Corona | Coming Attractions

The Swollen Goi... wrote:

Freude, schöner Götterfunken!

I'll be seriously disappointed if Beethoven doesn't make it into the soundtrack.

1. So your stepmom can use the excuse of a booked flight, but you can't? Sounds legit.
2. Since when do you give a shi' what other people think of you? And besides, it seems to me like you've already done more for the guy than he's ever done for you - no disrespect. No reason to let yourself be guilted into something you don't want to do.

Didn't you already book your return flight to St. Louis?

What happened? Did your stepmom decide not to come back to Orlando?

My wife and I were trying to figure out what we wanted to watch instead of Man of Steel on Friday evening and decided on The Internship, which was playing at the same theater where we would have watched MoS. I didn't have very high expectations for the movie, but it was actually pretty decent. Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson have already proved in Wedding Crashers that they work well together as a comedy duo, and they feed off each other quite well in this movie, too. It's a fairly formulaic fish-out-of-water buddy comedy, but Vaughn and Wilson are able to pull a bit more out of the given material through their performance.

That said, there are a few fundamental elements that you have to disregard if you want to suspend your disbelief. The biggest flaw is that the movie comes off as a glowing love letter to Google. I don't know if as a co-writer Vince Vaughn was commissioned by Google to make them look like some kind of magical kingdom or if the impetus came from his side, but it does leave a bit of a bitter aftertaste in your mouth and sometimes makes you feel like you're watching a two-hour corporate ad. The product placement became seemingly less intrusive as the movie progressed (or maybe I started blocking it out), but it felt pretty heavy-handed at first.

It also seemed unbelievable to me how technology-illiterate Vaughn's and Wilson's characters were supposed to be. Yes, they're 40-something salesmen out of a job, but they're portrayed as if they've never used a computer or the internet before. It just seemed unnecessary to make them that clueless, especially because there are plenty of other things even a person with average computer literacy wouldn't understand if they had to work at Google. On the other side of things, I was a bit sad to see that the nerds portrayed in the movie pretty much adhered to the kinds of stereotypes that have most recently been reinforced by The Big Bang Theory - their depiction boils down to superficial observations about their naïveté, lack of social skills, or absorption into a virtual world. The one who seems like an actual human being is Max Minghella's character, but as the asshole villain he's ultimately unlikable and comes off as more of a marketing-whiz rather than a true nerd.

Regardless of these flaws, however, I came away from the movie with an overall positive feeling and some pretty good laughs. I'm not sure if my liking of it is related to the lack of marketability that I have faced in the past year myself, but it certainly made it easier to connect to the main characters. I'm actually closer in age to the generation of young Google engineers than to that of Vaughn and Wilson, but I found myself identifying with both of them and rooting for them to succeed. In the end, it's the encouragement the movie provides to two generations facing the apparent death of the American Dream that makes it appropriate for our time.

I'd give it a 7/10.

Canadian politics was modeled after Narnia.

These can't be for real. They've got to be some kind of ironic statement about the cult of celebrity in this country. Nobody is actually *that* delusional. Right? Right??

[comment removed because Goiter beat me to it]

Damn it, Goits, I was going to surprise you with a ticket to Man of Steel once you got back to St. Louis, to make up for your shitty trip to Orlando. Vespa and I even held off on watching it over the weekend :(

I think this is an age-old question only for you. I don't know why it's such a big deal for you to go to the movie theater by yourself. You watch movies at home by yourself all the time, so you know that it doesn't have to be a communal experience. Do you talk to the people you're with when you're in the theater? In that case, going by yourself might make some difference, but if you're usually quiet (the way you're supposed to be in a theater, in my opinion, unless it's a laugh-out-loud type of comedy) then watching a movie on your own shouldn't really present a question.