Many moons ago, I read somewhere about Google's way of treating its employees, which was almost like pampered children-- with free food, and weight rooms, and office compounds very much like amusement parks. And I thought, "Wow! What a place to work!" But with everybody wanting to work there, the pressure to produce must be something awful.
Well, Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson's new comedy, The Internship, leaves me with the same impressions. And we are assured by the McClatchy reviewer that Google did not pay anybody to be nice to them, and did not ask for editing rights of any kind. And the movie makers admit that the central plot device of a contest among a variety of teams of internship candidates to determine who gets the one contract available has no resemblance to anything that even Google would take seriously.
I'm grateful for at least that gesture toward credibility.
But Vaughn and company don't care whether believe anything, as long as you enjoy everything, which you should.
Vaughn's endless optimism before even his silliest schemes, and Wilson's endless ingenuity in finding the cheery sides of the inevitable disasters Vaughn produces, are consistently enjoyable and endearing. And it's refreshing now and again to see a movie in which there is no evil, not even in big corporations.
Basically, The Internship is just a series of short stories about idiotic business ventures by a half-dozen eccentrics, with everything played for laughs--usually successfully. And what's the matter with that for a hot summer night?
A lot of current hits make no more sense, and they expect us to take them seriously.
