Come off it, Tom

Larry Crowne is horrible, just horrible, and I urge you to avoid it like the plague. It’s a ‘rom-com’ starring Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts and if you thought you can’t go wrong with Hanks and Roberts, two of the greatest screen presences alive, here is proof that you can. This is stilted, lifeless, bears absolutely no relation to how real people talk or behave, and is offensively sexist, or at least I found it so. Tom Hanks directs himself in this, and also wrote the original script, so if you ever thought you can’t have too much Hanks here is something else to blow your mind: you so, so can.

OK, Larry Crowne is a middle-aged man who used to be a cook in the navy but now works in a Walmart-type store. Larry loves his job and picks up the store’s car-park litter on his way in and out of work because ‘it’s the right thing to do’.