Don’t be alarmed if you’ve the sense that you’re alone in being stalked — to the local multiplex beside the four-lane, inside the movie rental store on the corner, or even by your mailbox to retrieve your latest Netflix DVD. You're not — alone, that is. The watchers are being watched. By Morgan Freeman. The cinematic truth-seeker has cornered the market on a unique and tiresome brand of fantastical theatrical omnipresence. Whether it’s a lady pugilist, a war of the worlds, or arctic penguins, it appears everyone’s lives are being surreptitiously observed and chronicled, from an angelically cosmic place high up above, by the trustworthy, mortal-teethed (periodontal whitener, anyone? ) veteran actor. It’s sensible —even incumbent upon us— to conclude that director Rob Reiner’s (Rumour Has It..., 2005) The Bucket List is just another plot in Freeman’s clandestine attempt at world narrator-domination. Farfetched, you say. If Freeman’s telling movie-ubiquitousness makes me, and quite possibly, you, feel like Jim Carrey's Truman Burbank in The Truman Show (1998), then maybe we’re really not alone.
Freeman is Carter Chambers, a sage old auto mechanic —and the world’s greatest amateur Jeopardy! player— that’s a father to three grown children and faithfully married for 45 years. He’s been diagnosed with terminal cancer. Chambers is hospitalized, and medical policy requires two beds to a room. Billionaire Edward Cole (Jack Nicholson), also suffering from terminal cancer, is his clinical roommate. Neither is pleased with having to acquaint themselves. Given that Cole is the hospital owner-magnate that bullheadedly created the two-bed policy (ironic, right?), nothing PC can be done to circumvent said circumstances.
Cooped up together, the couple of old coots recalcitrantly make small talk before the requisite emotional flood-gates open as they share their cliché-ridden philosophies about life and death. Regrets, mistakes, bad choices, missed opportunities, strained relations, etc., all emerge from the two men, who are still strangers. When they learn they have little longer to live than the movie they're starring in, Chambers covertly composes his “Bucket List”, a symbolic inventory of everything a person wants to experience before they kick the… er, croak. You get the idea.
When Cole accidentally-on-purpose finds Chambers’ wish catalog, he persuades the grandfather that the two of them should traverse the world, money being disposable, in "Bucket List" fulfillment. Apparently, donating the tycoon's financial empire to noble civic causes in an effort to apply his legacy toward the "greater good," is self-aggrandizingly, not in the cards.
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