Tuesday Trailer: The Internship

“From the people who brought you The Watch” is not an immediately enticing proposition, but there are other reasons to be apprehensive about The Internship, the first of this summer’s studio comedy blockbusters out of the starting block. ‘Frat pack’ regulars Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn recycle the fish-out-of-water template from Old School and Wedding Crashers – only this time around, the ‘out-of-water’ for these flailing fish is a coveted internship at Google’s California campus.

It looks a bit like a cinematic adaptation of the Simpsons episode ‘Homer Goes To College’ – boneheaded manchild in a permanent state of arrested development regresses to youthful exploits, to be taught important lessons by younger, smarter geeks, and along the way teaches those socially inept geeks how to par-ty down. Except that episode was as much a parody of movies like The Internship as anything else. Evidence from the trailer suggests it’s not much more than a fairly lazy vehicle for the increasingly paunchy Wilson/Vaughn partnership.

It’s also clearly a rather shameless feature-length Google commercial. And Lord knows, Google need that product placement moolah – they might have made profits of $10billion last year but the dudes down at HR could probably use another fußball table or two, and those silk beanbags in the employee lounge won’t pay for themselves!

Other slightly unwelcome elements we can expect as gleaned from the trailer:

• The Daily Show‘s Aasif Mandvi relegated to Asian Nerd Stereotype
• Chubby, middle-aged men improbably score with slim, young, beautiful women
• Dialogue which would have sounded out of date in 1995 (“everything’s computerised now!”)
• Snooty Brit in antagonist role
• Man Getting Hit By Football-esque comedy
• Swotty uptight geniuses learn the value of partying down
• Etc

The Internship arrives in cinemas in June; expect to see it ranked suspiciously high in Google’s search results.

Tuesday Trailer: Carrie

Pity poor Chloë Grace Moretz. In her fleeting fifteen years she’s been a lonely teenage vampire, offered her shoulder on which Joseph Gordon-Levitt cried, and watched as her dad Nicolas Cage died of severe burns. And now the unfortunate Ms Moretz must suffer the indignity of not only of being drenched in fake blood, but of appearing in a pointless and unwelcome remake of a much loved classic.

The forthcoming Carrie, a remake of Brian DePalma’s Carrie, itself an adaptation of Stephen King’s Carrie, swells with pointlessless.  This being a teaser, we don’t have much to go on, and so arguments for the film’s non-pointlessness remain clouded, but we can apparently expect plenty of fire and blood and things, so, you know, a fresh new direction!

It’s pre-emptive to start appraising a film not out until March, of course, but the omens do not look good. Pros include Moretz herself, who has a ridiculously impressive CV considering most children her age have yet to write out a CV, and has spent plenty of time in her brief career outshining her legal-drinking-age co-stars. Cons include the fact that Lindsay Lohan was almost cast in the lead (no, seriously) which does not suggest toweringly good judgement from the filmmakers, and the fact that, like most of the remakes flung our way by a lazy Hollywood, it seems an exercise in extreme futility. Or, as Stephen King himself put it: “The real question is why, when the original was so good?”