Yahoo just released the trailer for Larry Crowne, starring Tom Hanks (who also directs) and Julia Roberts in a film written by Hanks and Nia Vardalos, a veritable reunion of America’s sweethearts of the early 2000s. Hanks plays a middle-aged Navy vet with a bad mortgage who gets laid off from his Wal Mart job because he doesn’t have a college degree (because that always happens). “Sorry, Mr. Crowne, I know you’re a Navy vet with 30 years of experience in our retail store, but we’re going to have to fire you until you prove you can pass pottery class and the local JC. It’s just business.” Anyway, so then he enrolls at the local junior college to turn his life around (sounds like someone’s been watching Community!), and there, he meets a rag-tag group of kooky dillweeds and ends up falling for his speech teacher, Julia Roberts, on account of she’s so sullen and bitchy.
So yeah, basically exactly like Community, but with an older, schlubbier protagonist. Tom Hanks is great at playing the good-hearted, put-upon Buzz Lightbeer, but wouldn’t his real life story be better than this? He has a son who’s a rich, white, rhyme-spitting wigger caricature, a wife who’s always hanging out with Nia Vardalos… sounds like the recipe for a mid-life crisis to me.