Soundtracking

Polish poster

There's a moment early on in The Trip, the moc-doc of Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon on a dining tour of the north of England. They're winding through bucolic country roads through fields wrapped with round-stone walls. "Why are we listening to this?" Rob asks. "It's the soundtrack I've chosen for this landscape," Steve responds. "It's unexpected, you think of that as industrial... associate it with an urban landscape." It's Joy Division, and he's right, and also, characteristically, a really arsehole.  After that, music takes a distant third or fourth place to the dueling Michael Caine and Woody Allen impressions, competitive banter, and, yes, poetry recitations--with the exception of their duet on "The Winner Takes It All."

For a killer road movie soundtrack, you can't beat Jim Jarmusch's Broken Flowers. Don (Bill Murray) reluctantly tracks down old girlfriends, to solve a mystery more compelling to his Ethiopian neighbor (Jeffrey Wright) than to him. In fact, it's Winston who more or less puts the whole trip together, from looking up addresses, to renting the cars and printing out the maps, to making the CD Donnie plays as he none too excitedly drives from one encounter to the next. The music on the CD is Ethiopian jazz, mostly by Mulatu Astatke and his band. And it's great.

The trailer gives you a taste of Mulatu Atake before segueing to a fine Holly Golightly song. Watch the whole thing on Netflix instantly. Get the soundtrack! (You can also watch The Trip on Netflix.)