Word: bucket
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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From the Blue Ridge Mountains of Pennsylvania to the Bay Area farmland of California, small mom-and-pop distilleries have begun making liquor out of all kinds of fruits and grains. They account for a drop in the bucket of the $58 billion spirits industry (a brand like Smirnoff outsells the combined annual production of these small distilleries in a single week), but their liquors often are distinctive in taste, are creatively bottled and fit the trend for locally produced foods. "The microdistilling industry is exactly where the microbrew industry was 20 years ago," says Bill Owens, a brewmaster...
...Bucket List we learn that, for a lower-middle-class fellow like Carter, there's no death sentence that can't be ameliorated by running into a wealthy guy ready to spend millions of dollars on a Last Holiday. (The 1950 Alec Guinness film of that title, remade in 2006 with Queen Latifah, is one of many precursors to this fantasyland scenario.) The specific lesson to be taken from this doesn't have much practical application, unless the dying start demanding a double room with a billionaire when they check in for their inoperable cancer surgery. But this movie exists...
...each member of this two-man Over-the-Hill gang makes a list of things to do before kicking the bucket. Edward wants a few kicks: skydiving, tattoo, drag-racing. Carter has a loftier agenda: "Laugh until I cry." (That one kicks in around minute 86.) "Help a complete stranger." (Guess who?) "Witness something truly majestic." (Reiner clearly wants audiences leaving his movie to believe that's what they've just done.) They go to France for a great meal, Africa for a safari, Egypt for the Pyramids, India for the Taj Mahal, Nepal to scale Mount Everest. Carter...
...Savages, The Bucket List: these are fairy tales for the dying and their survivors. The Reiner movie gets some honest laughs when physical agony makes its heroes behave less than heroically - "Somewhere," Edward mutters during one lightning blast of pain, "some lucky guy's havin' a heart attack" - but its prescription is essentially whimsical: a Percocet disguised as a miracle cure to defeat the fear of death...
...chance it will be discovered on DVD by its natural audience: the old folks who don't go to movie theaters but could use a sweet fable to take them into the long night at home. That's the one wish that might be granted on The Bucket List's own bucket list...