Drink: Coors Light power hour
For those of you that don't know, a Power Hour is when you take a shot of beer every minute for an hour. I calculated it in my head and figured out that an entire power hour would only be 5 beers. True, not a small amount of drinking in an hour, but let's be honest, nothing I haven't done before without even knowing it. By Minute 21, I knew I was in trouble. There was something about the marking of each passing minute with the celebratory shooting of alcohol that slipped each minute of my life straight down my throat, into my stomach and towards my rectum that made me start to panic and worry about my 401k and my inevitable trek towards my 40th birthday and the fact that I could slip on some ice during this endless winter and I haven't signed up for Obamacare yet.
I now realize that this was the perfect frame of mind in which to watch Nebraska. A slow moving film that is slow in the way that the river you are floating on with a 30 pack of beer in one of those floating cooler things is slow. You don't mind.
The fact that the movie was shot in black and white usually tells me that the movie was found to be pretty lame in the editing studio and the production team was too tired to fix anything and thought the lack of color would draw some of the attention away from how lame the plot line was. When I think back through my Coors infested short term memory, however, I can't really imagine this movie being filmed any other way. I would like to say that the stark beauty of the struggle of life can only be truly captured without color, but let's be honest. Old people and the Great Plains just look better in black and white.
I watched it with 2 other people and we all had our own interpretations of the family. We hated the mom, liked the mom, hated the son, understood the son, rooted for the dad. All for different reasons. It seemed that each person filtered the characters through their experiences with their own families, recognized someone and felt a flicker of... annoyance? Guilt? Love? Who knows. I will say that it ended up as an argument about who had the craziest cousins. I'm happy, or sad, to report that I lost.
As I sat sank down in the couch with another Coors wedged in between the cushions, I saw my mom in the mom, my dad in the dad, myself in the son trying to fix everything. I had a thousand regrets, a thousand good memories, and one or two resolutions to be a better person, a better son, a better brother.
I just hope I can remember that in the morning.
