Venue: Cine 3, Ster-Kinekor
          Maerua Mall
Film: THE BUCKET LIST
Director: Rob Reiner
Screenplay: Justin Zackham
Players: Jack Nicholson, Morgan Freeman, Beverley Todd, Rob Morrow, Sean Hayes.
Genre: adventure; drama; comedy
Rating: ***
For Carter Chambers, the meaning of life is embedded in the notion that “You measure yourself by the people who measure themselves by you.” This is circuitous reasoning but exemplifies an entirely balanced approach to life. There is Carter, enduring chemo treatment in a Cole Hospital, while surrounded by his loving family comprising wife, Virginia, two sons and a daughter.

Though his life was unremarkable as a garage mechanic, his sons are both qualified professionals: one as a tax attorney and the other an engineer. He is surrounded by love and family bonds: he can indulge a few quirks, like showing off his gargantuan general knowledge by yelling correct answers at a TV screen during quiz shows.
His fellow cancer victim is the owner of the hospital, one of a chain of such hospitals, Edward Cole. He is a billionaire, peremptory and authoritarian, selfish and emotionally shallow, even underdeveloped. He is humorous, though, as his first lines to his co-habitant reveal: “As something of a Public Health expert, I believe more people die from visitors than diseases.” Carter’s wife has just left the room, which prompts the remark; Carter has been lying like a dead thing but delivers his sophistry with aplomb and animation. His only visitor is his Personal Assistant, Thomas, whose real name is Matthew but Cole finds this appellative too biblical.
Initially, the two men find each other abrasive: Cole refers to Carter as a “zombie” and demands his own room. Ironically, his PR has worked extremely hard to standardize a 2-bed room approach in his hospitals, justified by the policy that “We run hospitals not health spas”.
Proximity and the witnessing of each other’s suffering invariably draws the two men closer to each other and a kind of liking, born of tolerance, slowly develops. Cole confesses that he has no children on account of “I never stayed married long enough,” to which Carter quips, “Don’t worry; I’ve been married long enough for both of us.”  In the worst moments of the aftermath of chemotherapy, Cole drawls, “Somewhere, some lucky guy is having a heart attack.”