THE INTERN Trailer

When you grow up around film, you see a lot of the best and craziest role models. It was incredible to watch the performance art of Charlie Chaplin, or the storytelling of directors such as Akira Kurosawa and Stanley Kubrick. The Godfather movies, with the exception of #3, still stand the test of time for the conserved pacing, subtlety and epic everything that was those two films.

As honest as I can be, nothing I’ve seen this new millennium can compare. I mean, what’s the next film I’m looking forward to now? Anything by Marvel. What about the actors of yesteryear? They’re old. A lot of young people don’t understand, respect or even know about their contributions to our culture. Today, let’s talk about the new film, The Intern.

This comedy is directed by Nancy Meyers and stars Robert DeNiro and Anne Hathaway. Ben Whittaker (DeNiro) takes an opportunity to get out of retirement as an intern for a online fashion site. As time passes, he builds a rapport with nearly everyone there. He even builds a strong relationship with founder and CEO, Jules Ostin (Hathaway). As their friendship progresses, Jules begins to see Ben as her best friend. She helps Ben become more acclimated to the world of technology by signing up with Facebook. Ben helps her become a stronger CEO. Everything is good here as far as I can tell.

Thus the weird part. There is no strong sense of a purpose here. Ben doesn’t like retirement and wants to get back to work. That problem should solved within minutes of the opening scene. He’s getting acclimated to working with younger people and learning new technology but that is simply addressed and easily forgotten. Then focus is given to the Ostin character. Her crisis though seems to be that she’s getting CEO lessons. Speaking for myself, I can’t see the reason it would make her cry other than by feelings of inadequacy. If I understand correctly, she still retains her position as CEO or at least has not given up too much power. She still gets to take business trips and has enough time to hit the bar. Then again, it’s a trailer and I’m picking at what I can find.

It starts getting weird when you put nostalgia in the mix. There’s this scene where Hathaway rests her head on DeNiro’s chest. As I’m watching it, I’m thinking “ Why is she putting her head on Travis Bickle’s chest?” This man is a legendary actor who has taken on incredible parts. Depending on your interpretations, The Intern is about the generation gap between this generation of people and this other generation of people. For the purposes of making this film more interesting, I see it as this generation of actors vs this other generation of actors. They even make reference to this by saying “how in one generation have men gone from guys like Jack Nicholson and Harrison Ford…?” to that guy from Workaholics.

An interesting thing I found was the title image with the brief case. I have not seen those in ages. Everyone I see, in a business suit or otherwise, uses backpacks or large man purses. If the last quote was any indication, Meyers seems to be critiquing this generation somewhat negatively, seeing as she also wrote for this movie. Additionally, I find it interesting she’s critiquing this generation while simultaneously being a few years behind it as well. I hate to admit I know this but a lot of young people have left Facebook because their parents took over. It’s all Instagram and Twitter nowadays. I mean, I love the old generation but it shouldn’t be compared to the new guys. We have different things, we know different things and we live in a world of different challenges. The older generation seems to not recognize that.

The Intern comes to U.S. theaters September 25th 2015 and U.K. theatres on the 2nd of October 2015. For the full list, click here.

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(top image source: Warner Bros. Pictures)