Luck be a Lady.

“I’m on a roll, I’m on a roll, this time. I feel my luck could change.” Just as it seemed that I’d have to settle into Valentine’s Day weekend with the cloying miasma of Love Actually still wafting in the air, along came Wayne Kramer’s The Cooler (by way of my local Blockbuster.) Stacked with quality performances by William H. Macy, Maria Bello, Alec Baldwin, Paul Sorvino, and Ron Livingston, The Cooler is an enchanting magical realist tale about the transformative power of love that I found passionate, poignant, and poetic (and not in the Vogon sense.) I thought it managed to capture that first, giddy and glorious flush of a new romance in spades.

The film begins with Bernie (Macy), a guy beat down so low by life he makes Jerry Lundegaard seem like Tony Robbins, ambling around the once-fabulous Shangri-La casino, bestowing bad mojo like a benediction upon any unfortunate gambler in his wake. Y’see, Bernie is such a hard luck case that he infects everyone around him with his awful fortune, and has thus been hired as a “cooler” by Old Vegas mob boss Shelley Kaplow (Baldwin, well-deserving of his Supporting Actor nomination.) But, when Bernie encounters cocktail waitress and amateur astrologist Natalie (Bello), Cupid works some mojo of his own, and soon enough a revitalized, invincible Bernie inexplicably has the Midas Touch, which may not sit well with his employers…

True, you can guess where this is basically going from the opening moments. The Cooler is ultimately a brief genre exercise in noir romance – It’s not reinventing the wheel. But the wry script takes a few jags I wasn’t expecting, and Kramer, Macy, and Bello succeed in fashioning two lovebirds who veer from playful to amorous to desperate for each other in a way that belies the cookie cutter courtship of so many other films. (And while it at first seems that The Cooler has a Sideways problem, it doesn’t, for spoilerish reasons which will be evident if you see the movie.) In sum, if you can stomach the occasional burst of Old Vegas-style mob brutality (usually at the hands of Baldwin), The Cooler is a testament to the notion that even perennial losers can sometimes catch a lucky break, and a touching character-driven romance well worth checking out.

Detroit Red.

The trailer for the Assault on Precinct 13 remake, with Ethan Hawke, Lawrence Fishburne, Brian Dennehy, Ja Rule, Maria Bello, John Leguizamo, Drea De Matteo, and Gabriel Byrne as the Big Bad, is now online. It’s a bit depressing to see Tom Reagan of Miller’s Crossing clearly in the “Paying the Bills” phase of his career, but I guess you could argue it was already in full swing by 1999’s End of Days, versus the Governator.

Under the Sea and Over the Top.

In the trailer bin, Bill Murray dives into Cousteau for Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (I’m looking forward to the Henry Selick stop-motion stuff, which unfortunately isn’t in this preview), Jude Law gets increasingly overexposed in David Russell’s I Heart Huckabees (Can’t say I think much of this trailer, for some reason, nor of the “existential comedy” billing) and Chris Cooper channels Dubya for John Sayles’s political caper Silver City (Looks solid, but Richard Dreyfuss strikes warning bells…he can get real hammy when doing satire.)

Life and How to Live It.

Since my cable connection has been spotty over the past day and a half, and as I needed a break from orals reading, I threw another catch-up movie marathon here at Casa Berkeley. Not sure what the underlying subtext of this quadruple billing is…biopics, perhaps (Schmidt, Kahlo, Crane, Wilson)? Or, rather, fanboy villains in the arthouse (Nicholson, Molina, DeFoe, Serkis)? At any rate, here’s what I thought, in the order I watched them:

About Schmidt: I dunno…I’m normally a big fan of Alexander Payne’s movies, and particularly Election, but think I saw this film on the wrong end of the hype machine. Schmidt was mildly enjoyable, but it also dragged in parts and spent too much of its time deriving humor from goofy Midwestern antics (most notably the couple in the Winnebago park and Dermot Mulroney as the son-in-law to be…pyramid schemes and Why Bad Things Happen to Good People? Come on.) While aiming to be a rumination on retirement, time wasted, and the myths surrounding a life lived well, I suppose, I thought the entire film basically revolved around stunt casting – watching Jack play the anti-Jack. Speaking of which, Nicholson was quite good as the befuddled, world-weary Schmidt, but without him playing against type, there doesn’t seem to be much here. Something of a disappointment.

Frida: Perhaps this biopic focuses too much on the Diego Rivera-Frida Kahlo romance, but I enjoyed it, and particularly the narrative lapses into Kahlo’s artistic world (for example, the Day of the Dead hospital sequence by the Brothers Quay). There’s some grotesque miscasting in here – Ashley Judd trips all over her Spanish accent, Geoffrey Rush is oddly hammy as Leon Trotsky, and Nelson Rockefeller is entirely too Nortonesque – but Salma Hayek and Alfred Molina are quite good as the emotional center of the film, and all in all this picture works. After traveling around in the winnebago with Warren Schmidt for two hours, it was nice to spend some time with people who embrace life along with their pain.

Auto Focus: Greg Kinnear is very good as Bob Crane in this Paul Schrader flick, but unfortunately Auto Focus, while very watchable, comes off as a by-the-numbers addiction movie. Between the Angelo Badalamenti score and all the retro-dressed beauties stalking Col. Hogan in various dens of iniquity, this pic seems set in Mulholland Drive Hollywood from the get-go, which ends up being one of the main problems. Other than a shrewish Rita Wilson on his back, it’s hard to understand from this picture what drives Crane into this sordid life. Perhaps it’s unfair to compare these movies to each other, but oh well – When Frida Kahlo has an affair with Josephine Baker or Diego Rivera sleeps with basically everybody in Frida, at least they look like they’re having a good time. The sex scenes in Auto Focus are all filmed like something out of a Bosch triptych – dark, muddled, and hellish. Ok, I know the film is about sex addiction, but still – better movies on addiction (such as The Basketball Diaries) at least give a sense of what the draw was in the first place. As such, Auto Focus, while easy to watch, ends up feeling cold and puritanical. Too bad, really, because the performances are all generally good.

24-Hour Party People: I get the sense this movie would be inscrutable to anyone who didn’t already know the contours of the story, and insufferable to anyone who doesn’t care about Joy Division and such, but I found 24-Hour Party People the most fun of the foursome. Shot in a cinema verite style with real concert footage thrown in [along with postmodern narrative asides by Tony Wilson (Steve Coogan)], 24HPP is an informative and irreverent trip into the history of the Manchester rave, and one that seems to capture the spirit of the post-punk era without wallowing in Studio 24-type nostalgia. If I had my druthers, I would have spent more time on the rise of New Order (or for that matter, the Smiths and Stone Roses) and much less on the Happy Mondays, but oh well. As I said, I’d think this film might be immensely confusing – or just plain boring – if you don’t already know who Ian Curtis, Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook, and the Buzzcocks are, but if you do, Party People is rollicking good fun, a movie that manages to take its subject seriously by not taking it seriously, if you know what I mean.

So that’s that, then. I still have Human Nature and The Grey Zone to watch, which should make for one bizarre double feature.