Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson vie for a job at Google in the new comedy The Internship, and though we won’t spoil the results for you (okay, fine, they both die), it’s obvious who comes out ahead in the end: Google itself, which is presented over the film’s 119-minute running time as a hip, aspirational tech giant. It’s obvious, then, that the filmmakers love Google, but does the sometimes-capricious search engine return their ardor? To find out, we plugged Vaughn, Wilson, and the rest of their Internship castmates’ names into Google to find out what sort of commonly asked queries might come up via auto-complete. What do Google users want to know about these celebrities? All sorts of really weird stuff, it seems.
It’s so cute the way your dad uses Google to see if Vince Vaughn would be his friend. But what parameters of niceness are we using here? Didn’t Vince Vaughn star in Four Christmases? That wasn’t very nice. (Incidentally, here are the answers to the other three queries: No, no, and that’s how he met Jon Favreau!)
Have you been missing B.J. Novak since The Office went off the air? Or have you been missing him since before that, when he was technically still on The Office but didn’t really do that much? Apparently, you haven’t missed him at all, because according to Google, you think that B.J. Novak is just a big jerk who probably takes Mindy Kaling out to dinner and then says stuff at the end like, “Can you get this one? I don’t get paid till Friday.†(Watch out, Mindy!) Or maybe he’s stepping out on his hypothetical wife to date Mindy Kaling, which would further confirm your suspicions that he’s a jerk. (Close your legs to married men, Mindy!) Anyway, catch your favorite star of The Office this Friday in The Internship!
The “Is Owen Wilson …†results are kinda meh (except for the grammatically suspect question “Is Owen Wilson and Luke Wilson brothers?â€), but plug in “Does Owen Wilson …†instead, and you’ll discover the question that all of America has been asking: “Would Owen Wilson be a cool guy babysitter who’d take 13-year-old Olly to the skate park instead of making him do dumb chores?†The answer is “probably,†even if he’d employ an obvious stunt skater to do his grinds for him.
Ooof! Sorry, John Goodman! You are not a sex offender. Though there is a sex offender named John Goodman, and that John Goodman lives in Florida, obviously.
Is Josh Gad related to Jack Black? No, but just imagine how exhausting that Thanksgiving dinner would be. (Still, if it’s possible to buy a pitch based on a Google auto-complete query, Paramount is probably plunking down six figures for that already.)
Don’t Google yourself, Rose Byrne! You won’t like it. The answers this time: No, no, ummmmm, and briefly.
The Internship is actually rated PG-13, but if you assumed it was a sequel to the R-rated Wedding Crashers … well, great, because that’s what the studio was hoping you’d think. More importantly, is The Internship just a Google-funded propaganda film to distract users from the fact that Google Reader is shutting down in a few weeks? Pull the wool from your eyes, America!