The Cooler

Rating:
Summary: A movie full of great performances
Review: The Cooler was a hard movie to see. I saw it once in theater but was not able to see it again. The DVD relase is finally here so it was nice to sit down and watch this fine made movie again.

Bernie Lootz(Macy) is a very unlucky job. In fact his job is based totally on his bad luck. He is a cooler at the Shangra-Li casion in Las Vegas. His job is to go to the hot tables where people are winning and cool them with this bad luck. He does it with a lot of success. He is doing this job to pay off a debt he owes to the casino owner Shelly.(Baldwin)

Bernie ends up meeting one of the cocktail waitress in the bar named Natalie.(Bello) She like Bernie is depressed and both are looking for somebody to love. As there love begins to grow though Bernie is no longer doing his job. Shelly is mad and wants things changed. When Shelly wants things changed they normally happen. Bernie is only suppose to be at the Shangra-Li another couple days, but things are changing that could change his new lucky happy life.

William H. Macy is amazing in this film. Bernie is a very depressed upset character. Macy plays him so well you almost wonder if he's happy in his own life. The body language and the looks in his eyes look so real. This is one of the tour de force performances of the year, and I can' believe that Macy received no nominations by anybody for his performance. This guy can flat out act and he shows all of his talents in this movie.

Alec Baldwin is the man in this movie. His character Shelly cracked me up. Shelly is a pretty mean guy and he runs his casio old school. Baldwin has been hammered by the press the last couple of years for being a pretty angry guy, and he releases some of that frusteration on screen. He is the best thing in this moive and he easily deserved his Oscar nomination. The more I see this movie and the more I see Mystic River and I feel more and more that Baldwin was better than Robbins. He deserved the Oscar more. This is the second best performance of his carear behind Jack Ryan in Hunt For the Red October.

Mario Bello is pretty good in the film. Once again she plays the depressed Natalie very well. She isn't quite as good as Macy is as Bernie but it's a great performance. She received a Golden Globe nomination for the role and it's easy to see why. It's the best performance of her carear.

I got tired of the sex scenes in the movie. It's strange seeing these two people do such big sex scenes. Macy and Bello aren't the most attractive poeple in the world and lets face it that 90% of the time in movies sex scenes are done with attractive people. It was weird seeing them do it, and they do it a ton in the movie. I got tired of seeing them naked and this really is the only thing I dislike about the movie.

The Cooler is good movie. It's full of a bunch of Tour de Force performances. It was one of the best dramas of 2003. It's good to see an old time casino movie on screen. It definetly is not a family film and it deserves it's R rating. It's a very well made movie and I enjoyed it a lot.

Rating:
Summary: not bad, until the last 1/3rd...
Review: ...of the film, when the characters start saying and doing the stupidest, most improbable things.

I liked the idea of a casino hiring someone to bring bad luck upon winning patrons to minimize its losses, but that this man's perennial bad luck suddenly changes to good all around just because he finally gets laid and fall in love---that's hard enough to swallow, but wait until the last 5 minutes when the last tatters of disbelief suspension are just blown to smithereens. The savagery, sliminess and squalor of Vegas casinos and their shady owners is a well-worn Hollywood cliche, but this film had the potential to transcend all that...and more's the pity it didn't.

The saving graces: exquisitely candid and unglamorized sex scenes between Macy and Bello, solid acting and direction, nice jazzy soundtrack.

PS. To those who dislike this film just because of the sex scenes: grow up, for Chrissakes!

Rating:
Summary: not so hot
Review: Ever wondered what might have happened if Martin Scorsese had teamed up with Franka Capra? Wonder no more--the result would have been this simplistic fantasy (a pitiful shlub possesses the magical power to make Vegas casino players lose the minute he shows up at the table) jazzed up with stomach-churning violence and unnecessary nudity (do we really need to see William Macy naked?)Besides an unbelievable set-up (as the old-school casino manager/owner/whatever--it's never made clear exactly why he's calling all the shots--Alec Baldwin portrays a character that's been extinct in Vegas for 30 years), Macy is saddled with yet another variation on his tiresome sad-sack role. Take a pass.

Rating:
Summary: Luck personified
Review: The underated and always superb William H. Macy is terrific in his portrayal of Bernie Lootz, a cooler in a Las Vegas casino. Macy, a harbinger of bad luck, a walking black raincloud, is employed in the Shangri- La casino by casino boss Alec Baldwin. His job is to turn winners into losers and he is a non pareil at his profession.

Baldwin in his best acting performance in quite some time is a violent, ruthless, insensitive shark who has coerced Macy into a six year commitment working in his casino. It seems that Macy rang up a $150,000 gambling debt and one broken knee cap later, he's in servitude to Baldwin. Trouble starts as Macy's six year term is about to expire.

Baldwin hires Maria Bello, a Sharon Stone look alike, and waitress at the casino to ensare Macy in a relationship to keep him around. She falls in love with Macy and the relationship turns Macy's luck from bad to good. Conflict arises as the casino commences to lose money.

The Cooler is an absolute sleeper of a flick that combines excellent acting performances by Macy, Bello and especially Baldwin to create an excellent 101 minute diversion.

Rating:
Summary: Joe Btfsplk in the 21st Century
Review: Long ago, Al Capp created a character for his L'il Abner comic strip. Wherever Joe Btfsplk went, a dark cloud remained above his head. I thought about that gloomy fellow as I viewed this film. Here's its basic situation: A casino CEO in Las Vegas (Shelly Kaplow played by Baldwin) has hired a stone cold, recovering gambler (Bernie Lootz played by Macy) to cool off other gamblers when they are on a hot streak. All Lootz needs to do is stand next to or near one of them. Brrrrrrrrrrrr. They stop winning but continue to bet and eventually lose everything. Lootz has been working off a gambling debt in excess of $100,000 and is about to repay the casino when the film begins. When not at work, he lives in a small motel room. Of course, his plants have died and his cat has abandoned him. In essence, divorced and alienated from his former wife and family, he has no personal life.

Natalie Belisario (Bello) is a cocktail waitress at the Shangri La to whom Bernie is reluctantly attracted. Because he sees himself (and frequently describes himself) as a "loser," he sees no hope for a romantic relationship with her until....Meanwhile, Shelly is under great pressure from the owners to abandon his "old fashioned" ideas about casinos and accept the recommendations of Larry Sokolov (Livingstone) who is his nemesis. Shelly endures him while despising everything he thinks Sokolov represents which is, in fact, everything the "new" Las Vegas has become. Both Shelly and the Shangri La are endangered species.

This film invites comparisons with Atlantic City (1980), Casino, and Leaving Las Vegas (both 1995) but I consider it a lesser achievement. Although the acting throughout is outstanding, as are the atmospherics which include but are not limited to the casino milieu, the narrative is weak...in large measure because director Wayne Kramer introduces and then abandons so many sub plots which become (for me) distractions. Bernie's relationship with his son, for example. Kramer also takes a "hit and run" approach to character development, with Buddy Stafford (played by Paul Sorvino) the most obvious example. Given the compelling performances by Macy, Baldwin, and Bello, I regret that The Cooler does not have more a substantial story. Kramer must assume most of the blame because he both directed this film and co-authored its screenplay with Frank Hanna. An unfair question, I realize, but what if The Cooler had been based on a novel written by Elmore Leonard, with a screenplay adaptation written under his supervision?

Rating:
Summary: Baldwin makes a great sleazebag
Review: Las Vegas holds a tremendous appeal for filmmakers, for obvious reasons. It's a great venue for showcasing people on the down-and-out (and in contrast to the wealth of the casinos and high-rollers), people's lives and motivations are reduced and simplified to the bare essence of survival (i.e. what would you do for fame or money?), and future events can change on the roll of a pair of dice. `Leaving Las Vegas' is probably the best recent film made about Las Vegas, and while The Cooler is an easier film to digest than LLV, it doesn't achieve nearly as much.

The best aspect of The Cooler is Alec Baldwin's performance as an old-school casino boss being supplanted by a younger generation of MBA-trained managers. Even those who dislike Baldwin for his politics will enjoy his performance in this role (in fact, those people will claim Baldwin isn't acting at all in this role). Baldwin is great, but having seen John Hurt's even slightly better performance in a near-identical role in Owning Mahoney, I wonder whether the `casino boss from Hell' role is just a plum role for aging actors. I'm sure Jack Nicholson could do a great job with this role, too.

My biggest complaint about The Cooler, aside from its more restrained ambitions than a film like LLV, is its uneven pacing and blatant foreshadowing and symbolism. William Macy plays a casino `cooler', a mythical individual who emanates bad luck, whom the casino boss directs over to `hot' tables to cool down the players. Love, as a greater power, changes the cooler; the first time we see this we get it, but it is repeated again and again. Early in the film, a casino worker tells the casino boss a long story about a nature show that he saw on TV; it's blatantly obvious to the audience just what this story is foretelling. Finally, the pace of the film is somewhat restrained and even repetitive, up to the ending, in which events unfold in such rapid-fire succession that it's almost hard to figure out if everything ended up the way it had been foretold.

In the other main roles, William Macy was good, and we see more of him (in the dimensions of both time and space) than we did in Fargo, but his car salesman's role in Fargo is still his best. Mario Bello is OK, but unfortunately her most dramatic scene is marred by a lack of realism on her makeup special effects (perhaps the budget wasn't rich enough to make her appear to continue bleeding after being cut).

Bottom line: The Cooler has its positives, but definitely not the best film ever made in or about Sin City. If you can stomach it and haven't seen it yet, try Leaving Las Vegas.

Rating:
Summary: The Cooler
Review: Bernie Lootz is a loser. He is so much a loser that he makes the people around him have bad luck. And that comes in handy in his job as a "cooler" at the Shangri-La Casino in Las Vegas. Whenever someone is getting a little too lucky in the casino, in comes Bernie, and the hot streak is over. But then a funny thing happens...Bernie finds love in a cocktail waitress at the Shangri-La, and all of a sudden, Bernie's cooling powers are failing him. This is not good news for the owner, Shelly Kaplow who is feeling pressure from a mob boss to update his business methods. William H. Macy has sort of perfected the loser guy roles, so it is no surprise that he gives a good performance as Bernie, and when things start to go right for him, you feel happy for the poor guy. Alec Baldwin does a great job as the casino owner clinging to an antiquated way of doing things. All in all, a surprisingly enjoyable little movie.

Rating:
Summary: Shangri-La La La La?
Review: Las Vegas: A city rich in gambling tradition, as well as a place where entertainers from various musical and other genres, such as Wayne Newton, Tom Jones, Siegfried & Roy, etc. call their personal playground. This is the place where it all happens 24/7/365. It is also the town where a casino worker and a cocktail waitress (William H. Macy, Maria Bello) stake out potential casino "clientele", both on the business side (where Bernie Lootz [Macy] operates), and on the romantic and personal end of the spectrum (where Natalie Belisario [Bello] prefers to operate - although Mr. Lootz likes to take a little walk on the romantic side to satisfy his innermost sexual inhibitions as well). Their boss, one Shelly Kaplow (Alec Baldwin), wants to secure an even bigger piece of the business pie as well, as he makes it entirely clear to everyone that he is definitely the man in charge, and takes no prisoners in the process. Mr. Kaplow desperately wants to protect his investment. He does this by making sure his star employee (Bernie Lootz) constantly scours the casino floor, watching and reporting all the action, seeing to it that the patrons build up a respectable "cash flow", hoping these people will "crap out", and lose their entire take. Hence, Mr. Lootz is known in the casino & gaming business as "The Cooler". Will business for Shelly Kaplow, and romance for Bernie and Natalie come up a pair of "box cars" on the positive side, or a duo of "snake eyes" on the negative downfall? In order for your curiosity to peak as far as this juicy and interesting tidbit of a plot is concerned, just keep your "cool", and take in a viewing of "The Cooler" at your local theater, today!

Rating:
Summary: Great acting, flawed script
Review: With three superior performances--by Alec Baldwin, William Macy and Maria Bello--this should have been a better film. Baldwin in particular is great; he steals the show as a gangster-style casino boss in Lost Wages, Nevada--the place where you go to make your dreams come true. Only in the Golden Shangri-La, his casino, if you win big, you get your arm broken.

More likely than that, you don't win big because you're visited by another bygone era, old-school relic, a cooler: a guy who just by his mere presence smashes your luck to pieces. Played by Macy, Baldwin's cooler is a guy who's so down on himself he can't help but make those around him sink to his level.

This psychic effect is held in high regard by Shelly (Baldwin)--somewhat surprising, considering his crude demeanor and reliance on violence as the cure-all for whatever problems ail him. But there it is, and this weird juxtaposition makes this more of a fairy tale than a drama. That, and the love story that emerges when Bernie (Macy) falls head over heels with Natalie, a cocktail waitress assigned to him by Shelly. Natalie, stunningly beautiful, (Bello), herself is gaga for Bernie who's, let's face it, not the world's best looking guy. A bit long in the tooth, he's seen a whole lot of better days.

The age and looks difference accentuates the fairy tale aspect here which reaches astounding proportions right at the end of the film when a mind-numbing coincidence results in the happiest ending of all.

Long before that, though, Bernie gets confronted with a major problem--his son Mikey who's in tow with his "pregnant" girlfriend. Mikey has nothing but contempt for his father and takes advantage of him as much as possible. And Shelly has a big problem, too. His partner Nicky wants new blood in the casino--new blood, new family-style vacation-land attractions, a new look. This is represented by Larry (Ron Livinston), a young yuppie guy who's so sure of himself he tries ordering Shelly around and gets hurt as a result.

This peculiar mix of real and unreal elements doesn't really fuse to make a substantial story. Even with excellent actors, the film wants to be a lot more than it is, kind of like a cinematic having your cake and eating it too. The script isn't strong enough to suspend the viewer's disbelief at this "old school" approach to running a casino, here in the 21st century. Accentuating fantasy elements in a subtle way would have helped tremendously, giving the film more of a surreal feel that would place it squarely in the fantasy arena. This would have made the bizarre ending much more credible, the love story of two lonely yet mismatched people more palpable, and the anomaly of an old-school casino manager more believable.

The three stars are for the superior acting and the heartfelt attempt at a fantasy-reality story blend.

Rating:
Summary: Wonderful soundtrack
Review: The music throughout the entire film was great. The slow & varied jazz tracks gave the Vegas setting in the background a nice warm feel, especially Krall's I'll String Along with You. I'll be looking out the the soundtrack for sure...