“Lucky” DVD Review
Doesn’t matter how impossible the odds are – the chances of actually hitting a Powerball jackpot are just 1 in almost 200 million – almost everyone dreams of winning the lottery. Who hasn’t found themselves daydreaming of an answer to the question, “What would I do with all that money?”
Synopsis
Directed by Jeffery Blitz (Spellbound), LUCKY offers a glimpse into the reality behind the fantasy of lottery winners. They come from an amazing range of backgrounds, but all of their lives are radically transformed by the same thing – an enormous lottery jackpot. With prize money reaching into the hundreds of millions, some lives are changed for the better, some for the worse. And together, their stories show us what happens when the fantasy turns real. Do we become what we dreamed we would or what, deep down, we really are?
It’s always something you dream about, but what if you really did end up winning multi-millions of dollars. Just by writing that sentence I went off into a dream world for a few minutes, thinking about what I’d do with my winnings and then thoughts immediately drifted to the inevitable many who would come out of the woodwork, demanding money for whatever reason. It’s a not uncommon issue among lottery winners and, as this documentary shows, it’s also not all fun and games after winning the lottery either. It brings with it its own set of headaches and some wish they had never won it at all.
As the documentary attempts to show it seems the amount you win equates to the amount of the headache, though there are outliers in both regions. Some people change drastically, for better or worse, and others stay entirely the same. It’s an interesting look at this phenomenon as it’s something that few have experienced, yet they’re thrown into the spotlight so immediately after winning that they can’t help but try to shy away from it at first. It doesn’t hurt that Lost popularized the idea of cursed winnings, but that kind of notion has been around for decades prior regardless; but I can definitely see that show as being a reason for the sudden production of this film.
It’s an interesting psychological study as well as a character study, since both undergo such drastic changes after a big win. The documentary is brief but covers a wide enough territory that you don’t ever spend too much time on any given winner. Overall it’s not a highly educational documentary like most of docuramafilm’s other releases, but it’s still a Recommended one if only to fulfill the voyeuristic desire we have when it comes to looking at the wealth of others.
The DVD
New Video/docuramafilms brings Lucky to DVD in a standard amaray DVD case. Nothing overly special about the presentation of the documentary here—no fancy exterior cardboard slipcase and the cover itself looks rather simplistic. Video and audio is a solid presentation overall and about what you’d expect from a documentary. As can be expected from a documentary the video is in 1.85:1 and the audio is a simple stereo mix with the majority of the track focused in the front channels. Extras include:
Deleted Scenes
Filmmaker Biography
The extra scenes are definitely worth watching if you enjoyed the film; sadly there aren’t many of them, but it’s not exactly a documentary that needs much more to it. Worth a Rental.
Lucky arrives on DVD on April 26th.