Wednesday, September 30, 2015

The Intern

I was very excited to see two of the guys from Workaholics in this movie:  Adam Devine and Anders Holm.  I wonder why Blake Anderson was not in it.  Ders was married to Anne Hathaway.  Adam Devine seemed to be the head of the intern program with Robert DeNiro as one of the interns.  Zack Perlman plays one of the interns too.

The main plot of the movie involves Robert De Niro's character Ben Whittaker, a 70 year old retired former telephone book executive, bored with retirement, he becomes an intern at Anne Hathaway's character's new start-up company that sells clothes to women, called About the Fit.  Of course the acting excitement is between these two heavyweights, Hathaway and De Niro, toe to toe.  De Niro's character is very subtle and quiet, waiting for an opportunity to truly help Hathaway's character, a busy female executive juggling her family and business life.  The conflict comes when the VC want About the Fit to hire a CEO because they feel uneasy about Hathaway's experience level.  What the Viet Cong have to do with this is a mystery to me.  What is this?  The Deer Hunter?  Jokes aside, VC refers to Venture Capitalists who apparently invested in this About the Fit business.  That is the business conflict, but the personal conflict is Hathaway's marriage to Ders.  Ders apparently has a way with the ladies, and another mom at their kid's school can't keep her hands off the Ders.

Ders playing a husband was interesting.  He pulled it off.  He did wear a scraggly beard though, I did wonder why they made that choice.  I guess he is a stay at home dad, so no need to scrape the face, but what if he needed to wear a gas mask or something, a clean shave would help keep the poisonous gasses outside of that mask.  Just saying.

JoJo Kushner plays Ders and Hathaway's child Paige.  She does a great job playing a miniature version of her mother's character.  De Niro has many scenes with Kushner and they play well off of each other for fun times on the screen.

De Niro (72), of course, has a love interest, Rene Russo.  I always think of Mel Gibson movies when I see Russo (61).   That line from Danny Glover's Murtaugh, "I'm getting too old for this shit."  So, Bobby D. is 72 and Russo is 61 in real life.  But in the movie, Ben is 70 and I did not catch Russo's character's age.  But still a ten year difference is not bad in Hollywood.  It was a good fit.  Russo plays a massage therapist that works at About the Fit.  She meets De Niro when she gives him a chair massage as a reward for cleaning the business's junk table that seems to bother Hathaway everytime she walks by it.  Their romance is interesting, first date at a funeral, and foot massages that appear to be something else to Zack Perlman's character.

So how does this movie play out the two conflicts?  They do not hire a CEO because Hathaway's character is so passionate about her business, no one else would be.  And Ders apologizes for being so desirable to all the ladies.  I liked this movie and the characters.  A bunch of talented people making some commercial art.  Good stuff.

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