The first time I met Rob Reiner, back in the summer of 2018, in a restaurant near his home in Brentwood, I mock reprimanded him for setting the bar too high for us, the kids who grew up on his movies. If the first comedy you watch is This Is Spinal Tap, you are doomed ever after to disappointment. \u201cAw, but it really was all Chris and Michael and Harry,\u201d he insisted, referring to Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, and Harry Shearer, the film\u2019s leads. When I asked how he made arguably the only truly feminist rom-com, When Harry Met Sally, in which the male and female characters are treated equally, he protested again: \u201cBut that was all Nora!\u201d\u2014as in Ephron, the film\u2019s screenwriter. \u201cIn order for it to be funny, it had to be honest on both sides, and Nora taught me how she saw men.\u201d<\/p>\n
Oh, how lucky were we, those of us who grew up on Rob Reiner\u2019s movies. I was in kindergarten when This Is Spinal Tap came out, so my first Reiner movie was\u2014of course\u2014The Princess Bride, a movie my sister and I watched so often on our parents\u2019 Betamax that we can still recite the whole thing. Now, my own children do the same (minus the Betamax). Next I watched Stand by Me, then Spinal Tap, then The Sure Thing, then When Harry Met Sally, then Misery, then A Few Good Men. Name another director with a run like that. That\u2019s right; you can\u2019t.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The first time I met Rob Reiner, back in the summer of 2018, in a restaurant near his…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":352049,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[236,88],"class_list":{"0":"post-352048","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrities","8":"tag-celebrities","9":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/352048","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=352048"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/352048\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/352049"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=352048"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=352048"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=352048"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}