Celluloid Heroes

Cedar Rapids has been in the news from the flood of ’08 and the presidential elections from last year, our town has been quietly absent from any national recognition. It now appears that we will be featured in a major motion picture and our fair city will also serve as the film’s name.
The film features Ed Helms as “a wholesome and naive small-town Wisconsin man (Helms) who, when his role model dies, must represent his company at a regional insurance conference in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where his mind is blown by the big-town experience.” The Hollywood Reporter also reports that John C. Reilly has also signed on to the film, which is scheduled for release next year.
The reality of Cedar Rapids is much different, of course, directly resulting from the aforementioned flood and the slow process of recovery. If you were to visit our town right now, you’d probably be surprised at how little it has to offer right now, aside from the occasional minor league sports, an art museum that prominently features native Grant Wood, and a wide array of chain eating establishments. Most of the town’s character was knocked back a few steps with the influx of water, and hopefully some of the charm will return when things have rebuilt.
Our neighbor, Mount Vernon, is just down the road a spot, and it hides one of the state’s best restaurants (it’s up there with some of the best eats in larger cities and over half the price) and a cool vibe that’s really prevalent during the fall and winter months. Apparently, it’s on the hipster’s radar too.
Aside from that, we’re kind of in transition. The preverbal “pardon our progress” sign is on which means that we’re in need of a nice Hollywood makeover.
We’re content to recommend that you visit Des Moines which has a burgeoning night life (2 hours away) or Iowa City for drunken tomfoolery and related assaults from drunken youth (about a half-hour away, so technically in the neighborhood). We also have Dubuque, which is your atypical river town (an hour away) albeit with more Catholics per-capita than most Iowa cities, or Davenport, another river town that is part of the Quad Cities (an hour away). I really have no idea what made that area a destination point, but all four points (Davenport, Rock Island, Moline, and Bettendorf) all make up a reasonable amount of Midwestern population and pointless commuting. Then there’s Waterloo/Cedar Falls, which is like North/South, black/white, rich/poor, all rolled into one. It’s about an hour away. I like it. Lots of cool nature shit (Backbone State park, about an hour to the east is pretty awesome and will change the opinion of anyone who thinks Iowa is all cornfields and farms.
I failed to mention Council Bluffs, which is essentially a suburb of Omaha with a few casinos, and Sioux City that is in the northwest part of the state. It’s close to South Dakota and is strangely Republican. They keep voting this moron Steve King into the U.S. House, so we don’t visit there.
Hopefully, by the time Cedar Rapids the movie is in theatres, we’ll be dressed up enough to have you stop buy and say hello. I hope the director will treat us with a modicum of respect and not point too much fun at our version of a “city.” We actually think the model that most of you are familiar with is kind of silly-what with your hour-long commutes, toll roads, and endless entertainment. “You can’t always get what you want.” Is our model, and the stuff that passes as sushi at Target is almost as good as the real thing.
But seriously, you can find the good sushi here.