Short Bio: Zach Stiles is a fellow soup connoisseur, as well as a bit of a soup scientist: often tinkering with his soups in pursuit of the perfect bite. He also resides in sunny Atlanta, and is a frequent visitor to the S!TII headquarters. While Zach was unfortunately not present on the night that S!TII was founded, he is making up for it now by expanding our horizons into the world of chili!! As you'll see, his review is entirely about chili, and he absolutely does not go off on any tangents about non-chili topics! We're excited to have Zach's chili expertise!

An ever-present question for any publication of note is the matter of scope. For a juvenile weekly soup review offering like Soup There It Is, scope is elemental to our work. Age-old questions like “is cereal a soup?” won't be answered here today; I leave the taxonomy up to you, dear reader. In this week's column, no matter how you structure your own hierarchy of spoonable meals, allow me to venture beyond the threshold of the Platonic soup, to see if we can derive something true from that which is uncertain. Today, STII's first chili: Trader Joe's Beef Chili with Beans.

Likely the most viscous dish covered by STII to-date, Trader Joe's Beef Chili with Beans provides a hearty ratio of substance to sauce. I actually added some additional crushed tortilla chips to my dish for a little added texture to each spoonful. After adding a dash of pepper and hot sauce as well, I sat down with my bowl brimming with flavor and turned to an old friend, 2015's The Intern, starring Anne Hathaway and Robert De Niro and written-produced-directed by Nancy Meyers, her seventh and most-recent directorial foray.

I was struck throughout this rewatch how Meyers' portrayal of men across generations has evolved throughout her filmography. The men of What Women Want, Something's Gotta Give, and It's Complicated (Gibson, Nicholson, and Alec Baldwin, respectively) are plagued with an innate Boomer toxicity. They struggle to view women on any terms other than their own: their arcs involve overcoming personal prejudice to reconcile with a fiercely independent woman. De Niro's Ben, alternatively, is "too observant" according to Hathaway's Jules, possessing a preternatural patience, acuity, and interest in Jules and her business. Jules wants to regress into a more balanced home life yet is cautioned by Ben from relinquishing her independence and power. Completely dissimilar from the sex-crazed cads of her earlier films, Meyers neuters Ben in a way, never implying any thoughts of sexual impropriety with Jules, even when they end up in a hotel bed together at her most vulnerable. The Intern breaks Meyers' established men-of-a-certain-age mold, depicting boomer men as not only as still supremely capable and eager, but also empathetic to a woman's plight.

My fascination with The Intern persists today also in part through Meyers' depiction of millennial men, her first such opportunity (I'll leave an analysis of her supremely interesting Gen Xers, Keanu in Somethings gotta give and Jack Black and Jude Law in The Holiday, for another time). Meyers' Millenial men, namely Adam Devine's Jason and Zack Pearlman's Davis, are bumbling, inept, and in need of a wise uncle. Meyers employs this characterization first as a product of her comedy stylings, employed as a foil for Ben's slow-to-talk, aggressively competent persona. To brush these characters off as comedic stand-ins however would be a mistake, evinced by Jules's unmissable drunk monologue on the state of gender politics. Jules, acting as a surrogate for the writer, argues that fathers of millennials shifted focus to their daughters, leaving their sons without a firm, guiding hand—and implicitly leaving them to be nutured by their mothers. Jules herself provides a further extension of this seachange, herself the achiever and her husband now the passive, stay-at-home father for their daughter. Because of their own upbringing, the millennial father can be patient and loving, but can't be the bulldog champion that Jules had. Instead of Jules' "real men" of past generations, millennial men are lovable, but foolish; passionate, but aimless.

While The Intern is Meyers' latest film, I would of course be remiss if I didn't at least bring up Hallie Meyers-Shyer's Home Again, on which Meyers (Meyers-Shyer's mother) has a producing credit. The young millennials of Home Again, played by Pico Alexander, Nat Wolff, and Jon Rudnitsky, don't require the guiding hand of an elder man like Ben, but some additional mothering from Reese Witherspoon's Alice. Oedipal considerations aside, Alice gives our boys the safety and structure necessary for them to hone their aims into something more concrete and mature—a push in the right direction. Our boys in The Intern basically can't even tie their own shoes, requiring coaching on the basics like how to dress for work or how to approach women with respect; they're still half-baked.

My final thought as The Intern was finishing up and I let my cat mop up a few last tastes from my bowl, was that I hope Meyers' evolution doesn't end here. Her new film Paris Paramount is in turnaround at the moment, Netflix apparently balking at her proposed budget for the picture. I'm hopeful a deal is around the corner.

The credits finally rolled, I put my bowl into the dishwasher, and thought, "huh, that was a pretty fine bowl of chili." Verdict: 7/10