The Internship

Posted on June 6, 2013 at 6:00 pm

Co-writer and star Vince Vaughn brings us what is basically a remake of his “Old School,” a sort of “Revenge of the Un-Nerds” with a little “Legally Blonde,” and a lot from pretty much every story about a group of assorted losers who show the cool kids how it’s done.

Vaughn and his “Wedding Crashers” bro-star Owen Wilson play Billy and Nick, best pals and partners in selling the ultimate in old-school technology, luxury watches. When their company goes under — even the receptionist uses her phone to check the time — it is clear that even the ability to “sell prosciutto to a rabbi,” remembering to compliment the buyer on his daughter’s gymnastics achievements, and a “Get Psyched ” mix with fist-pumping sing-alongs to Alanis Morrisette is no longer a sustainable business model.

It is also clear, with an Adam Sandler-esque notion that any mention of pop culture between 1980-95 is automatically endearing and funny, a complete waste of John Goodman and Will Ferrell, and a dumb joke about a child’s weight that no one is shooting very high, here. It has a numbingly predictable comeback-setback-comeback structure. But as dumb fun, it’s not too bad.

To the surprise of no one who has seen the title, our good-natured but immature watch salesmen apply for the intensely competitive internships at Google. To the surprise of no one who knows anything about the control freaks at Google or the concessions one must make to use the logo and setting of a real-life corporation, Google is portrayed very, very favorably. And to the surprise of anyone who’s ever seen a movie before, Billy and Nick prove themselves to be completely clueless losers but then, when they are put on the team of outcasts, their team spirit and oddball skills will save the day. Even if you haven’t, the English accent of the arrogant bad guy (nicely icy Max Minghella) is kind of a giveaway.

It is all pretty tired, with its fat jokes and crotch hits, and “Flashdance” pep-talks. Then there is an extended portrayal of a drunken visit to a pole-dancing club with lap-dances (three separate shots of the nerd-boy frantically trying to use the hand-dyer on the crotch of his pants) as the ultimate signifier of liberation and empowerment. And really, when will they notice that women can be funny, too? Rose Byrne, so magnificent in “Bridesmaids,” is relegated to the “hyper-competent girl who needs to slow down and enjoy life” role. Vaughn has made a movie about having the courage to adapt to change that is itself stuck in the 90’s. What word would Alanis Morrisette use about that?

Parents should know that this film includes very crude and raunchy humor, strong and vulgar language and explicit sexual references, pole dancers, lap dancing, drinking and drunkenness (portrayed as liberating), and drug humor.

Family discussion: What would be your answer to the blender question? Ask the people in your family about their toughest job interviews.

If you like this, try: “Old School” and “Legally Blonde”

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Google Hangout with Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson About “The Internship”

Posted on February 12, 2013 at 3:59 pm

Check out the exclusive Google hangout with Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson February 13th at 11am PT/2 pm ET, hosted by Conan O’Brien, to debut the trailer of their new comedy “The Internship” and talk about their experiences shooting at the famed Google campus. After it is over, it will be available on YouTube.

Vince Vaughn and Owen Wislon are salesmen whose careers have been torpedoed by the digital world. Trying to prove they are not obsolete, they defy the odds by talking their way into a coveted internship at Google, along with a battalion of brilliant college students. But gaining entrance to this utopia is only half the battle. Now they must compete with a group of the nation’s most elite, tech-savvy geniuses to prove that necessity really is the mother of re-invention. Shawn Levy (“Night at the Museum”) directed the film, which opens on June 7.

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The Watch

Posted on July 28, 2012 at 12:45 pm

Yet another attempt to go for the “Ghostbusters” funny-scary vibe crashes and burns in the under-written “The Watch,” originally titled “Neighborhood Watch” until the Treyvon Martin shooting created uncomfortable associations with the idea of self-appointed suburban guys with guns. But the attempt the neutralize the title does not save the idea and the can’t-believe-that-got-an-R raunch does equal comedy.

Ben Stiller plays Evan, a gung-ho guy who loves his job as a manager at Costco and his community in the quiet suburb of Glenview, Ohio. He is a one-man force for civic pride and improvement, starting up clubs and volunteer projects. One night the Costco security guard is brutally murdered, dismembered, and skinned. Even decides to start up a neighborhood watch to help find the killer and protect his community.

The only people who show up to help are Bob (Vince Vaughn), a contracter with a teenage daughter, Franklin (Jonah Hill), a guy who lives with his mother, resents failing the police academy tests, and likes to play with his knife, and Jamarcus (Richard Ayoade of the British sitcom “I.T”), who is new in town and hoping to make friends, especially the kind who is willing to provide a very specific sexual favor. That’s the basis for a cohesive crack team of operatives, right! On to the stakeout and don’t forget the special jackets and the beer!

As the Watchers poke around, they begin to turn up in places were more bad things happen. A skateboarding kid and a cranky old guy (R. Lee Ermy) are the next victims. The Watchers start to do more than watch when they discover a mysterious orb that blows things up — and then the alien who is looking for it.

And all of this is an excuse for a lot of dumb destruction and vacuous verbal riffing, though once in a while there is a funny moment. The aliens leave behind green slime. There is a dumb and overlong discussion of the relationship of its properties to a particular male bodily fluid but also a nice underplayed reference to getting slimed at the Nickelodeon’s Kids’ Choice Awards. Despite a script credited to “Pineapple Express” scribes Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg with Jared Sten, it feels like they were making it up as it went along. It is always fun to hear Vaughn’s randomly attention-deficit commentary and Billy Crudup shows up for some nicely creepy moments, but Rosemary DeWitt is wasted in yet another example of the Our Gang (“No Girls Allowed”) school of film comedy. The unfortunate truth is that changing the title just left us with exactly what audiences should not waste time doing . They didn’t bother to write it; you shouldn’t bother to “Watch” it.

Parents should know that this film has very crude and explicit language and sexual references, comic but sometimes graphic peril and violence, drinking (including drinking while driving), smoking and drug use, explicit sexual situations (orgy) with nudity, potty humor, attempted sexual assault of a teenager, switchblade, stockpile of weapons

Family discussion: Which character was most responsible? What surprised them the most about each other?

If you like this, try: “The Burbs” and “Attack the Block”

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Couples Retreat

Posted on February 10, 2010 at 8:00 am

I’m guessing that what happened here is that BFFs Jon Favreau (director of Iron Man but here as an actor), Vince Vaughn, and Peter Billingsley (star of A Christmas Story-turned director) decided that it would be a lot of fun to go off to a beautiful island together and so they decided to make it a business trip by creating a story they could film there.

And I am guessing that their home movie of that trip would have been more entertaining than this dull, drawn-out, mess of a film about four couples who go to a resort that is somewhere between “Fantasy Island” and “Dr. Phil.”

These are the kinds of couples with a friendship you only see in movies. They have nothing in common. They do not particularly seem to like each other. They do not appear to know anyone else. And yet, they are always up in each other’s bidness, hugely involved in the tiniest details and decisions, far more than in their own, so much so that they are constantly conference-calling each other on their cell phones, inviting each other to make crucial decisions about their lives. Possibly the hardest to believe, they are not only mandatory attendees at a birthday party held for a very young child of one of the couples, they all wander off in the middle of the party, including the child’s parents, for a power point presentation on one couple’s marital breakdown (apparently a welcome relief following a previous series on the husband’s testicular cancer). The couple (Jason Bateman and Kristen Bell) have arranged for a group rate at a resort and guilt everyone to going along with them: the couple who are distracted with young children (Vaughn and “Watchmen’s” Malin Akerman), the couple who are furious with each other (Favreau and “Sex in the City’s” Kristin Davis), and the recently separated Shane (Faizon Love) with his new 20-year-old girlfriend (Kali Hawk) who calls him “Daddy” and wants to party all the time.

While the other couples planned to relax and enjoy the island, it turns out that the couples counseling is mandatory, starting at sunrise — sort of Dr. Phil boot camp. There is much attempted hilarity from a scantily-clad male yoga instructor getting very up close and personal with both the men and women (a lot of homosexual and adultery panic in this movie) as he demonstrates the poses. There is much attempted hilarity from the counseling sessions and from a child twice confusing a store display with a working toilet. None actually occurs.

Individual scenes drag and the movie as a whole sags. Episodes are thrown together haphazardly and run on forever. There are innumerable references, for some reason, to Applebee’s and there is an extended and pointless, even by the low standards of this film, excruciatingly drawn out game of Guitar Hero. And we are supposed to care about these people and believe that they have actually learned some important lessons about communication and not taking each other for granted. It fails at comedy, it fails at warming our hearts and it fails at making us care enough about any of these characters to want them to work out their problems. Instead, we just keep wishing they would get out of the way and let us enjoy the pretty scenery.

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Four Christmases

Posted on November 24, 2009 at 8:00 am

The biggest acting achievement in this film is four Oscar winners valiantly managing to hide their embarrassment in appearing in sheer holiday dreck. Its leads are not as successful. Reese Witherspoon and Vince Vaughn cannot manage to disguise their shame and all but skulk through this latest lump of coal in the cinematic stocking.

We get a couple of “Christmas Craziness” movies every year, shrill, over-the-top extravaganzas about dysfunctional families and holiday pressure, ending with some realization of a highly secularized discovery of the true meaning of Christmas. Following in the miserable tradition of Surviving Christmas, Christmas with the Kranks, Deck the Halls, this is one more overstuffed turkey of a movie trying to draw laughs with barfing babies, bratty children, embarrassing revelations, and old people talking about sex.

Funny, huh?

Not only that, it begins with our heroes, Kate (Witherspoon) and Brad (Vaughn) in the midst of a sex game in which they pretend to meet for the first time, taunt each other with crude insults, and then have a quickie in the bathroom. Yes, these are the lovebirds with whom we’ll be racing to four different homes, each designed to illustrate Tolstoy’s view that every family is unhappy in its own way.

Kate and Brad plan to avoid Christmas entirely by telling their families they are on a humanitarian mission but going to Fiji for a fabulous sun ‘n’ fun vacation. But they are busted when the airport is fogged in and they appear on the news, so they are stuck visiting their parents on Christmas. Since both parents are divorced, that means four houses. Robert Dvuall is Brad’s father, who hosts them with Brad’s cage-fighting brothers (“Iron Man” director Jon Favreau and country star Tim McGraw) and their children. After a few rounds of insults and smackdowns, it’s off to cougar-ville with Kate’s mother, Mary Steenburgen and her female relatives, who enjoy hugging Brad so much he wishes he was back in the hammerlock. Brad and Kate get dragged into playing Joseph and Mary in the mega-church nativity with preacher Dwight Yoakam. Brad’s mom Sissy Spacek and her boy toy host them for a game of “Taboo” that reminds Brad and Kate how little they know each other and then Kate’s dad John Voight goes all Bruce-Demi-Ashton with the whole family at his house.

Director Seth Gordon is an able cinematographer and documentary-maker (“Shut Up and Sing,” “The King of Kong”) but he shows no feel whatsoever for comedy pacing or romantic banter. A battalion of writers apparently each worked on different pieces which were thrown together without any effort at consistency. Kate has a completely different relationship with her sister in one house than she did in the other and the evolving interest in building a family is forced and flimsy. All four visits and the interactions between Kate and Brad feel slack and saggy and after sitting through it, so do we.

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Comedy Romance