Hollywood: 'The Internship' - work experience the movie

The Internship - canny timing, given what's been in the news lately

Well it’s certainly good news for Google.

20th Century Fox have released the trailer for The Internship, an unlikely comedy which sees newly unemployed Wedding Crashers Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn competing for a job at the tech giant by being granted internships there alongside a platoon of super-smart college students.

It’s funny because they’re old and dumb and the students are young and clever. Opposites!

The film from Shawn Levy, director of the Night at the Museum films, satirises – among others – the culture of internship, Google’s horribly young staff and the quirky culture of Silicon Valley firms (“red paddle indicates no,” explains a Google boss with a table-tennis bat played by Aasif Mandvi).

It’s certainly canny timing. This week a sub-committee of the Occupy Wall Street movement has been protesting at New York Fashion week over the use of unpaid internships in the fashion industry, and free labour has been criticised in HBO’s hit Girls, where lead character Hannah ended up being asked to leave her internship after asking to be paid.

Meanwhile, the UK Government’s mandatory “work experience” has just unravelled in the High Court.

Google can afford to be more generous than the fashion industry and Poundland – Wilson and Vaughn would earn “competitive salaries” if they were lucky enough to intern at Google in real-life. The free cereal and ping-pong tables probably don’t hurt either.