JACK VAN HALEN

In Alexander Payne’s ABOUT SCHMIDT, Jack Nicholson plays the title character, first name Warren, who, like the director’s movie a decade later, THE DESCENDANTS, centers on a man’s life after finding out his dead wife had been cheating (in a coma in that case, dead in this one): A road trip odyssey involving a man in his RV seeing the country, winding up at his banal son-in-law’s family’s house where, in his childhood room that he obviously occupied throughout his teens, and a short while thereafter, there’s a Van Halen poster (or sign) from the David Lee Roth era, 1979 to be exact: the artwork from their second album, Van Halen II…. And the next morning, Jack’s so sore from a waterbed that somebody gets him a doctor, or close: Kathy Bates provides a pain pill that blasts him into orbit so he can make it through the wedding rehearsal: Light up the sky!