In Just My Luck the world is Lindsay Lohan’s rabbit’s foot. She is blessed with the gift of incredibly good luck. Everything in her life is perfect—she can’t lose with scratch and win tickets, and when the dry cleaner drops off the wrong dress to her apartment, it turns out to be one of Sarah Jessica Parker’s frocks and is exactly the right size and just the perfect thing for her to wear that night on a date.
Into her ideal life stumbles Chris Pine, a busboy / music impresario who is also the unluckiest schlub in NYC. He is so cursed that even when he is fortunate enough to find a discarded five-dollar bill in the trash, it has recently been used as a pooper scooper—the first of many poo jokes in the film.
Their paths cross at a charity masquerade ball. On the dance floor they exchange an anonymous kiss, their identities hidden behind masks. Somehow in their moment of passion they swap more than spit, and in minutes the polarity of their lives is reversed. He is golden and she finds herself being hauled off to jail following a series of unlucky events.
This is a romantic comedy, so of course they meet again, but will they get together?
This is being touted as flame-haired Lindsay Lohan’s move away from the teen films that have made her a star and a shift into Julia Roberts territory. I’m not so sure Just My Luck is the movie that will shed her teen queen image. It isn’t exactly a mature film, it lacks the sophistication of Notting Hill or even My Best Friends Wedding. Instead it’s more like Freaky Friday with a love story. Lohan is a likeable performer, but here she is forced into doing physical shtick that was old when another famous redhead—Lucille Ball—did it. She pulls it off, but the movie feels overly long and to call it predictable is an understatement.
Bobby is an ambitious attempt to reenact the day Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on June 5, 1968. Director Emilio Estevez has assembled a extensive ensemble cast, featuring vets like William H. Macy, Harry Belefonte and Anthony Hopkins to Brat Packers like Christian Slater and Demi Moore to hot young stars such as Lindsay Lohan and Elijah Wood to up and comers like Shia LaBeouf and Joshua Jackson who play people who were in the hotel the night Kennedy was killed.
Estevez, who wrote and directed Bobby, was only six years old when Kennedy was assassinated so it might be his lack of personal experience with the era that gives Bobby it almost hopelessly earnest tone. The late 60s were a politically charged time, fuelled by protests, assassinations and civil unrest, but Estevez’s account of the time is simplistic, with stock characters—the racist kitchen manager, the wise old doorman—spouting dialogue that sounds as though it was written for a history textbook and not a feature film.
When Lohan’s character says, “If marrying you tonight keeps you from going to Vietnam, then it’s worth it,” before she walks down the aisle with a recently drafted Elijah Wood, it’s difficult not to imagine even a Harlequin romance writer cringing at the clichéd line.
With 22 characters Bobby is too populated by half. Many of the stories are superfluous and don’t add anything to the film except star power and running time. It’s a snapshot of the time that needs some serious cropping.
Despite the needlessly sprawling story, it’s hard to really dislike a movie this earnest, a film that wears its heart on its sleeve. While cinematic greatness might not be evident, Bobby’s message of peace and justice shines through.
A Prairie Home Companion’s story is very simple. A large company has bought the theatre and radio station that has been home to A Prairie Home Companion, a thirty-year-old homespun Mid-Western radio variety show, hosted by the eccentric GK. Week after week the tightly knit cast has told corny jokes and sung songs that range from old hat to heartfelt for a faithful audience. It is the end of an era but GK refuses to acknowledge the gravity of the night. “Every show is your last show,” he says. “That’s my philosophy.” Luckily director Robert Altman does imbue the proceedings with some weight.
The eighty-plus Altman has been making films for more than fifty years and is still one of the most distinctive filmmakers going. His style, with its long uninterrupted tracking shots with lots of over-lapping dialogue perfectly captures the chaotic goings-on backstage and the loping rhythms of the performers onstage. In a summer filled with slick action pictures Altman’s film feels old fashioned, handmade almost, and that’s a good thing. The movie is so easy going and so enjoyable that it doesn’t draw attention to how beautifully it is made.
Altman has populated the cast with eccentric characters—Guy Noir, the bumbling security guard who seems to have read one too many Raymond Chandler novels; Yolanda and Rhonda Johnson, the two surviving members of what was once a family singing act and the Dangerous Woman, an angel who appears on earth in the form of a woman who died while listening to the show—but somehow manages to balance the real human drama with the more ephemeral aspects of the story.
A Prairie Home Companion is so much more than a radio variety show on film. Altman turns the simple story into an allegory about death –with jokes. It’s a touching portrait of the end of a simpler era made by an 81 year-old man who understands the past and is astute enough to look into the future.
