Lucky (2011)

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

Blonde girl Leslie buys a lottery ticket and forgets her driver's license at the convenient store. Ben Keller (Colin Hanks) is a bumbling accountant who's in love with the firm's secretary Lucy St. Martin (Ari Graynor). She quits after an affair with the boss goes sour. Ben has known Lucy since childhood but she couldn't care less until he wins the $36 million lottery. His mother Pauline (Ann-Margret) found the ticket and cashed it in. Detective Harold Waylon (Jeffrey Tambor) is investigating a series of missing blonde women.This is a black comedy that doesn't quite get to being funny. The black part is all there. The comedy part tries to be there. Ari Graynor is trying so hard. Colin Hanks is more or less the straight man. He has the persona of a bunny rabbit with a butcher's knife. Director Gil Cates Jr. isn't able to pull it off. He's not a particularly good director or a guy who does comedy. This doesn't working.

If it weren't for the very bad reviews on here, I would probably make this a 6/10, but I think this movie is worth a watch...casually on Netflix or some other free form. Did I love this movie? No. Not the best movie around, but I love Colin Hanks and the premise looked really interesting. It was rather slow moving at points, and as others mentioned, the characters can be annoying. However, Lucy being a very annoying character was actually planned perfectly. At first I hated it, but once it played into her manipulating Ben, and how that dynamic just seemed incredibly realistic, I really felt what they were going for. It REALLY hit me when she witnessed the first murder though. You could see her character as this zany annoying girl who just manipulated into a marriage she didn't want just for some money, and then she walks into this nightmare and she realizes.The battle between wanting to stay with a rich husband, and processing the murder is just a brilliant couple of scenes. She is zoned out, but slowly chooses to help her husband and try to live with it, but you can tell she isn't coping that well (who would!?). But every additional display of money is just edging her towards just dealing with it and enjoying a lavish lifestyle.Also Colin Hanks was great as the serial killer, and the craziness with imagining Lucy all over was really well done. He also was believable in the way that he just snaps and kills and then kind of comes back to reality.

The director, Gil Cates, does what he can to pep up this bizarre story without distracting directorial displays, but the screenplay doesn't give him much to work with.It's not impossible to make very funny movies about serial killers. "Arsenic and Old Lace," "Kind Hearts and Coronets" are both successful. But this movie doesn't seem to know where it wants to go. It's an ineffective hash of comedy and horror and it gets nowhere.As comedy it fails because there's nothing particularly funny about it, outside of one scene towards the opening, in which Ari Graynor interrupts a board meeting to tell some intimate and disgusting secrets about the chairman. It's a nicely caught moment.But -- well, what is the story about, anyway? A greedy and noisy young blond marries the office nerd, Colin Hanks, for his money after he wins the lottery. It turns out that this nebbish has no idea how to handle this sudden flow of cash and, on top of that, is the notorious serial killer the police are hunting. There are three bodies buried in the back yard, in addition to those cadavers he's left on the spot. So what does Graynor do when she digs up the bodies? (There is no hint of cadaverine.) She drags them and buries them somewhere else, an act which, along with one or two other utterly inexplicable acts, leads to her conviction as the serial killer and after a year or so, Hanks visits her in prison for the first time. She heaps her calumny upon him. And then what? She quietly asks him to keep visiting her and smiles gently. The last scene is an appealingly artsy overhead shot, as the director's joints creak while he reaches for SOMETHING to serve as a climactic moment.Ari Graynor is almost always loud and teetering on hysteria, which isn't funny. Colin Hanks looks like the guy in some TV commercial who tries to fix a home appliance and gets shocked.What does it all mean? The mismatched love, the lottery, the serial murders? Your guess is as good as mine. It all reminds me of a stew I once made out of canned foods whose sell-by dates were rapidly approaching. I called it an "olla podrida." This movie turned out better than the stew. The movie is at least a "ragout chez mois."

I'm stunned by the reviews this film received. It makes me wonder what audiences are looking for. Giant robot cars, maybe? Stereo-typical heroes and bad guys (with capes!)? This is an independent film and the reviews read like they were written by a church group. This film is innovative and clever and extraordinarily well written. Sublette and Cates' work here deserves better reviews than these. I feel bad that they have to be subjected to this type of unenlightened ridicule for such a wonderful film. I suspect that the film just didn't get a chance to find its audience (which is not the Bridesmaids/Hangover crowd). Lucky is a different type of romantic comedy that successfully takes brave risks and they all pay off. On to specifics:The screenplay was an extraordinary piece of writing. I won't give anything away, because if you like quirky independent film, you should see this movie. But, some of the scenes were beautifully nuanced. In particular, the final scene, which was an extremely difficult scene to pull off. Sublette manages to make it work. The pacing, editing, and direction are all as good as it gets. And the way the screenplay subtly builds these characters so that we believe their relationship (as bizarre as it may be) is masterful.The acting is superlative. Hanks and Ari Graynor are ideally cast as nebbish serial killer and quirky love interest, and their performances are exquisite. I was amazed at their work in this film. The emotionality of the scenes required refined acting chops and they delivered.I'd kill to work with any one of these creative talents and think they should be lauded for this film.