Hey folks, Harry here with a report from the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in the Czech Republic, where I'm headed soon to vacation and enjoy fine Czech beers and food... ahhhh, Czech pivo.... mmmmm.... Here's a run down on the fabulous festival and William H Macy's THE COOLER... here ya go...
Hey, Harry. I noticed you hadn't received any reports from the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, so I thought I'd drop you a line, along with some film reviews in the coming days. (I wrote a Moulin Rouge review for you a ways back, but it's been a while.)
If you've never been to Karlovy Vary (aka Carlsbad, in the Czech Republic), you're missing out on one of the most gorgeous towns in the world. Just an hour or so outside of Prague, where many big-budget pictures film (XXX, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Blade II, Hellboy, Brothers Grimm, Bourne Identity, A Knight's Tale, Dungeons & Dragons, etc.), it's a jewel-box spa town set into a lush green valley with amazing art-nouveau architecture and thermal mineral baths that has attracted everyone from wealthy Russians to foreign kings & diplomats. And now, once a year every year, it attracts many of the top names in European and American cinema -- last year Sean Connery and Roger Ebert were scheduled, this year includes Morgan Freeman, John Hurt, Gus Van Sant, Stephen Frears and others too numerous to mention.
But because it's one of the only festivals in Europe that opens itself up to the public, it also attracts an eclectic crowd of visitors, including wealthy older folks in town for their seaweed massages and throngs of young backpackers who've traveled from all over Europe to camp out on the hotel grounds and populate the late-night raves. Smartly, the festival organizers this year have given all festival pass holders access to the Thermal Hotel's huge swimming pool & locker room showers, so the euro-stench among the ever-ripe camping crowd has been kept to a simmering minimum. (Thankfully, since all the screenings have been packed.) Indeed, the festival is at virtual capacity this year, with nearly every theater sold out -- everything from big-budget preview screenings to the student films from Slovakia. On the other hand, organizers are notoriously lax about enforcing the credential requirements for press and VIP screenings, so it's easy to get a seat at them if you know where they are.
Major films being screened at the festival this year include big-budget Hollywood pix that have not yet opened in Europe, such as Adaptation, The Hours and Dreamcatcher, as well as a large number of films slated for later this year or which haven't received a release date yet, such as Lars von Trier's Dogville, Gus Van Sant's Cannes winner Elephant and the Harvey Pekar biopic American Splendor. There's also a raft of movies that only saw limited release in the U.S. and abroad, such as American Gun with James Coburn and the Wilco documentary I Am Trying To Break Your Heart. Also on my list are some buzz flicks that I'm dying to see, such as Roger Dodger and Kwik Stop.
Some films will also be shown in versions that won't make it to the U.S., such as the 3-hour version of Dogville, which will reportedly be cut to 2 hours for the U.S. release; and the NC-17 version of The Cooler (reviewed below). Quite frankly, after seeing some of these uncut versions, I can't quite fathom what problem the U.S. ratings board has with the films -- in The Cooler, for instance, they objected to a sex scene where the most "shocking" element was William H. Macy's pubic hair. Now, granted, there's a thousand good reasons to not want to see that, but that really should be for the audiences to decide, and not the ratings board.
Okay, enough of the rant. Here's The Cooler review.
THE COOLER (written & directed by Wayne Kramer)
William H. Macy plays Bernie Lootz, a lovable loser whose main virtue in life is exactly that: he's a loser. In fact, he's such a mush that his bad luck rubs off on those around him, making him a pain in the ass to anybody he's gambling with, but also making him a hot commodity to the Vegas casino where he works, since he can freeze the hot streak of anyone around him... and thus, his job title: "a Cooler."
Alec Baldwin, channelling his 10-minute Glengarry Glen Ross "steak knives" speech for an entire movie, plays aging casino boss Shelly, a throwback to the Sinatra rat pack days when women were classy and rollercoasters were in Disneyland. Shelly still subscribes to the "cooler" myth, so he's hired Lootz to chill the tables at his casino, The Shangri-La, in exchange for relieving a gambling debt that Bernie ran up after a streak of particularly bad luck. Shelly had Bernie gimped back when he couldn't pay his debt, but Bernie's such a schmuck that now he thinks of Shelly as his friend for giving him a job, not realizing that Shelly's just looking for a better profit margin on his tables.
But Shelly's got his own set of problems. Bernie's only got a few more days worth of cooler work left before he's paid off his gambling debt, and then Bernie's planning on getting out of Dodge for good. Ron Livingstone (Swingers), meanwhile, plays a snot-nosed MBA hired by Shelly's financial backer to slap the dinosaur boss out of his nostalgic haze and into the 21st century of Family Vegas. And Shelly's prize lounge act, an underused Paul Sorvino, is entering his final stretch as a booze-guzzling, smack-addled crooner, soon to be replaced by Livingston's hip-swinging golden boy, Joey Fatone. (Yes, of 'NSync fame. Don't worry, it's only a cameo.)
Enter--Maria Bello, cocktail waitress, who takes pity on sad Bernie and ends up falling in love with him. Bernie's fortunes seem to finally have changed... but that only creates a whole new set of problems. Because when the world's all-time loser suddenly gets lucky in love, what does that do to the rest of his bad luck? And how far will an old-school boss like Shelly go to keep his prize Cooler on track?
Obviously, at this point, it should be clear that Macy, Baldwin and the rest of the denizens of the aptly-named Shangri-La casino live in that old-world fantasy of Vegas, and it's essential to the story that you buy into Shelly's romanticized notion that a ''cooler'' can actually exist for the rest of the film to have any meaning to you. Given how important that is, Kramer spends remarkably little time convincing you of this, but rather than dwell on the unlikelihoods of whether Macy can bring up double-zeroes on a roulette table simply by walking past it, he instead focuses on Macy's portrayal of Bernie as a kind-hearted man of such pathetic tragedy that you can't help but believe that his bad luck is more a function of genetics than superstition. (In fact, the role was specifically written with Macy in mind, and he inhabits it completely.) Even when Bernie's own hustler son shows up to beg money, Bernie can't help but handing over his entire wad, though it's clear that the lowlife kid is the one who deserves all the bad luck coming his way.
Kramer also does a great job of bringing an old-world, Vegas-noir quality to the film, using muted colors and deep film tones to give it the atmosphere of a seedy but not-quite-sleazy strip. Baldwin brings some well-crafted weary fade to his edgy casino boss, and Bello does a fine job as the failed showgirl who's clearly much more than Bernie should be able to get and yet falls for him anyway. In many ways this is an ensemble piece, and the pieces fit together so well that you can't help but know that someone's going to die in the end.
The Cooler is certainly not a perfect film; its finale in particular becomes a bit too absurdist, but I have to concede that by then the film has charmed you enough to convince you to go along with it. Overall, it's a damn fine Vegas flick, and it would be a stroke of particularly bad luck if its NC-17 controversy painted it as a just another Showgirls.
Again, sign me...
Kidradical
