Loren-Paul Caplin's ironically titled "The Lucky Ones" is a real discovery, an ambitious work of much texture, density and scope in which a young reporter (Ivan Martin) is caught up in a sleazy dolce vita as a reporter for FAME-TV, a cheesy cable channel, for which he endlessly pursues celebrities, mainly C-level. Yet Martin's Lorenzo has higher aspirations, and the film propels him to a stunningly orchestrated moment of truth.
 

FILM THREAT, Eric Campos (May 2005)

* * * (three stars)

Something has gone terribly wrong in the life of Lorenzo as interviewer has become the subject. Through brief flashbacks, we’re shown what looks to be an aftermath of a shooting due to an acquaintance of Lorenzo doing his best Mr. Orange backseat “I’m gonna die” song and dance. And so, taking his time in front of the camera for once, Lorenzo pulls us back into the events that led to this bloody misadventure.

Lorenzo is a hotshot tabloid journalist whose feeling the burn from his own bullshit so he tries to validate himself by doing something more meaningful, namely doing a piece called “The Lucky Ones”, a video study of those who’ve stumbled upon great and often unexpected fortune. But the seedy tabloid journalist inside Lorenzo refuses to release his hold on him and thus leads him to the aforementioned event that, in the end, may be the one thing powerful enough to make him change his ways.

“The Lucky Ones” takes you on a tour through the gutters of the rich and famous, sticking your nose in the filth to make sure you get a good whiff. Think what you may of these people as you watch the film, and then turn that disgust onto the general public, maybe even yourself, as they’re the ones obsessed with this culture of fame that breeds people like Lorenzo who is only too happy to bring it to them, heaped and steaming, sacrificing their own souls to do so.
 

GRASSROOTS CINEMA (May 2005)
Recipient of the Best Dramatic Feature
"The Lucky Ones"

Dallas Roberts, Best Supporting Actor in a Feature, The Lucky Ones

The Lucky Ones offers a dark, intelligent commentary on our obsession with fame that delves intothe bleak world of celebrity and deconstructs it with a bold, raw style and structure. Director/writerLoren-Paul Caplin composes an original, stark, cerebral thriller as he tracks a fringe celebrity-reporter's quest for meaning in what amounts to a mythic journey of self discovery. This self assured debut feature updates while it riffs on Fellini's La Dolce Vita set against contemporary New York City. With over 50 locations, numerous characters and an amazing visual palette this is clearly one of the most ambitious mini DV films I've ever seen.

Tom Arola, Grassroots Cinema
 

Review of “The Lucky Ones” for Madyradio.com (June 2004)
By Elisabeth Stevens

The desire for self-integration and the painful, persistent need to unify the sensual and the spiritual are themes that animate “The Lucky Ones”, a fascinating mythic film shown at the 2004 Sarasota Film Festival.

A low budget production shot in 29 days at more than 58 locations in and around Manhattan, “The Lucky Ones” is writer/director Loren-Paul Caplin’s intensely personal vision of what amounts to a Jungian journey of self discovery.  Caplin’s hero and narrator is Lorenzo, a schlock reporter of celebrity peccadilloes for FAME-TV who is “addicted to excitement.”

Lorenzo is played by Ivan Martin, an actor whose surprising resemblance to the sensuous, dark eyed youth depicted by the Italian Renaissance painter Caravaggio in masterpieces such as “Bacchus” augments his effectiveness.  Lorenzo is inexorably involved in a life style that has “few personal boundaries.”

As the action begins, Lorenzo and his camera crew interview Walter Strate, a man who purportedly plans to end his life with dignity in a double suicide with his wife of fifty years.   Later, Lorenzo visits his father, a Yoga teacher who, his son feels, “was always busy.”  Then Lorenzo films a gymnastics trainer who has just won the lottery, and afterwards spends time with a less-than-successful artist who considers himself “lucky” because self confidence has enabled him to paint for thirty years in New York.

Apart from the persistent painter, these father figures in vignette have little to recommend them beyond oddball notoriety. They also disillusion.  Strate “changes his mind” after his wife’s death and moves in with another woman.  Lorenzo’s real father finagles his way into his son’s apartment one night with a girlfriend—and Lorenzo has to sleep in the park. His father (Ronald Guttman) also indifferently refuses to answer the phone when Lorenzo is having a rough time.

Significantly, the film offers no satisfactory mother figures except perhaps Rebecca, (Toby Poser) the married co-worker who encounters Lorenzo with her baby after their one night stand—and rejects him. (The paucity of “good mother” figures in this and innumerable contemporary dramas is a matter worth contemplating.)  Finally too, Lorenzo’s hard boiled female boss at FAME-TV is a harridan worthy of John Waters.

Even more important to Lorenzo’s life than cardboard parental stand ins are his friend Edison (Dallas Roberts), the drugged out son of a banking magnate, and  Bhota (Walker Richards), the Nigerian cab driver who appears (conveniently but not always believably) at significant junctures.  The self-destructive Edison, who fears the responsibility of the big job he may inherit, can be viewed as an aspect of Lorenzo himself.  Similarly, the honest and hard working Bhota, a family man, seems to function as Lorenzo’s own protective, Jungian shadow.

At the film’s climax, Lorenzo is forced to choose between the urgent demands of Edison and the immediate welfare of Bhota, and his choice symbolically determines the direction of his life.  His dream-like, yes, nightmarish, odyssey ends ambiguously.

In the course of the narrative, Lorenzo has sought enlightenment beyond his daily encounters by visiting a church, a synagogue and a guru offering unseen but vociferous “animal spirit guides.” Lorenzo, in his own words, has “embraced everything. “

Does “everything” suffice?   Or are the seductive, glossy, and addictive alternatives suggested merely superficial, self-indulgent, and evanescent?  Whatever viewers may decide, this is a film in which the search is more important than the answers.  That is why the preponderance of uncertain, shadow-dominated night shots is so important, so integral.  It is also why the extremely varied musical background—from Pop to choral—seems so right. One of the movie’s best moments, perhaps, is when, rising above the refuse of a midnight Manhattan alley, we hear the hoarse, voice of a ancient street singer repeating:  “Jesus’ love never fails me, Jesus’ love never fails me.”

Elisabeth Stevens is a fiction writer (Fire & Water, In Foreign Parts) and former art and architecture critic of The Baltimore Sun and art critic of The Wall Street Journal, The Trenton Times, and The Washington Post