Word: summerizes
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...movie calendar is weird. The summer blockbuster season begins the first week in May (this year: Wolverine), reaches its twin peaks the weeks of Memorial Day and July 4, then gradually subsides. We're still in midsummer, yet there's only one ginormous action adventure (G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra) awaiting release, and not a cartoon hero or a dinosaur - or a cartoon dinosaur - in sight. Suddenly it's the time of real people learning how to cope with recognizable problems. The Hollywood kind of problems - the ones that can be solved in under two hours...
Mind you, there's nothing intellectually strenuous in the late-summer offerings. These are quirky romantic comedies in which dissonant figures struggle to achieve harmonic convergence. They take their cues from a pair of summer releases 20 years ago: When Harry Met Sally, which described a friendship that was sometimes a courtship, and sex, lies, and videotape, in which a man's impotence was the spur to romance. (Read TIME's 1989 review of When Harry Met Sally...
...people who hate each other and thus are bound to fall in love, as in The Ugly Truth, or strangers with complementary needs, as in The Answer Man, or, for a change, folks who seem simpatico but have trouble becoming a couple, as in (500) Days of Summer. What the new films share is an aim to evoke familiar laughs and perhaps a climactic tear. That's the difference between an action movie and a comedy: the first makes you gasp, "I've never seen that before!"; the second has you nodding, saying "Hey, that...
Meanwhile, (500) Days of Summer sweats like a dockworker to win your favor. All that labor could pay off: the film earned a bundle in its first week of limited release and will soon broaden its charm offensive, or assault, at a theater near you. The script, by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber, imagines that the perfect young man, Joseph Gordon-Levitt's Tom, falls in love with the perfect young woman, Zooey Deschanel's Summer. But she's reluctant to commit; she refuses to think of them as a couple, even after they've become best friends...
...University has grappled with racial profiling issues a few times in recent years, although those cases involved the Harvard University Police Department, not the Cambridge Police Department. Last summer, HUPD officers, in a confrontation allegedly "laced with obscenities," approached a young black man attempting to remove a lock from a bicycle who turned out to be a Boston area high school student working at the University for the summer. The incident helped trigger a University task force review of community and police relations, and prompted HUPD to reach out to the community, drawing praise from black student organizations...