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Last Updated: Jan 2nd, 2008 - 09:33:35
The Bucket List - Review
By Cynthia Kirkeby
Dec 18, 2007, 18:55 PST
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| © Rob Reiner Films 2007 |
The Bucket List
Recommended
Jack Nicholson (Edward Cole) and Morgan Freeman (Carter Chambers) are probably more themselves in the Bucket List than in any other films they have done through the years. Their collaboration with Rob Reiner brings us a film that touches all of us, who are all too aware of our mortality as we see the years slipping past.
Both actors shine in their own ways with performances that seem so true to life that you can't help but believe these two men met with so little in common and yet became such great friends. Jack Nicholson is full of mischief as usual, and Morgan Freeman seems as mellow as a Buddhist monk. Such a funny pairing works wonderfully. Having Freeman and Nicholson together in a film is long overdue.
As you watch them visiting locations and jumping out of planes, there were moments when something in the images seemed a little off. Welcome to the continuing world of CGI. Having watched film of my sister leaping from a perfectly good plane, this section of the movie jumped out at me. It was in part perfect visually, but then watching the faces of the two actors everything was wrong. The wind was not distorting them near as much as it should. Later, I discovered that although the film of the jump was real, both of the actors' faces were computer overlaid onto the bodies of the actual pair that did the jump. Sneaky....They're getting more and more sneaky....
Something that wasn't created by special effects was Jack Nicholson's puffy face in the hospital scenes. Those scenes were shot last, and they came after Jack was taken to the hospital for some emergency adenoid surgery. As it turns out, some of the dialog in the film was created from his experience in the hospital, which was his first time in surgery. Bringing his life into film is undoubtedly what makes Jack Nicholson one of the greats.
What is computer generated and what is real, doesn't really matter that much in this film. What matters is the relationships and the stories they tell. What matters is the way we each relate those stories to our own family histories. In the film Carter Chambers (Morgan Freeman) reminisces that his wife said that Edward Cole (Jack Nicholson) left with a stranger and brought her back her husband. There are probably many of us who feel someone close was becoming a stranger and slipping away. What a gift it would be to reconnect.
My sisters and I have our Bucket Lists of sorts. We each have notebooks with many of the places in the world we would each like to visit or have visited through the years. Having watched the film, The Bucket List, I think it's time to take a new look at my old list and perhaps add a few things to it.
In a Q and A after the screening, Rob Reiner mentioned that we all take a look at things a little differently as we start getting further up in years, and he is very right. Even though I'm only 50, and my family tends to be long-lived, it seems more important to accomplish certain things now then they did before.
The Bucket List gets a high recommendation from me. Not because it's an earth-shaking film, it's not,but because it is one that will make you think, smile, cry, and possibly remember someone close to you that you've lost and remind you of the things you did together. What more can you ask for?
© Copyright 2007 by Classbrain.com
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