In 2000 Bob Dylan won an Oscar for “Things Have Changed”, the song he contributed to Curtis Hanson’s film, Wonder Boys. Hanson was on a nice little run there for a while. Having come out of the thriller genre in the 1990s (Bad Influence, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle), he transitioned to a higher class of film in 1997 with L.A. Confidential (still a thriller, but a high end one) and then moved to Wonder Boys (not much of a thriller, only the dog gets shot). He followed that with the wonderful 8 Mile (for which Eminem deserved an Oscar nod himself), giving him three really good films in a row. Then he did In Her Shoes, a Cameron Diaz star vehicle, and it all seems to have fallen apart. In 2007 he did Lucky You, starring Eric Bana as a professional gambler, Drew Barrymore as the (strangely brunette) woman who loves him, and Robert Duvall as his estranged father. Now, I haven’t seen Lucky You, but I saw the last ten seconds of it while trying to find a video of Dylan’s contribution to the film, “Huck’s Song” (which plays over the closing credits). Watch the first ten seconds of this clip and then tell me that you’d actually watch this movie:

So no Lucky You for lucky me. The song itself is perfectly fine. It’s certainly no “Things Have Changed”, but it recalls the type of contributions that Dylan had more recently made to Gods and Generals and to North Country. It’s a nice ballad, with some nice slide guitar, but it doesn’t really have a chorus or a hook, and so it is not entirely memorable.

The song itself will be collected on Bootleg Series v8 in 2008 so you don’t have to buy the Lucky You soundtrack. Here’s a fan-made video that has better sound quality than the clip up top:

PS. I guarantee that Lucky You ends with Eric Bana getting rivered to finish second in a huge poker tournament, but that’s ok with him because he wins the love of a good woman and restores his relationship with his dad, which is all that matters. What do I win if that’s correct?