Day Eight of our nine-day road trip continue in Cleveland due southeast from the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in the kind of neighborhood that wouldn’t normally attract tourists if there weren’t some kind of major draw. As fate would have it, in 1938 a pair of young men named Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster would put their heads together to create an intellectual property (years before the term became commonplace and meaningful) that would bend pop culture into new shapes and change the course of entertainment history.
Alexander Payne’s new film Nebraska perfectly replicates that forlorn Midwest sensation of being trapped in rooms with hordes of impressionable, elderly relatives all living on the same slow-motion wavelength, visiting and reminiscing and comparing their amnesia levels and enjoying life’s remaining minutes at the speed of molasses, except when they’re jumping to conclusions at hyperspeed. When that happens to me, I put on a brave front while suppressing the desperate urge to crawl out of my skin. With SNL’s Will Forte acting as my proxy and reenacting my childhood family vacations so vividly, I’m surprised I didn’t convulse in my seat with flashbacks.
Older fans of Matthew McConaughey’s spate of ’90s romantic comedies may be in for a shock when they walk into Dallas Buyers Club and see him playing Christian Bale’s character from The Machinist. He and costar Jared Leto (both radically transformed and up for Oscars this year) underwent severe weight loss for their roles in this based-on-a-true-story underdog drama that’s one part can’t-we-all-just-get-along and four parts sticking-it-to-The-MAN.
Midlife Crisis Crossover! 