The Bucket List

I’ve been wanting to see The Bucket List for a while.  Not too long as I didn’t find out about it until after it came out.  The concept is great.  An odd couple of cancer patients get stuck in the same room at a hospital.  Eventually they start to get along, but then they get this idea to do a bucket list.  A list of things that they want to do before they kick the bucket.  So they go off on a grand adventure made possible by one of the guys being a billionaire.

Sounds brilliant, don’t it?

Unfortunately, something went wrong.  It’s an okay movie, but it doesn’t rise above.  It doesn’t meet its potential.  It is too good for that ‘fellow’.  Slight language warning on that link.

First problem is the characters.  They are too much.  Their main character traits are too exaggerated to make them truly likable.  At times I like them, but much of the time their traits make them obnoxious.  Despite this, Thomas, the billionaire’s attourney/aide, is awesome.  He’s great.  Perfect character.

Ed, the billionaire and Nicholson’s character, is a jerk.  He’s a “I have money, what else do I need” type billionaire.  A man who believes money can buy anything.  Now, having a lot of money can quite easily lead to such a person.  He loves the money.  But his jerk level was too high. Much too high.  I don’t care if their are people like that.  I just can’t like the fellow when he’s that big of a jerk.  His change of heart at the end doesn’t make him more likable.  He is still so pushy and such a jerk that his likableness is permanantly damaged.

Carter, the poor mechanic and Freeman’s character, is a know-it-all.  I don’t even have to mention why that’s annoying.  That trait is worse than being a jerk.  I think he was supposed to be a trivia buff.  Having lots of obscure knowledge.  That’s okay.  But he always knows the answer.  He always has just the right story.  He always knows everything.  He crosses the line from trivia buff to know-it-all.  And by golly, that’s obnoxious.  He’s an outright Mary Sue.

I’ve heard male versions of Mary Sue, Gary Gtu and Marty Stu being the big ones, but they lack the charm of the term Mary Sue.  Besides, why do we need different terms for different sexes?

Next issue was that of time allocation.  The movie spent way too much time ‘developing’ the characters in the hosipital setting before having them go on their grand adventure.   They only had 100 minutes.  The time should have been spent more on the adventure.

The initial character developement done in the hospital took too long.  They did not need to spend half the movie establishing that Carter was a know-it-all with ‘faith’ and Ed was a materialist and a jerk.  The real character developement happened on and after the trip.

The movie should have begun thus: introduce our characters and the fact that they are sick, give a little time (1 or 2 short scenes) with them in the hospital together, montage, introduce the bucket list, give the characters the news that they have only months to live, start journey.  They could have done this in 10-15 minutes tops.

My final, and largest, complaint is that of ‘faith’.  Carter talks about ‘faith’ at one point and I get the feeling that they were trying to give a message about the importance of ‘faith’.  The problem lies in that it was a generic, undefined ‘faith’.  I hate undefined ‘faith’.  It’s meaningless garbage.  If you want to talk faith talk specifics.  Give me Buddhist, Muslim, druidistic, or something else specific before you feed me this undefined dreck.

But then, it’s a generic American movie for generic American people so why shouldn’t it have generic American faith?

I didn’t really enjoy it.  It was okay.  The problem that prevented me from enjoying it was the horrid flaws that were preventing it from being good.  Flaws that could have very easily been fixed.  It’s like they didn’t even try.

With a bit of effort, I think it could even have been very good.

Cursive

First off, I have my third interview (second on-site) with DSSI on the 24th.  That should be the last and about a week later I should be hearing as to whether or not I get the job.  I also got my acceptance letter from ABC of Wisconsin, so I can go look for possible sponsors for a plumping apprenticeship.

Job possibilities opening up!

Second, and the real reason for this post, is to complain about cursive.

Last week at the reunion there was a brief discussion about cursive.  A couple of folk believed cursive to be very, very important.  The rest of us were divided between not really caring and thinking cursive was a waste.

I think it’s a waste.

It’s supposed to be faster, but that is unproven.  The writing form that a person uses the most is the form that they write fastest with and people who use cursive are not as a group any faster than people who use print as a group. Given that cursive was just how you wrote back in the day, this would explain how this idea of cursive being faster originated.  Any correspondence more formal than casual was expected to be written in cursive.  Cursive also had the advantage of being more legible when paper was saved by writing on top of other writing at a 90º angle.  Folk who have read Little House will know what I’m taking about.  Since written correspondence required cursive that is just what people used.

The claim of speed is also nonsense when thought about logically.  Look at the area covered by the pen or pencil when making a letter in either type.  They are about the same.  Each form has advantages and disadvantages in regards to some specific letters.  Print involves lifting the pen while cursive kind of does not.  However, the lifting required by print is minuscule and can be performed at the same time as the horizontal movement is being made without decreasing horizontal speed.  This also means that cursive has more ‘noise’.  Finally, cursive still requires dotting Is and crossing Ts (and Xs and anything else I may have forgotten) which is done at the end of a word/sentence/paragraph.  That requires going back over what has already been done while in print the crossing and dotting can be done as the letter is being formed initially.

Another issue is legibility.  Cursive letters are less distinct than print.  It’s very easy for slight slips of the pen to create an entirely different letter from the one intended.  Extremely bad print handwriting is about as legible as poor cursive and even the best cursive (i.e. cursive fonts on computers) still pale in legibility before decent print.  Why do you think every official form ever requires people to print everything except the signature?  And even the signature is treated more as a personal ‘mark’ than actual writing.  People still have to print their names.

Cursive is also claimed to be more beautiful than print.  That’s bullock.  There’s nothing about cursive that is fundamentally prettier than print.  It’s just that everyone is told that cursive is pretty thus it is perceived as pretty.  It’s all subjective.  Y’know, beauty is in the eye of the beholder and all.

Cursive’s functional use has been supplanted by type and the cheapness of paper.  No one wants to sit and decipher a poorly written letter, so we use typewriterscomputers to write our letters.  Professional correspondence requires letters be typed.  We don’t need to write on top of our writing because a sheet of paper is so cheap.  The only thing left for cursive in the future is signatures.  Right now there’s still the matter of being able to read cursive that other folk still insist on using.

Or those comments in picture albums.