The Luckiest Man in America
The Luckiest Man in America
The end credits of “The Luckiest Man in America” feature a clip of the real “Press Your Luck” episode from 1984. Which is the one shown in between Turner and Michael Larson. He is talking about the contest with the host, Peter Tomarken. Michael Larson tells Mr. Tomarken about going to his daughter’s birthday party that he had missed and how he drove an ice-cream truck in the summer to make extra money while working as an air conditioning repairman. Such detail can be used on screen for about 45 seconds. Still, it is hard to understand what director Samir Oliveros was brainstorming when he used the best shot in making it the centerpiece of a 90-minute movie on Larson’s embarrassing work in the game show.
Nowadays, Larson’s name resonates with the message that he walked away with $110,000 from the show, which he was able to achieve because he remembered the algorithm of the Big Board and Maurice is more interested in the question of motivation. But more answers to the questions “How did Larson want to lose and why, and how did he fake bank?” This is how Larson was the luckiest person in America because from the perspective of the format of the show it is very rich in time to try to capture the recording the date and time of the taping when Larson came to a shouting and flipping over the bank. It has coercive power when the producers look panicking that this cornpone contestant from Lebanon, Ohio has outsmarted them all. Even when the show begins in earnest and they want to go after him, even then Oliveros and his co-writer Maggie Briggs try to extract those parts of Larson’s life that were not included and concentrated on the game, his preparations for it or the show demotion out of Alabai az I’m Press Your Luck.
Working out a perfect or perfect strategy in a game is one thing but having that strategy baptized from an American perspective is where the problems lie in this case ‘the Luckiest Man in America out of the Owning a P Setting Mathematically dense book’.
The character Larson is endearing to us all, and it’s forgivable for the Press Your Luck producer Bill Cunningham (David Straithairn)’s condescension to the ‘aw shucks’ demeanor of him since he knows that Larson would be a pretend redhead who got to the flicks by claiming to be another contestant. Rather than being imprisoned, as Bill’s partner Chuck (Shamier Anderson) intended, Larson comes back to audition, rolling his ice-cream truck to Television City in Los Angeles.
One cannot be surprised to find out that there is also a story behind the producers of this show in “The Luckiest Man in America” documentary, which happens when things do not go as planned and the producers have to take the contestants’ place. With Walton Goggins as Tomarken, Haley Bennett playing Larson’s wife Patricia, Maisie Williams featuring as a tour guide and Patti Harrison and Brian Geraghty playing his co-contestants, this certainly must have been good enough on paper to put together such a strong cast but not quite in its final outcome even with all these efforts. The film wastes no time pulling back the curtain on Larson’s ambiguities right away, even though it tries to do everything in its power to bring focus onto the character who the story revolves around — Larson, to the extent of him being shown on a talk show hosted by Johnny Knoxville who is more than glad to have Larson explode in emotion on his couch.
In “Bad Lucky Goat,” there is hope for better things to come from Oliveras’s debut feature so as not to belittle the promise that was showcased in film’s concluding seria-comic tone. Cinematographer Pablo Lozano makes use of low lighting by old game show bulbs which were used before computerized technology to bring out a sense of dark to the events, in addition to production designer Lulú Salgado impressively recreating the ‘Press Your Luck’ set and making surrounding studio lot feel at once thrilling yet menacing.
Nevertheless, an audience loses that engagement when Larson participates in a game where he already knows the winning outcome. This same form of disengagement occurs while watching a movie when many scenes are cut out in an attempt to reach the ending, going against the nature of control room where the seebestwho has a cheating suspicion doesn’t even consider the option of switching off the telecast. The film is right in at least one sense that much of what Larson has said where he does has strong warnings that what you about to see is a re-enactment, and makes it clear that he never felt like a winner, however much money laser might accumulate. Given its enormous array of skills, The Luckiest Man in America is however somewhat less satisfying than it ought to be.
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- Genre: Thriller
- Country: United States
- Director: Samir Oliveros
- Cast: Shamier Anderson, Haley Bennett, Brian Geraghty
