Luck (Skydance Animation, Apple Original Films, Ilion Animation Studios, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

During our recently concluded vacation to visit my husband Charles’s mother Edi in Martinez, California, we watched five movies of varying levels of interest. The first, which we saw on July 27, was Luck (2022), a computer-animated film produced by Skydance Animation in association with Apple Original Films and a Madrid-based studio originally called Ilion Animation until it merged with Skydance. I’ll say at the start that I generally don’t like computer animation; it doesn’t have either the realism of live-action or the flexibility and (in rare instances) artistic quality of drawn animation. I have liked a few computer-animated films, notably Ratatouille and Soul, because the creativity and genuine emotions of their stories overcame my overall distaste for the look of computer animation. Luck was not so – pardon the pun – lucky. It’s the work of committee-driven processes, and looks and sounds like it. The concept for the “original” story (quotes definitely merited) was by Rebeca Carrasco, Juan De Dios, and Julián Romero, though the story itself was by Kiel Murray, Jonathan Aibel, and Glenn Berger, with Murray getting credit for the script as well and Julia Miranda supplying “additional dialogue.” The film also went through changes of director (Peggy Holmes replaced Alessandro Carloni) and composer. John Debney, son of 1950’s Walt Disney Studios TV producer Louis Debney (Zorro, The Mickey Mouse Club) and a major contributor to Disney projects in various media (movies, TV, theme parks), replaced Tanya Donelly (a well-traveled woman rock musician who’s been in the bands Throwing Muses, The Breeders, and Belly) and the L.A.-based band Mt. Joy.

There are also two names on the producers’ list that gave an air of creepiness to the project. One was David Ellison, owner of Skydance Media and Donald Trump groupie (and son of Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle, who famously said that in the age of the Internet “Privacy is over; get used to it”), who just arranged to acquire Paramount and CBS and to ensure government approval of the transfer of CBS’s broadcast licenses paid Trump what amounts to a $30 to $35 million bribe ($15 million to settle Trump’s preposterous lawsuit against 60 Minutes for allegedly defaming him by editing an interview with Kamala Harris in which Trump did not appear, and $15 to $20 million worth of free airtime to promote Trump-selected causes) and offered Trump Stephen Colbert’s head on the proverbial silver platter. The other was John Lasseter, founder of Pixar Studios and essentially the inventor of this style of computer animation. Lasseter was put in charge of Walt Disney Studios’ entire animation department when Disney bought Pixar, until he was fired for sexually harassing his female employees in 2017 in one of the earliest triumphs of the “#MeToo” movement. Emma Thompson originally signed to be one of the voice actors for Luck, but dropped out of the project on principle when she heard Lasseter was involved. Given that many of the people on the project, including Peggy Holmes, Kiel Murray, and John Debney, had previously worked with Lasseter on Pixar/Disney projects, Luck has the look and feel of a Pixar/Disney film in exile.

Basically it’s your standard-issue adolescent quest narrative centered around Samantha “Sam” Greenfield (Eva Nobelzada), who’s the recipient of continuous bad luck. When the film opens she’s just turned 18 and has therefore aged out of the orphanage where she’s grown up. She pleads with the management to be allowed to stay at least two more days to help the chances of her best friend, Hazel (Adelynn Spoon), to get adopted and find a “forever family.” Sam is told that’s not allowed, but she is placed in her own tiny apartment and is also given a job at a retail store, where because she’s the unluckiest person in the world she has a disastrous first day. On her way home from work she finds a magic coin – a penny with a four-leaf clover insignia – and the next day she’s super-competent on her job until she accidentally flushes the penny down a toilet. She offers to share her sandwich with Bob (Simon Pegg), a black cat with a Scottish accent who lives and works in the Land of Luck and needs his penny back to be readmitted there. When Bob finds out Sam has lost his crucial penny, the two journey down a magic portal to the Land of Luck, run by a race of leprechauns. They try to pass Sam off as a leprechaun, explaining her much larger than normal leprechaun size by saying she’s from Latvia. It turns out the Land of Luck has three levels: Good Luck, Bad Luck, and the “In-Between,” sort of like Catholic Purgatory. There is also a gadget called the “Randomizer,” run by a unicorn named Jeff (Flula Borg) who has a crush on the ruler of the whole Luck land, Beth the Dragon (Jane Fonda), which takes both good and bad luck and randomly distributes them to Earth people.

Luck is derivative of Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz and even Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (while the scene in the Bad Luck Bar can’t help but recall the Cantina scene in the original Star Wars), though I give the writing committee points for making the protagonist exactly 18 years old and suddenly thrust into an adulthood for which she’s completely unprepared. I also liked the way the writers worked into the plot line the fact that in England, as in the U.S., black cats are symbols of bad luck, while in Scotland black cats are symbols of good luck (which is why Bob, who’s really English, poses as Scottish through most of the film). Frankly, I’d have liked Luck a whole lot better if it had been done as a live-action film, with Nobelzada on screen as well as on the soundtrack (based on her imdb.com head shot she’d have been as right for the part visually as she is vocally), with little people playing the leprechauns and the animals supplied with CGI. As for John Debney’s score (the main reason I wanted to watch Luck in the first place), it’s a good, strong piece of functional film writing, delivering the goods expected for a children’s fantasy but not all that interesting or stirring as a listening experience on its own. And the original soundtrack album on Milan Records does not contain Madonna’s song “Lucky Star” – sung not by Madonna but by Eva Nobelzada with second vocalist Alana De Fonseca (that surprised me! I had assumed it was Madonna’s original record with Nobelzada singing along) – despite its importance in the overall film. The reissue on Intrada (the two-CD set I’m reviewing for Fanfare) does contain a short version (1:17) of it on track 13 of CD two.

The Gorge (Crooked Highway, Lit Entertainment Group, Skydance Media, Apple TV+, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Fortunately the second film my husband Charles and his mother Edi watched with me on our recent vacation, The Gorge (screened July 28) was considerably more to my taste than Luck. Instead of a fey children’s fantasy, The Gorge was a definitely adult action-adventure thriller about two professional hit people, Levi (Miles Teller) and Drasa (Anya Taylor-Joy), who are assigned to opposite ends of The Gorge to shoot and kill any of the monstrous creatures who live at the bottom of The Gorge and periodically try to escape and menace the normal humans above. During the first hour of this 127-minute movie the two are separated by The Gorge and can do no more than look at each other and call out boasts by phone, mostly centered around their previous sniper assignments. (The film opened with Drasa picking off a man getting out of a plane at such a long distance Levi would have assumed it was impossible.) Naturally Levi is getting the hots for Drasa, and the feelings appear to be mutual, because at the halfway mark Levi shoots a rappelling cord across The Gorge so he can traverse the distance and have an in-person physical date with her. When he reaches her side of The Gorge she at first tells him he stinks (literally!) and forces him to take a shower, then steals the clothes she left for him so he has to go to her place naked. Eventually they have dinner together and ultimately make love, though on the way back his cord breaks and he falls into The Gorge. She lowers herself into The Gorge and attempts to rescue him, but they come face-to-face with the monsters of The Gorge, whom we’ve already caught glimpses of and know they’re humanoid but with faces that look eaten away and overall spindly shapes that make them look like their bones have somehow come through at least partially to their outsides.

Our intrepid hit-people come across the remnants of a secret laboratory set up on the floor of The Gorge during World War II. Through a film canister hand-labeled “May God Forgive Us,” Levi and Drasa project the film and on it there’s a woman scientist giving a lecture about how the creatures of The Gorge came to be. [Spoiler alert!] It seems that the U.S., Great Britain and the Soviet Union, while they were allied during World War II, not only started a secret project in the U.S. to build the world’s first nuclear weapon, they also started a bioweapons project on the Gorge floor. The intent was to create unstoppable soldiers that couldn’t be killed and would just charge at the enemy without fear for their own lives. (Anyone who’d seen the 1942 PRC film The Mad Monster would have known this was a bad idea.) Only they did such a great job re-engineering human DNA that it fused with the DNA of particularly violent animals to create these bastard forms of life that Levi and Drasa had originally been assigned to kill whenever any of them tried to escape The Gorge and enter the world of living people. What’s more, the mutation that created the monsters is contagious. If you’re exposed to the monsters and you don’t fall victim to the mutation in five days, you’re home free; otherwise, you’ll become one of the monsters yourself. The second half of The Gorge, directed with suspenseful power by Scott Derrickson from a well thought-out script by Zach Dean, is nearly non-stop action as Our Heroes not only have to escape the monsters but also have to contend with the machinations of their nominal commanders, particularly Levi’s immediate supervisor Bartholomew (Sigourney Weaver, who must be awfully tired of these kinds of roles by now since the original Alien and its sequelae).

The film had already been reminding me a lot of Prizzi’s Honor – the late movie by John Huston starring his daughter Anjelica and Jack Nicholson as Mafia hit-people who meet and fall in love even though they work for rival factions in the Mob and they’ve been assigned to kill each other – and Charles thought of it too when Bartholomew gave Levi the order to kill Drasa. In the end Levi takes a big fall off a ledge into a river and we think he’s dead, while Drasa waits out the five days to see if she’s going to come down with the mutation and become a monster. Luckily Drasa escapes the disease and goes to her secret redoubt in the south of France, where she and Levi had talked about settling down once they escaped their commanding officers – and, sure enough, going for the happy ending of the Bogart-Bacall vehicle Dark Passage (1947) instead of the cynical, violent one of Prizzi’s Honor, Levi turns up there two months later. The Gorge is a neatly made fusion of action-adventure and horror, though the horror elements are played down enough that even people like me who don’t like modern-day horror films could enjoy it. It also benefits from great casting in the leads; Miles Teller has been in quite a few major movies lately but the only ones in which he made an impression on me are Divergent and its sequelae, and in those he was cast as a villain. And Anya Taylor-Joy is equally good, sufficiently androgynous that in her opening scene I thought she was a young man. Derrickson and Dean also neatly characterized the two leads by their different tastes in music, which work out quite the opposite from how you’d expect: Levi listens to classical music (specifically the Prelude from Johann Sebastian Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1, played by two different cellists (Jeff Taynor and Martynas Levickis – were we supposed to believe Levi had two different LP’s of it?) while Drasa loves 1970’s punk, particularly “Blitzkrieg Bop” by The Ramones, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ “Spitting Off the Edge of the World,” The Dead Weather’s “I Feel Love (Every Million Miles),” and Twisted Sister’s cover of the traditional Christmas carol “O Come, All Ye Faithful” – the sort of record that makes you ask yourself, “Is that … ?”