Day 57: Heat Wave, Day 2

The heat today is worse.  Gracie and I got up before the sun and took a long walk.  We saw lots of rabbits and the newspaper delivery people--what a hard job that is!  After Gracie ate, we sat on the damp deck and read the newspaper.  When it got too hot for us, we went back into the only air conditioned room in our old house (built in 1915 with radiators and so ducts for central air) and went back to sleep.  By the time we woke up again, the combination of heat and humidity was oppressive.  The weather forecast for Minneapolis is increasing heat and humidity through Tuesday with the overall heat wave lasting until the middle of next week. 

Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts do community college.

We were prepared to spend the majority of today as we have been spending the last couple days: reading and sleeping.  Fortunately, Bruce had another idea.  We went to the St. Louis Park Cinema and saw Larry Crowne, which is about a 50 something ex-Navy guy who gets let go from his clerking job in a big box store and decides that his best option is to attend community college.  Tom Hanks plays a Forrest Gump-like guy that everyone loves, including a twenty-something Latina with a flair for fashion who takes Larry under her wing.  Among other things, she gets him to untuck his pants and chain his billfold to his back pocket.  Larry is too nice to make a pass at this young classmate--if he had a daughter (though he doesn't), she could be the age of this girl--and instead develops a thing for his forty-something communication/speech teacher, played by Julia Roberts.  Unlike the pleasant, easy going Larry that everyone loves, the Robert's character is cynical and burned out.  Her biggest career goal is to have so few students in a section that she is able to drop the class.  Not surprisingly, the dean, or whatever he is, makes frequent visits to her class.  This dean (or VP of something) seems content with what she is doing as long as she is disaffected and boring.  As soon as she starts to get into her course and really engage with the students (just one over the limit of too few), his eyebrows go up.  Of course even though Roberts is actually in her forties, she is very attractive with her large mouth full of large teeth--the toothy grin--and her great legs that really look good in the short skirts and high heels she wears when she teaches.  (It made this community college instructor's feet hurt just to she her stride down the hall in those shoes that the movie makes a point of showing her put on as she gets out of her car in the school parking lot).  The  audience likes the character because we like Roberts.  On closer analysis, however, this character is a mess.  She is married to a terrible person who would even make a bad dog.  (Shouldn't she look bad for taking this fellow on in the first place?  What WAS she thinking?  Or maybe she wasn't thinking at all.)  This bad marriage has apparently been going on for quite a while too.  Roberts and her husband--the dad from Malcolm in the Middle, so you can image what he's like--bicker endlessly.  She seems to regard him in the same way she regards her class--with boredom and contempt.  When they have their final blow-up though (he tells her why he likes porn), Roberts immediately makes a pass at Larry...the same night even.  It seems she is not quite independent enough to spend more than ten or fifteen minutes without a "man" in her life.  After all the lame guy movies that are all the rage now (Hangover etc.), this Larry Crowne was refreshing in that the lead guy seems to have standards and to think before he acts.  Gosh darn, he's really nice too. It was a pleasant movie on a hot day.  Most interesting, however, were the stereotypes from big box store and its employees to the community college and its faculty and students that it uses--like advertisements or politicians do to streamline the message.  Like all stereotypes, the ones used here ring true enough for us to chuckle in recognition.  Or do they ring true?  Maybe we recognize them not because they are true but rather because we have been hammered over the head with them so much that we have come to accept them as true...or true enough...just as we accept the stereotypes in advertising and politics.  As Grover Norquist knows, if something is said often enough, people believe it: snap, crackle, pop--try to forget that one!  This movie made me want to watch Peter Sellers in Being There again.  I think there is a connection but I suspect this new version on an old theme has been dumbed down.  I brought Gracie's bathmat to the theater and after she gave up on being allowed to scout under the seats for spilled food, she proceeded to sleep through the film.  I'm left wondering if Gracie might have been a critic in some previous life.