BEFORE: It's a bit funny to me - but only to me - that Kathleen Turner was in the previous film and Annette Bening is in this next one. I've already told the story here about how earlier this year I managed a screening of "Nyad" while Ms. Bening was in contention for the Oscar, and after the screening she was interviewed live on stage by Ms. Turner. I had to use the theater's handicapped elevator to bring them both to the stage that night, as one had a broken foot and so they couldn't walk up the steps to the stage. Hey, I'm there to help out any way I can.
However, by watching this film tonight I'm kind of stranding the film "NYAD", I can connect to it via Annette Bening, but then I've got nowhere to go after that, it doesn't connect to anything else. So I'll just have to wait for another opportunity to watch that one.
Michael McKean carries over from "Beautiful".
THE PLOT: Based on the true story about long-married couple Jerry and Marge Selbee, who win the lottery and use the money to revive their small town.
AFTER: Sometimes you just have that relevatory "A-HA" moment, I guess - and some people are just better at statistics and systems and such, which is how Jerry Selbee figured out a way to game the lottery and virtually guarantee a winning investment, not by hitting the jackpot but by buying enough tickets to have three or four numbers right enough times. You could say something similar happened to me when I finally figured out the best methods to link movies.
Years ago, when my father's family wanted to give out presents at Christmas, they used a system where instead of buying small gifts for everyone, each family member would be assigned ONE person to buy a larger gift for - or you could abstain from the process, but if you wanted to receive a gift, you had to buy someone else a gift. During a summer cookout or similar event the names would be drawn, but ultimately they found that the process never created one giant circle, ultimately there would be smaller circles that formed, like Uncle Leo would give a gift to Cousin Paul, Paul would draw the name of my mother, and she'd be assigned to give a gift to Uncle Leo. Great, that was fun, but who goes next?
One day while thinking about it I realized that there was a way to draw the names and form one continuous circle, so the gift-giving would go all the way around the room in a giant chain. All they had to do when they assigned the recipients to the givers was put the names on bits of paper in a bowl, and then draw name #1, that person would give a gift to name #2, then the next draw would be to determine who name #2 would give a gift to. They were using two bowls, that was the problem, so I couldn't wait for the next family party to tell me aunt that I'd figured out the best way to assign the recipients to the givers, they just had to draw from ONE bowl, and build the chain in succession, instead of going down a list and assigning the names that way. But I came up with it too late, because the next year the family decided to go with a "Yankee Swap" format, where we'd draw numbers and everyone would bring a good wrapped gift, and we'd all draw in order and then you could either keep the gift you unwrapped or force a trade with someone who picked before you. Damn, I came up with the solution just a little too late.
In a similar way, Jerry's brain calculated that in this Winfall lottery system, where if nobody won the jackpot in a particular week then they would just increase the payouts to the lower winning tiers the next week - tickets with three or four correct numbers would be worth more on the "rollover" weeks. So with some quick math, he determined that if someone bought enough tickets to have a substantial number of those smaller payouts, mathematically there should be enough smaller payouts to be bigger than the cost of all the tickets purchased. The lottery might have been aware of this little loophole, because they were doing nothing to close it, or perhaps they were clueless and just under obligation to give away a certain amount of money.
After essentially gambling with some of his retirement money, Jerry proves that he can turn a profit, and estimates that the winnings would also increase if the amount of tickets purchased would also increase. So he confesses to his wife and they start making money - and this was totally legal, there's nothing wrong with buying more tickets to put the odds in your favor, and in fact professional lottery players can also deduct the non-winning tickets, or keep them as proof in case they should get audited. But then a problem pops up, the state of Michigan decides to cancel the Winfall lotto format, to keep winning Jerry and Marge would need to make frequent road trips to Massachusetts on the rollover weeks, stay in a hotel, spend a few days finding the winning tickets in the pile they bought, etc.
We've known all along that the more you play the lottery, the greater the chance of winning, and if you could somehow cover all of the possible combinations of numbers with your tickets, well then you'd be assured of a jackpot. But that's why they have so many numbers to choose from, because it would be impossible to buy all those tickets within a week's time to guarantee a jackpot. But Jerry and Marge didn't need a jackpot, they just needed enough small wins to keep doubling their investments - and eventually they got the idea to form a business out of it, and get other people involved in order to make millions for their small town, revitalize the downtown area and maybe rebuild the concert stage and resurrect the JazzFest.
So they found a helpful convenience-store owner, just over the Massachusetts border probably, who would let them use his machine around the clock to purchase and print out tickets. What could POSSIBLY go wrong, besides the fact that the store owners probably aren't supposed to let the customers run the machine 24/7? Well, a couple of college students at Harvard did a thesis on the odds of winning the lottery and spotted the same flaw, so they started up a similar investment group, got a bunch of college kids with free time to fill out the stacks and stacks of betting slips, and now two competing squads were buying up tickets on the same weeks, and that also changed the odds of winning for everyone.
Ultimately this true story also changed the way that lotteries work, for starters the game that both groups played was terminated when the loophole was exposed, and also the lotteries did away with rollover weeks and also started posting the exact amount of the jackpot in real time, which ultimately led to that mania that occurs whenever the PowerBall or MegaMillions jackpot gets close to a billion these days. We had that happen here in NY about a month ago, and yeah, I bought tickets for the first time in a long time, and it was nice to think for a few days that I had a non-zero chance of winning a billion, but then inevitably my numbers didn't come up and I had to come crashing back down to real life. What's a billion, anyway? If the IRS takes half the money right off the bat, you're down to 500 million, and then you have to report the interest, plus suddenly everyone you know will come to you with a business proposal or with their hand out, so really, is it worth it? That's assuming you were the only jackpot winner, you might have to share that 500 million with four other people, and really, 100 million doesn't buy what it used to. JK.
They don't get into too many of the finer details here about how it was done, but I'm guessing that both betting groups had to have some system for what numbers they played, because they couldn't just do Quick Picks, that maybe wouldn't produce the wide spread of number combinations that they needed to cover. But we see the Harvard group passing out the stacks of empty slips to students and saying, "OK, fill these out." I'm thinking it had to be just a little more organized than that, just picking random numbers might not be enough, and people maybe couldn't be trusted to do this right unless there was some order to it all. Also, NITPICK POINT they really only had to do that once, because you can re-use the same filled-out slips again and again, if you take good care of the slips.
This was a very good slice-of-life film, rooting for the people who won't go quietly into retirement is always a safe bet, this older couple just wasn't prepared for the down-time, and without fishing or gardening to fall back on, it's nice to see them go out and have a big adventure. I have to call NITPICK #2 on the driving distance from Evart, Michigan to western Massachusetts, my phone's map says making that in 10 hours would be impossible, it's got to be at least 12 hours, not including breaks.
Also starring Bryan Cranston (last seen in "Asteroid City"), Annette Bening (last seen in "Death on the Nile"), Rainn Wilson (last seen in "Weird: The Al Yankovic Story"), Larry Wilmore (last seen in "The Laundromat"), Ann Harada (last seen in "Disenchanted"), Jake McDorman (last seen in "Lady Bird"), Anna Camp (last seen in "Pitch Perfect 3"), Devyn McDowell (last seen in "Annette"), Ana Cruz Kayne (last seen in "Little Women"), Colton Whitfield, Jackson Whitfield, Uly Schlesinger, Cheech Manohar, Tracie Thoms (last seen in "Rent"), Lindsay Rootare, Don Stallings (last seen in "Where the Crawdads Sing"), Subhash Mandal, K.D. O'Hair, Kurt Yue (last seen in "Greenland"), Joe Pistone, Michael Scialabba (last seen in "Let's Be Cops"), Kenny Alfonso (last seen in "No Good Deed"), Evan Bergman, Robert Pralgo (last seen in "Term Life"), Rhoda Griffis (last seen in "The Program"), Tordy Clark, Lindsey Moser (last seen in "The Best of Enemies"), Cameron Andrew Howell, Tori Kelly (last heard in "Sing 2").
RATING: 7 out of 10 boxes of cereal
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