Go See "The Internship!"

”Look man, remember when there were no seatbelts? What happened then when you crashed?”

“My mother’s arm stopped me; I went through the windshield!”

“Exactly! And you got 39 stitches all over your head that made you look like a total badass all through third grade! And did that stop you? No! A few years later in 8th grade you took that same station wagon out with nobody’s permission, to go pick up the girl of your dreams!”

“So what’s your point?”

“My point is, life is like that car! Sometimes it throws you through the windshield, cracks your skull wide open, even breaks your heart! But you can’t let that stop you from getting back in there! Ride, Billy. RIDE!”

Far be it from me to call a Vince Vaughan and Owen Wilson comedy “profound” or “life-changing,” but man is it a much-needed dose of uplifting optimism.

In case you haven’t seen the trailer, “The Internship” is about two sales reps for a watch company who get laid off and decide to re-invent themselves by getting an internship at Google. Naturally having two guys the age of Eddie Braverman suddenly be plunged into the midst of so many overachieving yet cynical whiz kids is a hell of a ride. The concept of competing with so many others for a few coveted jobs at the end of the summer is something that we WSO monkeys ought to be extremely familiar with.

Because the duo have made their living off being proactive and schmoozing, you could expect some of these scenes to play out in real life: while the code junkies try to find a bug in some software for one of the internship tests (by searching through 2 million lines of code), these two decide to just track down the programmer who wrote it to charm it out of him. If you’ve seen the movie, you know what happens next.

In an orientation Q&A, they're the only ones who say "yes" to such important questions as "Would you have a beer with your boss," "Would you date a fellow intern," and "Would you take the [free] food home from the office?"

On paper, they’re terribly outmatched; their evil Brit rival snags all of the Harvard/Stanford/MIT pedigree he can get his hands on. But the team manages to bond together not only through work but also through some serious partying (which gives the team an idea for an app). And even though the duo’s wildly mismatched team wouldn’t be a front-running pick from the beginning, let’s just say that someone you wouldn’t really expect goes to bat for them.

“You can’t tear me down man; I’m too positive!” Owen Wilson tells the jaded 21-year-old on WallStreetOa—sorry, I meant on his team in the movie. We can be very cynical and unappreciative in this industry, and it’s nice to be reminded that no matter what, you can always take a deep breath, look up, square your shoulders…and ride.