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"It\u2019s easy to see why Tommy Lee Jones and Meryl Streep signed on to \u201CHope Springs,\u201D even if doesn\u2019t fall into their usual two buckets, as astutely defined by Indiewire \u2014 \u201Cchallenging fare\u201D and \u201Ccash-ins.\u201D This is an adult movie, about the kind of clouds that skid across your sunset years; clouds that aren\u2019t always so distant on the horizon, even. It\u2019s a story about marriage as it enters its seemingly inevitable non-sex-having phase. This is both difficult, unhappy territory for a movie, and ocassion for all manner of flick-friendly blue humor. Here, for instance, we see Streep absentmindedly biting into a banana as she ponders a book\u2019s instructions to practice her oral technique on the fruit.Looking past the clouds, then, the film\u2019s forecast calls for noble life musings with a chance of ribald humor. Wonderful. Except there are some glaring problems. The intelligence-insulting pun implied in the title, for one. Just think of what a porn producer could do with such a labored bit of hand-holding. (\u201CHope Springs Internal\u201D?) And then there\u2019s Steve Carrell as the sex therapist; can we finally agree that this man\u2019s career has, finally, managed only to reveal him as stiff and awkward, not some master interpreter of the stiff and awkward?Finally, and most damningly: What is it about this trailer\u2019s insistence that this older couple never learned how to have sex in the first place? They had children, which admittedly doesn\u2019t prove much in real life but in the cinemaverse suggests that they had, if nothing else, a fairly average relationship. Which would mean something more than the odd impregnation. And we\u2019re pretty sure that the filmmakers did not set out to make a movie about a couple that never understood the act. The film\u2019s clearly intended to reach those people concerned about the \u201Cspark\u201D going out. And if it can\u2019t appeal to their understanding of sex\u2019s fundamental rewards, then it might as well not bother talking to them about sex at all.[content:advertisement-center]&amp;nbsp;"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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