Entertaiment

Just My Luck Launches a New Doris Day
By Orson Scott Card

We haven’t gone to many movies lately – between directing a play, teaching a workshop, traveling, finishing a screenplay, and writing a novel, there hasn’t been a lot of free time during the hours when movies are being shown.  (I guess there just aren’t enough of us who want to see a movie at nine a.m. to justify opening up the whole theater.)

Monday night, though, with our daughter’s 13-year-old cousin visiting from out of town, we hit the Carousel to watch the Lindsay Lohan romantic comedy Just My Luck.

We knew Lohan as a teen star, which meant that we expected the movie to be geared toward the younger members of our contingent.  They certainly enjoyed it, but so did we elderly persons.  Because Lindsay Lohan has grown up.

In fact, if I were to tag Lohan with an apt comparison from an earlier generation, it would be this: Doris Day.

No, there’ll be no rendition of “Que Sera, Sera.”  But Lohan has the girl-next-door, unthreatening charm that Day personified.  She’s not terrifyingly sexy, as some young actresses try to be; she’s the woman who makes you feel comfortable with her even though she’s obviously also pretty, strong-willed, and smart.

Add to Lohan the perfect leading man for her: Chris Pine.  Pine is equally credible as an earnest, bumbling nerdy guy and as a strong-jawed hero.  He has charisma, yes, and looks – but he can also act.

Just My Luck has a simple premise: Lohan’s character, Ashley Allbright, is lucky.  Everything works for her.  She always wins at least a few bucks in the scratch-off lottery; there’s always a cab for her; the rain lets up when she goes outdoors.

Pine’s character, Jake Hardin, is leading the opposite life.  If it can go wrong for him, it will.  Even things that couldn’t possibly go wrong, do.

In fact, he is so used to having execrable luck that he carries a backpack loaded with disinfectants, bandages, anti-itch salve, umbrellas, changes of clothes, and other emergency supplies.  More important, he’s armed with pluckiness that triumphs over his desperate misfortunes – he keeps trying.

The result is that when, in his desperate effort to get a demo record to a top executive, he finds himself at a masquerade ball, dancing with Lohan’s Ashley, he takes his opportunity, and kisses her.

The kiss, of course, is a “kiss for luck.”  Lohan suddenly has his luck, and he has hers.  Almost at once he gets an in with the recording executive and his band has a hit record and a gig on Times Square.  Meanwhile, Lohan loses her job and faces disaster after disaster as she joins the real world.

Oddly, her misfortune benefits one of her friends, a songwriter who gets a chance to have a tune of hers played by Jake’s band.  So when Ashley (Lohan) finally realizes that Jake is the man she kissed, she naturally will kiss him and get her luck back.  Thereby ruining his sudden lucky streak.

The fantasy premise does not require any elaborate and silly machinations (Tovah Feldshuh plays the delightful Madame Z who does not cause the change of luck, but merely foresees it).  The resolution is clever and satisfying.

The rest of the cast is a delight.  Samaire Armstrong and Bree Turner play Lohan’s friends with such charm that we wish they were our friends, too.  Sometime singer Carlos Ponce plays the male-escort-next-door to perfection.

And the movie is almost stolen by Faizon Love as the record executive.  There aren’t a lot of great parts for double-XL black men, but this is one of them, and Love is magnificent.  He exudes power, confidence, callousness, and wit.  I loved every minute he was on screen.

It’s hard to tell from the credits who really did the main work of writing this light-hearted gem of a movie, but the bulk of the credit seems to belong to I. Marlene King and Amy B. Harris, though three guys are credited with coming up with at least part of the story – which probably means that their draft was the starting point.

Director Donald Petrie also led such projects as Welcome to Mooseport, How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days, Miss Congeniality, Grumpy Old Men, and Mystic Pizza.  I don’t think I’m surprising anybody by saying that this movie proves that when the script is right, he’s an excellent director of comedy.  Unlike some directors, he doesn’t belabor his setups – you don’t feel like the movie works way too hard for very small laughs.  Instead, the gags seem almost accidental or inevitable; sometimes the characters even point out that a gag is coming, yet when it does, it still works.

On a budget of $45 million, this movie grossed only about $17 million in the U.S.  That, my friends, counts as a flop.  And that’s flat-out too bad.  I suspect it’s Lohan’s teen image combined with the summer blockbuster time of year that did the damage and kept people away.

But you can help make up for it when it comes out on DVD.  This movie is perfect for family viewing – nobody hops into bed with anybody.  It is actually less sex-centered than the old Doris Day/Rock Hudson comedies.  Yet this innocence is accompanied by a genuine depiction of love.  We can see two good people coming to need and depend on each other.  How often does a movie do that?

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For instance, In Good Company has been omnipresent on HBO lately, and after watching various sections of it I’ve come to a couple of conclusions: Topher Grace is a marvel; Dennis Quaid is utterly dependable; Scarlett Johansson is an emotional black hole down which movies pour all their energy, leaving none on the screen; and the storyline is completely destroyed by the fact that the romantic leads sleep together.  It makes it all seem just as shabby and meaningless as the father (Quaid) feared.

But In Good Company made a profit and Just My Luck lost money.  Which one do you think we’ll see more of?  More Scarlett Johansson, more meaningless sex.  Less genuine love story, less delightful whimsy, fewer movies that families can see together without embarrassment.

At least we’ve seen that Topher Grace can carry a movie.  If he can survive playing Eddie Brock (“Venom”) in Spider-Man 3, we’ll see what he does with his own co-written script for Kids in America.  I hope he understands what his own appeal is; and if he does, I hope he becomes a powerful star who can make the kind of movie that he’s suited for.

But I also hope Chris Pine survives the financial woes of Just My Luck to become a star, too.  But from the fact that his next movies are entitled Smokin’ Aces and Blind Guy Driving, we can be sure he has a few more years of struggling apprenticeship ahead of him.