As a rural Nebraska native...

Yep. My viewpoint was confirmed again this past weekend.
This movie is an exaggeration. There's nothing wrong with that. I don't get why we can't just admit that it's an exaggeration. Yes, there are dying towns. Yes, there are towns with more old folks than young folks. This movie exaggerates them.

Liberalism is a mental illness, and it's the only one that's contagious.

There just might be a different bar in town that the "younger" patrons prefer. Crazy, right?

Actually I heard the worst things about my relatives at their graves, a lot like that. It's sort of like respecting their humanity by admitting their fault.

Same here, Kambo. I went to my father's hometown cemetery with my aunt and she told one interesting story after another while pointing to graves. One that particularly stuck with me was one about her aunt who'd been married to a man named "Jones" in the early 1900's. Mr. "Jones" was a disabled Spanish American War veteran who drew a disability pension. After he died, the aunt collected his pension as long as she did not remarry. When a wealthy bachelor "Smith" came available, she simply moved in with him without formally marrying him and called herself "Mrs. Smith", since living together was a shameful thing in those days.

One day in the late 1920's she was at the post office when a man tapped her on the shoulder and asked, "excuse me, but are you Mrs. Smith?" To which she replied, "why, yes I am." The man was a government investigator: that was the end of the "Jones" pension for the common-law married Mrs. Smith.

According to my aunt, to the end of her life the Jones/Smith aunt kept a running total of how much Spanish-American War pension she'd missed out on because of being tricked by that government snoop. And very bitterly she'd tell the exact figure that had accrued so far to any who asked right up to her death in the early 1970's.

There are abandoned farmhouses all over the place in rural America.

A day without a buzz is a day that never was.

Pretty much. You don't really get the poverty or homelessness issues that you might run into in other towns, so you don't really see or wouldn't ever see squatters living on somebody else's property. As for the farm houses, if you ever take a road trip across Nebraska, especially in central Nebraska where I live, you see old properties and barns that decay and fall apart as the years go by. I don't think there is any building code that says they need to be demolished, and they are on private property so even if they are an eye sore they sit there, for years.

Growing up we used to go to abandoned houses out in the country for fun. If I could explain it, I would. I suppose it's just one of those things.

Abandoned farmhouses are VERY prevalent in the Midwestern USA. I live in Iowa and there are many foreclosures and abandoned properties. Jobs are tough to come by for many and so are mortgage payments. So it is VERY correct to have empty farmhouses and old abandoned shacks. I live in a small town and there are many abandoned homes in our city. It is such a tough economy. Many are downsizing or leaving. The homeless population in nearby counties has soared and our food pantries can't keep up with the need from individuals who used to be prominent business professionals. I am sure Nebraska is quite similar to here.

Yep, they stand there untouched for ages! I grew up in NW Rural Nebraska. Live and graduated at Oshkosh. Visited a house that my first wife and I were living in years ago, East of Oshkosh, and it was abandoned, and looked a lot like all the rest of abandoned houses. One remembers happy and sad thoughts at those old places, what we did, how we interacted with our family, the rains, the snows, the peace and quite of that area.

As far as squatters, no, they don't live in those abandoned houses. There is no electricity, and unless there is a windmill for livestock there is no water anywhere close by, and miles from the nearest town and usually at least 1/4 mile or more off any county road. No electricity, no water, no nearby food, no heat in winter, and always the very possibility of rattlesnakes in or around those old houses. So, there is no good reason for anyone to live on that private property house. The rancher/farmer will call the Sheriff if he finds you in that house on his property and you would be leaving. Even if the original owner is dead, or in a nursing home, someone rents or leases the property and does not want anyone in there that might build a fire that gets out of control.

I saw very familiar scenes in this movie, and the room with everyone watching the TV was very common for that type of rural Nebraska. It may be fiction, but, like the long series "Centennial" most of what you see there is real .... there.

The tracts were too small. A serious modern farmer would buy up four times as much land, get serious farming equipment and leave the old farmsteads to rot. You can see this all the way back in 1939 film of Grapes of Wrath when one man with a machine could work the land ten sharecropper families had houses on. Old people die off and the electric and plumbing and roofs are in awful shape having been patched up and unfixed for twenty+ years - it isn't worth putting money into these places so they are abandoned.

that's exactly what happens to them. They're completely obsolete in terms of energy efficiency, often don't have readily available water, sewer, gas, or even electricity, they're decayed and worn out, they lack proximity to work that most people do, and they're lonely to be in for most people. That plus squatters would be quickly ejected by the owner. They're simply an architectural artifact of days gone by now. Even town squares, formerly the hopping-est part of a small town, are often semi-deserted and falling to ruins now. The countryside and many small towns have simply depopulated and are no longer vibrant and viable places in many cases. They're history, not current.

Probably because the movie is a realistic drama.

I'm from Paris... TEXAS

Of course it's fiction and it's played up for laughs. I just wanted to show some respect for Payne since 99% of directors misrepresent rural America. He really hit the mark here.

Geez... chill, bitch. Someone felt related to the movie. It's nothing out of the ordinary about that, you know?

Shakespeare's company probably didn't produce it like that either.

I hope you didn't take my post for something other than what it was meant to be.

Listen to the river sing sweet songs
to rock my soul

Just watched this movie over the weekend and thoroughly enjoyed it. Well done; I was entertained ... and took it with a grain of wheat.

But poking fun at rural America is a staple of liberal Hollywood. I am from southern Louisiana and know quite well what it is like to have sport made of your culture (Swamp this and Duck that). My wife and I both commented about "their" accents (we don't have accents in Cajun country, lol) but added that the depiction of the corn-belt clan had to be facetiously exaggerated along the lines of Minnesota in the film "Fargo," Maine in "Funny Farm," or even Oklahoma in "August: Osage County."

Such are the stereotypes perpetuated in America via film. And foreign viewers buy into it whole hog. (BTW, I found it amusing that Germans had regional accents as portrayed in "Inglorious Bastards.")

Now, excuse me while I go out back and whip me some slaves.


�If you've done everything right, then you must have done it all wrong."