-arrogance you tend to see in people raised by computers (try to deny it). It's hard to say anything more about the movie, since it comes and goes with such nonchalance. Is it a movie about a kid who can't connect to other people who nevertheless designs a site which is connecting the world? Not really, Zuckerberg isn't played as particularly lonely. His loneliness is more a function of wounded pride, he expects to not be alone and is disappointed when he is. So what is this movie about?

There is a certain glee to see programmers being treated with the same rapt enthusiasm given to rock stars or people who throw or kick round things at or into round or square net-things, which sustained my interest for the first half. But I think the whole concept might have worked much better as a miniseries than a movie, because while Sorkin is great at making dialogue go by with breezy ease, the movie felt full of air. The main conceit, playing the action as being retold through two simultaneous lawsuits against Zuckerberg, loses traction in the second half. Zuckerberg so eloquently dismisses these lawsuits as unimportant (settling out of court), and in the end, we have to agree. There's not enough matter for a full trial, and not enough substance for a full movie.



True Grit

The main question left by this movie is what, precisely, did the Coen brothers see in the material here. Because there's not much in it that seems very Coen, the plot is a basic revisionist western, which might have carried weight in the late 60s (when the previous version was made) but seems a bit uninteresting now. The only things of heft are the characters, right down to Josh Brolin, who can breathe life into the smallest role. Jeff Bridges is heavy, old, cantankerous, and above all rambly, which is refreshing. There's some tacit rule in Hollywood that heroes and anti-heroes alike all have to be laconic, the only people allowed to babble are mothers-in-law and foreigners. But really it was Hailee Steeinfield's sassy and tallish 14 y/o that sustained the movie.

But besides some gorgeous landscape and some minor characters there just isn't much here. There's no Coen weirdness, what we get instead is some irony and wry humor, as if the characters are equally disappointed to be in an uninteresting movie. While this may seem harsh, just remember how good No Country For Old Men was.

Award Season Ramp-up Round-up: Down to the Wire!

There is a particular joy in the art direction of Fantastic Mr. Fox, where the scenery and all the action is flattened into two dimensional planes, the background sttretched up and out like a renaissance landscape. Unlike in a traditional animation (or god forbid cgi) the subjects on screen are real, tangible, three-dimensional objects: puppets, lovingly matted and choppy, walking about in colorful, detailed sets so meticulous you can almost smell the rubber cement. Yet these detailed, 3d objects are smooshed into two-dimensional planes and the effect is like having your head stuck in a diorama, or a toybox, where everything's it's own little fascinating anthill. Like in some of the fantastic 2D platformer games that have come out in the last few years you get the sense that although this is a stylized reality nothing has been lost in the stylization. A reduction that enhances. At no point does it feel like a cartoon and at no point does it feel like a movie. It's its own world, which is what an animation should be.

Which isn't to say Mr. Fox is all that great. It's near-impossible to judge Wes Anderson movies as movies, mostly because they refuse to be taken as such. They're kind of like a disaffected Gen X'er on the other side of the room at a party. Interesting, talkative, defensive, flawed but he'd never call them flaws, petulant but (he says) always justifiably so. And above all he never approaches you — you're either interested or you aren't.

Sometimes it works. I was taken in by The Life Aquatic for its unabashed childishness, it was so loudly and uncompromisingly a labor of love, a big, expensive non-commercial romp in the toybox of aging adolescants. (The 2d-flattening effect was also used to great effect here — suddenly the submarine becomes a great big toy, of Bill Murray's yes but mostly Wes Anderson's, and we get to play around in it with him.) Other times he's less convincing. I thought The Darjeeling Limited, for example, failed to gel around anything other than its leading men's self-fascination.

So we know We Anderson movies have certain plot points and certain characters, and there's only one lesson anyone ever learns (the only lesson one really can learn by himself alone in a sandbox, "I'm a little crazy, yes, but I can't help it.") Mr. Fox hits these points no better than any other Anderson movie, so in terms of that it's pretty mediocre. But there's still some fun to be had watching a creator plays with his creations, especially when those creations get away from him as they often do, here probably more than in any other of his films.

The dialogue of course is sparkling and the cast a screenwriter's wet dream. But if you were expecting Anderson to grow up anytime soon, well, no cussing way.

Award Season Ramp-up '09 pt2

Wherein the author continues to watch as many award-season movies as possible, jotting thoughts down as soon after viewing as he can.



An Education is sweet and full of texture, it brought to life both the drab and the excitement of 60s Britain without really choosing sides: The drab is also comfortable and cozy. The exciting is also shady, strange. It's somehow wrong, wrong in ways you can't quite explain other than that it's not comfortable or cozy. That David is also somehow wrong we know right from the start, and as we and Jenny learn more about him the wrongness gets clearer and clearer until it's blatant, inarguable. But he was always wrong, and the movie handles this well, he never becomes any less or more than he is right there at the beginning. Only Jenny is changing.

The movie loses ground only when Jenny starts to become the voice of authorial arguments, delivering speeches to blank-faced adults who could very well offer a counter-argument but never do. Maybe that's the point though, she has to learn on her own, the adults in her life are of no help, not unless she wants their help. These other roles really make the movie though. Her father is played brilliantly by Alfred Molina, he exudes care and love and worry even while yelling, you just want to give him a hug every time he talks. Emma Thompson as the school headmistress is exactly the opposite, she never needs to show that she cares. She's only in a few short scenes and mostly on the quiet end of a Jenny-speech, but just in not arguing with Jenny she makes probably the strongest argument in the movie. These two performances balance the story, a cartoonish portrayal of either would have ruined it from the start.

Also excellent was Rosamund Pike as the trophy-girlfriend Helen, who manages to be dumb yet sweet without being too dumb or too sweet. Again, a cartoonish portrayal would have killed it.




Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. Herzog movies generally take place in a world somewhere between the realities and the delusions of his main characters, and in this movie even the obvious fantasies: iguanas, break-dancing souls, etc, don't mark a clear line between reality and unreality. They're real to Nicholas Cage, and that's all that really matters. As the plot gets increasingly convoluted and nonsensical you might start to wonder if we're all tipping into fantasy-land with him. But no, turns out it's no more or less real than it ever was.

And Cage's performance is so strange, mostly because he's clearly wrong for the part. He walks around hunched over in suits too big for him, moving like he's fifty pounds heavier than he is, yelling like he has a voice for yelling. (He doesn't have a voice for yelling. He sounds more like a frustrated English professor than a professional, no matter what movie he's in.)

But Cage is fabulous at being miscast, I can't think of any other actor who so deliberately seeks out roles he is completely wrong for. If this movie were another Harvey Keitel vehicle you could imagine the Lieutenant as being actually frightening, actually loathesome, actually at times courageous and at times charming. With Cage, we have a character who is none of those things. He's nothing at all really, just confused and in pain, and the movie is better off for it.

The point of the movie seems to be that there's things out there (reptiles, water) that disaster lets in and once they're in they take hold and get stronger and stronger until at the end you're drowning in them.

Cage's question at the end is "Do fish dream?" Herzog's answer seems to be "Yes, they dream this movie."



Bright Star is a well-needed reminder that poetry, as it is in the first line we hear of Keats, is a joy, cut of the same cloth as a walk in flowered fields or throwing pebbles in a lake or sitting in front of an open window on a windy day — though more than a hundred years have almost convinced us that these things aren't enough, as if there were something that was more of life than these simple, fleeting moments. In the movie, Mr. Brown is an annoying, heavy-handed reminder of what poetry shouldn't be: vain, self-serving, cynical, serious, witty in the service of pettiness, "modern" in the service of fear. Though he's a reminder of what a poet has to deal with you often he's far too despicable to have as much screen time as he does. Keats however is portrayed as playful first and melancholy second, a welcome departure from the brooding Byronic figure you come to expect from movies about poets. Movies in general aren't keen on geniuses, they'd much rather focus on common people in uncommon circumstances, public figures — genius is too private a thing to translate well to a medium that is public at every stage of production and consumption. Intimacy in a film is a difficult and necessary illusion, which is why the love story is practically the definition of film: A love between two people is both private, between each other, and public, seen by each other. It is the smallest unit of intimacy that can be put to film.

The production is very lush and surprisingly intimate, and manages the difficult task of making a period piece not look like a set piece. Some shots have the heaviness of a painting, and though this takes you out of the story a little it also reminds you of what you're in. The movie is brimming with poetry, in the dialogue as well as the visuals.

It all turns to misery of course, and Campion is a Romantic enough to embrace the misery as much as the joy. Everything may turn to misery in time, and everyone may die, but in those bright moments of not-misery there is a promise and a hope that misery might never return. The young sister Toots is a heartbreaking reminder of this as she banishes autumn from her garden. In some world, she succeeds.

As for the love story, it's strange. The courtship is short and full of jousts and lots of silences, and you get the sense that the most they know of each other are those silences, that they are filling those silences with dreams of each other. Like love was a dream they were wishing each other into, and in so faling in love themselves. You never once suspect in the end that they actually know each other, or even themselves (they're so young!). And in that sense it's a very honest love story, and a very true one. And very powerful.

Also, that cat should win best cat acting by a cat in a non-cat movie.




What was surprising about Inglourious Basterds is not that it's bad — and it is bad, very bad, "What were you thinking?" type bad &mdsash; but that it's poorly made. We don't expect a Tarantino movie to be drab, his characters lifeless and their motivations a mystery. We expect explosive wit and familiar throwbacks. We expect larger-than-life characters pitted against each other in a ridiculous and ultimately satisfying orgy of genre tropes. But the only larger-than-life characters in this unsatisfying movie are The Nazis and The Jews, the individuals are almost nondescript. His Nazis are luxuriously evil, slippery and smarmy and nasty, sometimes brave, sometimes cowardly. If only he cared nearly as much for his so-called-protagonists, but to call them cookie-cutter would be an insult to creative bakers. The only one of any interest is Brad Pitt's Aldo, who is clearly not Jewish. The rest are so well summed up by their nicknames ("The Bear Jew," etc) they don't even need to have lines (and many don't).

But the names Nazi and Jew are red herrings, this movie would more honestly (and far less offensively) be set on Mars, with some evil Martian Socialist Party hunting down ethnic barsoomians or something. But the fact that the movie makes no sense (and the movie makes absolutely no sense) is secondary, we could forgive even that if it were in the least bit interesting. The script is set up as a series of verbal confrontations, some of them twenty or thirty minutes long, and an ordinary director would play these heated conversations as a buildup of tension, putting off the release until the last possible moment until it explodes, generally in gunfire. Instead, Terantino has these scenes play out normally, as if nothing were happening at all. The audience knows something is at stake, the characters know something is at stake, yet no one acts as if something is at stake — giving an overall impression of watching boring people talk about boring things which something interesting just might be happening somewhere else. Like having to sit through a discussion of hog futures on the deck of the Titanic. And because there's no tension when the release comes it feels less like a climax and more like a "What just happened?"

The problem here is clearly that Tarantino has developed a sort of auteur's arrogance, he expects us to believe whatever he tells us. He says this crack commando team has killed so many Nazis behind enemy lines that even Hitler is afraid, we're supposed to believe him (even though all this Nazi-killing supposedly happens in the jump cut between the "Let's kill Nazis" scene and the "Hitler is afraid" scene). He says Eli Roth is somehow fearsome, we're supposed to believe him. He says that movies can end the war, we're supposed to believe them. Sure none of it makes any sense, but he doesn't seem to even lift a finger to try to convince us, which is both lazy and unforgivable.

The joy of Kill Bill or Pulp Fiction or Reservoir Dogs was in things we've seen already, familiar themes and tropes and body movements and dialogue, for what is "genre" but something the audience already believes without you having to tell them? Inglourious Basterds is a departure from that. Things are still familiar, god knows he doesn't have an original bone in his body. But they don't feel familiar. They feel rather shoddy.

Award Season Ramp-up Round-Up '09, part1

Every year around this time I try to see as many best-of-year films as possible, that way when Oscar night finally comes around I have that much more to be aggravated about. Generally I don't document it as best as I could, but this year I've decided to make the effort to get it all down, generally as soon after I see the movie as possible.

I've already seen Public Enemies and Avatar. So here we go!




THE HURT LOCKER
Fantastically realistic (or realistic-seeming, who knows if it's even remotely actually-realistic). So much so that little bits that didn't seem realistic stood out more, even a single canned sound effect was enough to jar me out of it for a second. Also unconvincing, that tendency for any squad in any action movie to be immediately qualified for any operation, no matter if more experienced troops are probably waiting by (Miami Vice-itis). The glimmerings of a plot thankfully they petered out, as if to say: here's the sort of movie you're expecting to see, but this isn't that movie.

There are no superior officers to be found, there are no consequences beyond the physical damage to the squad (almost entirely from themselves and each other), and there is no enemy -- everyone is treated equally as an enemy, allies, friendlies, squadmates. And it's an interesting consequence of a bomb squad that there really is no enemy: there's only it, and you, and what you do or do not do to it. It has no will or plan or purpose.

So war is a bomb, and the bomb is a drug, and the soldiers are addicts and they either see it and quit or they keep at it. The only way to view James is as an addict, and as an addict he serves a necessary purpose in the war, a purpse that the movie clearly admires. But this purpose is not a moral one, he doesn't save lives or make things safe for his countryment -- the more he cares the worse he is at his job. He can't actually make a difference. His purpose is as inexplicable as the bomb's.

Avatar is the triumph of a gamer, an ultimate gamer's fantasy where the gameworld becomes more important than real life. Hurt Locker is nearly identical in that regard, they're about addicts who give into their addiction. And for all its brutality, Hurt Locker still glorifies the addiction. But that's the question, isn't it? Is James really being "All he can be"? Or has war made him less than he could have been? All we really know is that when he's in the suit he's all that he is.

Interesting that we've been talking about how '00s movies are specifically amoral, their exemplary heroes aren't anti-heroes (who do wrong things for the right reasons), they're the opposite: they have the wrong reasons and whether their actions are good or not is entirely up to chance or circumstance.

We'll see if it continues with Bad Lieutenant.