Tao of Poker

The Cooler

There is a great indie film called The Cooler that my friends have been telling me to see. My art friends are raving about the odd sex scene and my gambling friends want me to see it because it's all about gambing and... Las Vegas!

Here's a review called: 'The Cooler' shines as a tale of life and luck in old-school Vegas from the Seattle Times.

Here's a bit: "Nearly all of Wayne Kramer's Las Vegas fable "The Cooler" takes place in artificial light; scenes unfold on the cavernous floor of an old-school casino where day and night merge, dimly lit back offices, or musty apartments where curtains are drawn firmly against the light. It's a strange, free-floating world, and it's become a prison for Bernie Lootz (William H. Macy), a "cooler" at the Shangri-La casino who dreams of going somewhere "where there are clocks on the walls."

A cooler, in this movie's old-school Vegas parlance, is someone whose luck is so bad that he can "cool" a table just by standing nearby. And it just takes one look at Bernie to see that he's got rotten luck -- as played by Macy (who, along with Philip Seymour Hoffman, is king of the indie-movie shlub), he's got greasy, flattened-down hair, nastily wrinkled suits, a pronounced limp and a perpetually worried look. "People get next to me, their luck turns," he explains to Natalie (Maria Bello), the pretty cocktail waitress who's inexplicably flirting with him..."

If you would like to watch the trailer or a preview visit this site: The Cooler: Trailers. I just checked it out... and it looks great. I'm going to try to get Haley to go see it this wekeend (but she wants to go see LOTR 3.) Stay tuned for a movie review from me!!