The Intern is a 2015 American comedy-drama film directed, written, and produced by Nancy Meyers. The film stars Robert De Niro, Anne Hathaway, and Rene Russo, with supporting performances from Anders Holm, Andrew Rannells, Adam DeVine, and Zack Pearlman. The plot follows a 70-year-old widower who becomes a senior intern at a fashion website, where he forms an unlikely friendship with the company's workaholic CEO.
70-year-old widower Ben Whittaker, a retired executive from DEX One, considers retirement too boring. He applies to fill the newly conceived position of senior intern at About The Fit, a fast-growing e-commerce fashion startup in Brooklyn.
Ben impresses everyone and is one of five senior interns hired. He is assigned to work with CEO Jules Ostin, who is somewhat skeptical at first and ignores him. However, Ben wins over his co-workers with his congeniality and his helpful advice on life and work.
One morning, Ben organizes a messy desk Jules complained about, winning her good graces. After work, he notices Jules's chauffeur drinking, persuades him to leave and drives Jules home himself, a role he will continue to fill in days to come.
But on their first drive together Ben asks Jules several personal questions, and she asks her VP, Cameron, to reassign him. However, that evening they bond when Jules finds out that he worked for almost 40 years in the same building which About The Fit now occupies. The next morning Jules learns that Cameron had replaced Ben as driver with Doris, a horrible driver who almost crashes. Jules apologizes and begs Ben to come back, and he does.
Jules starts assigning him work, and he is able to help lighten her workload. Ben also starts a relationship with About The Fit's in-house masseuse, Fiona. When Jules accidentally sends a scathing email about her mom to her mom, Ben volunteers to take some coworkers to break into her mother's house to delete it from her computer. They narrowly avoid getting caught by the police in the process.
Ben also gets to know Jules' family. Her husband, Matt, gave up his own career to be a stay-at-home dad to their daughter, Paige, when About The Fit started to take off. However, the marriage is slowly breaking apart as the couple grows more distant. When driving Paige home from a party, Ben discovers that Matt is having an affair.
Meanwhile, Jules is under pressure to give up her post as CEO to someone outside of the company, as her investors fear she is unable to cope with the unanticipatedly high workload. Believing it will give her more time at home with her family, Jules is willing to consider the proposal.
She asks Ben to accompany her on a business trip to San Francisco to interview a potential CEO candidate. While there Jules reveals that she knows about Matt's cheating, but has not confronted him about it because she was not ready to deal with it.
To buy herself time to save her marriage, Jules decides to hire the prospective CEO, while Ben greatly encourages her to think about how much effort and passion she has used to build About The Fit. Matt unexpectedly drops in at the office and urges her to reconsider, saying that he is sorry and ashamed, and wants to support her in her dreams.
Jules goes out looking for Ben, wanting to tell him that she has changed her mind, and finds him enjoying his tai chi exercise group. She finally lets herself relax and joins him in practicing tai chi, an act symbolic of her finding balance in her life.
Originally set up at Paramount Pictures, The Intern was planned to feature Tina Fey and Michael Caine in the lead roles.[3] Handed over to Warner Bros., Fey was replaced by Reese Witherspoon as the attached star, though Witherspoon left the film on January 15, 2014, due to scheduling conflicts.[4] On February 7, 2014, Anne Hathaway was in final talks to replace Witherspoon in the lead role.[5] Stephen Goldblatt was set as director of photography.[6] On June 23, 2014, Zack Pearlman joined the cast of the film.[7]
Principal photography began on June 23, 2014, in Brooklyn, New York City,[8] where De Niro was spotted on the set of the film.[9] On October 2, 2014, director Nancy Meyers announced that filming was completed.[10]
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 59% of 202 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 5.7/10. The website's consensus reads: "The Intern doesn't do enough with its timely premise, but benefits from the unorthodox chemistry of its talented leads."[12] Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 51 out of 100, based on 36 critics, indicating "mixed or average" reviews.[13]
Richard Roeper of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film three and a half out of four stars, stating, "With some genuinely insightful dialogue, a number of truly funny bits of physical business, and small scenes allowing us to get to know and like a half-dozen supporting players,"[14]
Manohla Dargis of The New York Times wrote that the film was similar to Meyers's other works, stating that it was "frothy, playful, homogeneous, routinely maddening and generally pretty irresistible." Despite criticizing Meyers's screenplay and "conflicted ideas about powerful women," Dargis praised the casting of De Niro, stating he "owns the movie from the moment he opens his mouth." Hathaway's role was derided as "less of a character and more of a fast-walking, speed-talking collection of gender grievances."[15]
Clem Bastow, writing for The Guardian, suggested that poor reviews for the film were primarily coming from men, who form the overwhelming majority of film critics.[16] Bastow further suggested that female critics would "feel the need to go hard on certain films for women" such as The Intern.[17]
Bollywood actress Deepika Padukone announced on January 27, 2020, that she will produce the Hindi remake of The Intern, also playing the female lead role, but the remake's production was postponed mainly due to the COVID-19 pandemic.[22] Rishi Kapoor was initially cast as the male lead, but after his sudden death in April 2020 due to leukemia, he was replaced by Amitabh Bachchan in March 2021. Principal photography began in November 2021.[23]
On July 5, 2022, the first episode of the Japanese television remake of The Intern,[24] called Unicorn ni Notte or Riding a Unicorn, released its first episode with Hidetoshi Nishijima in the De Niro role and Mei Nagano in the Hathaway role.[25]
Senior Film Studies major and Evans Scholar Olivia York is graduating this May with an impressive internship on her resume from Mocean, which produces trailers for unreleased movies and television shows and whose clients include Disney, Marvel, Fox, Warner Bros., Netflix, FX, and CNN.
York first learned about the internship opportunities at Mocean during a week-long study away to Los Angeles, California, in spring 2019, which led her to apply. Then following her internship with Mocean last summer, she has continued to freelance for the company.
Another thing that has helped York prepare for her career is the photography business she started when she was only 15 years old, in which she photographs portraits for high school seniors, families, and weddings.
[ userinfo livejournal userinfo ] [ archive journal archive ] The Intern and Internalized Sexism - Spoilers for the Movie[Nov. 14th, 201510:21 am]moirajmoore The Intern is a movie starring Robert De Niro and Anne Hathaway. Robert does play the main character (Ben) in that the focus is primarily on him, an older retired man who is hired in a sort of pilot project in a rising e-commerce company, but beyond getting hired and getting used to the new technology, and getting a girlfriend, nothing really happens to him. There isn't any character development for him, and we never learn if he will be hired on after the initial six weeks are up.
The movie is really about Anne's character, Jules, who created the company and, in 18 months, has steered it through growth from the kitchen table to the whole country, from 25 employees to 220. A big part of the movie is that the company has grown much faster than the structure of managing it. Because she has a hand in absolutely everything, Jules is run off her feet and always late to everything, and things are starting to slide. The investors are pushing her to hire a CEO, which she, quite rightly, finds a slap in the face, and she's worried about a CEO taking over everything and undermining everything that has made the business a success. All of the potential CEOs that the audience are told about are men, but no one makes a point of mentioning that.
The One Sane Guy in the company basically tells Jules she has to pick a sort of personal assistant from one of the interns in order to set an example for the pilot project. She doesn't want one. This, she says, is because she doesn't deal well with older people. All I can get from that is that no one involved with this movie has ever had to supervise an intern while being an extremely busy person. Supervising interns takes time and she doesn't have any. This isn't mentioned.
The worst offence, though, is that Jules is portrayed as tough to work for. She says it herself, it is implied by the other employees, and some snobbish stay-at-home moms seem to think so.
The only unpleasant aspects of her behaviour as a boss is that she's late all the time and that she seems unaware and unappreciative of everything her secretary does for her. This last bit seems very out of character, as she is always appreciative when Ben does something above and beyond his duties, and she congratulates others for doing a good job. They have birthday parties for the staff, which she participates in if she can, and there is a masseuse on the premises every day. I find it very odd that Jules expresses so much frustration with the growing pile of stuff on the table that's been turned into a junk drawer in the bullpin, but doesn't notice the mountain range of chaos on her secretary's desk. (Also, that her secretary takes all her notes on post-its, which seems a highly inefficient way to manage information.)
She is very hands on and gets involved in every aspect of the company, from showing the packers how to wrap the products, because she received something from the company and it was a mess, to taking customer calls just to get a feel for how customer service is going, to giving input on the website in a decisive but not at all obnoxious or overbearing manner.
She takes criticism and feedback well, isn't shown losing her temper when things go wrong, and apologizes for the mistakes she makes.
This is hard to work for? If so, sign me up. This is the kind of boss employees wish their horrible bosses would turn into. All she has to do is learn to delegate a little more.
If the character were male, no one would be doing anything other than singing his praises.
The movie tries very hard to address the sexism in business, and at no time is Ben put out by her behaviour - at one point he tells others she's a badass, but that that's what's necessary to be successful in business and good for her - but at no time does a single character point out that she isn't in fact hard to work for. Her only flaws are due to being overworked.
If this weren't fiction, I would find a way to contact Jules and introduce her to the realm of professionals that help organizations figure out a way to function better. No need to bring in a CEO who would try to take control of the whole thing. The obvious answer was to give Ben a permanent role in the company that had him organizing things for her, as he showed the skill and the respect needed to do that without undermining her, and I was shocked, so shocked, when they didn't end up doing that.
I did like the movie. It was fun. It's pretty much the only De Niro role I've ever liked. He's laid back, and while he isn't on the ball with technology in the beginning, he gets the hang of it very quickly, is open to learning new things, and shows no discomfort with working under a woman beyond accidentally calling her 'sir' in their first meeting, which he promptly apologizes for. His impact on the other interns is hilarious. He helps fix a relationship between one male employee - who's a scumbag, but moving on - and the woman he liked by convincing him that maybe texts and emails aren't the form of communication necessary to get her to forgive him. Another intern, a "normal age" one, starts the movie showing up for work in jeans and untucked shirts and ends it wearing a suit and tie. (With handkerchief.) Another falls in love with Ben's briefcase, made in 1973 and discontinued, and finds one on E-Bay.
The heist is hilarious.
I like Jules for the reasons mentioned above. She seems like the sort of person I'd like to hang out with, if she ever had the time. linkReply
Comments: function userhook_unscreen_comment_ARG () setStyle("cmtbar" + arguments[0], 'background', '#aaaaaa');setStyle("cmtbar" + arguments[0], 'color', '#000000'); function userhook_screen_comment_ARG () setStyle("cmtbar" + arguments[0], 'background', '#5f6f99');setStyle("cmtbar" + arguments[0], 'color', '#000000'); From: starcat_jewel
2015-11-14 05:14 pm (UTC)
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