A Little Reflection

You know it's not very often that a movie can make me laugh till I cry and cry from sadness all in the span of just a few minutes. It's also rare that a movie makes me both laugh one minute and cry the next from opening title to closing credits. The Bucket List is one of those rare movies!

The concept is simple and seems to be one of those movies where you walk in knowing exactly what will happen, no surprises. The two leading roles are played by two of my favorite actors and since they've never done a movie together before I thought it was a perfect opportunity to see a little film history made. I'm also a big fan of one of the supporting actors, Sean Hayes, mostly from his days on Will and Grace as the hysterical bad actor Jack McFarland.

The movie started off as expected, with both main characters finding their way to the hospital stricken with cancer they soon learn is terminal. The two men are from opposite worlds and spend the first part of the movie disliking the other until eventually a friendship forms. Typical Hollywood stuff so far. The unlikely room mates from hell forming an unbreakable bond as they are forced to live together for weeks on end in close quarters and eventually learn about each other and what lies beneath the skin. The film is even predictable up to the point that both are released from the hospital, on the same day I might add ( a little Hollywood magic helping both men recover from their afflictions and become "symptom free" in the same timeline).

Rather than simply returning to their homes and lives they go off in search of adventure with the intent to see the world before they 'kick the bucket' each crossing things off their master to-do list as they go. The adventure takes them around the world and creates some scenes between the two actors that had the entire theatre laughing till they cried, which happened to be one of the items on the list for the two onscreen characters. It's a feel good movie where the audience forgets why these two characters are off on their little adventure, until ...

As expected with about 20 minutes left of the movie the ending begins to take shape, exactly as we all knew it would. Reality is that terminal cancer patients do in fact die, we knew this when we bought our tickets to the show. We all sat down in our cushy reclining seats knowing that the ending of the movie had to result in at least one of the two main characters 'kicking-the-bucket'. I knew it was only a movie, that these were not real people, and that my ticket to the show included watching at least one of them, if not both die. So why was I in tears?

I remember parts of the ending but not the entire thing. Rather than watching what was happening on the screen in front of me I spent the time thinking about how little time we really get here on this planet and of that time home much of it we waste on trivial things. I began revising my own personal 'bucket-list' in my head and was quite pleased when I realized that some of the top items on it I have already accomplished. I guess it's time to revamp those goals and see if the new ones are attainable as well.