The movie tells the fascinating tale of what happens when a 70-year-old retired executive decides her will fill his time by becoming the unpaid lackey to the founder and CEO of an e-commerce fashion company. And what’s even better, who are an inspiration to the – gasp – younger folks.
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The rare case of a comedy that saved its best gags for the movie and didn’t spoil them in the trailers, director Genndy Tartakovsky’s goofy, inventive, colorful lark is chock-full of riotous bits: the stretching rack used for yoga; David Spade’s invisible man faking an equally invisible girlfriend; Mel Brooks’ elderly vampire referring to Keegan-Michael Key’s mummy as “talking toilet paper”; Megan Mullally and Nick Offerman just doing what they do.
As our lead Ben Whittaker, screen legend Robert De Niro keeps a smile on his face the entire film.
It’s really character-driven. I do a lot of this work now on Pinterest so I now have Pinterest boards, you know, if anyone wants to look at them, you’ll see exactly how I developed it. [Hathaway’s character] lives in Brooklyn.
Filmmaker Nancy Meyers reminds us that there is life after 60 in The Intern, a frothy exploration of romantic travails set in the offices of a thriving dot-com fashion business. Her movies are aspirational, not inspirational.
Nancy Meyers is a special kind of filmmaker. I’m very affectionate towards him. And I imagine, having been a woman in this industry for the last 30 years, it’s not easy being the smartest, funniest person in the room and being a woman, but she’s handled it with tremendous grace. No matter what you think of her work, she is a trailblazer. She’s the prototype for white feminism: pioneering, admirable, yet limited in scope.
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But the hilarious throwaways pop up with such regularity, and with such a hearty success rate, that Hotel Transylvania 2 actually gets you thinking that maybe all of Sandler’s movies would be hysterical if their jokes landed as speedily as this one’s. One of the things that I love about the film is that Jules has so much heart and she builds an incredible structure. That is her calling card, and while this year there have been older women like Blythe Danner and Lily Tomlin starring in films on the art house circuit, Nancy Meyers has a reach into the masses that few other female filmmakers have.
