Travel News Syndication

By JEANNE WHALEN

LONDON—British police investigating illegal newsgathering tactics in the media have recovered a large cache of emails previously described by News Corp. as deleted and started examining them for possible evidence of wrongdoing, a top police official said Monday.

Sue Akers, deputy acting commissioner of London’s Metropolitan Police, said forensic experts at the end of November “rebuilt material that we thought had been lost” and started searching it last week.

The recovered emails make up “the content of News International’s main server before 2005, this being material that had previously been described by the company as being permanently deleted,” Ms. Akers said in written evidence released Monday to a judge-led inquiry that has been probing media ethics. News International is News Corp.’s U.K. newspaper unit.

Investigators are in the “process of examining a database of 300,000,000 emails,” Ms. Akers said.

A spokesman for a News Corp. committee liaising with police said 300 million is the total number of emails in the database that police are searching. About 11 million of the emails had been deleted and then recovered, he said. The spokesman declined to comment on how or when the deletions occurred.

Both the police investigation and the judge-led inquiry were sparked by revelations that News Corp.’s now-closed News of the World tabloid engaged in illegal voice-mail interception, a practice known as phone-hacking.

Ms. Akers, who is overseeing three separate investigations into potential media wrongdoing, didn’t say when the company described the emails as being deleted, or whether the company had helped recover them.

Asked whether the company had helped police recover the deleted emails, the spokesman for the News Corp. committee working with police said: “It is the role of the Management and Standards Committee to recover such records as are relevant to the police investigation.”

News Corp. owns Dow Jones & Co., publisher of The Wall Street Journal.

News International has faced questions from lawmakers and others about whether it attempted to hide evidence as the scandal over phone-hacking grew. Last month, a British High Court judge presiding over civil claims from alleged phone-hacking victims said he had seen evidence suggesting News Corp. executives activated a preconceived plan to hide emails in 2010, just before the phone-hacking matter erupted into a global scandal.

The judge ordered News International to search a number of its computers for evidence of a plan to conceal phone hacking-related evidence.

A News International spokeswoman declined to comment.

Earlier this month, lawyers for News Corp. said that, during an IT upgrade in early 2011, the company deleted a key 2008 email from the inbox of James Murdoch, deputy chief operating officer, in which company counsel spelled out a plaintiff’s claim that voice-mail interception was widespread at the News of the World.

Mr. Murdoch has said he didn’t read the email thoroughly when he received it in 2008, and that he remained unaware of widespread wrongdoing at the News of the World until late 2010.

Write to Jeanne Whalen at jeanne.whalen@wsj.com

Corrections & Amplifications

News Corp. says British police have recovered and are examining roughly 11 million emails from the company’s U.K. newspaper unit that had previously been deleted. An earlier version of this story said police were investigating 300 million such emails. The total size of the email data base police are examining is 300 million.

Silicon Valley’s talent wars are going younger.

Bay Area tech companies, already in a fierce fight for full-time hires, are now also battling to woo summer interns. Technology giants like Google Inc. have been expanding their summer-intern programs, while smaller tech companies are ramping up theirs in response—sometimes even luring candidates away from college.

Dropbox Inc. plans to hire 30 engineering interns for next summer, up from nine this year, says engineering manager Rian Hunter, who adds the company wants interns to comprise one-third of its engineering team.

The San Francisco-based file-sharing company this year dispatched its entire engineering team to recruit at more than a dozen colleges, up from just five schools last year, schmoozing recruits over dinners and through technical talks on subjects like how Dropbox reduces the amount of memory its desktop client uses.

“More interns means more opportunities to bring people to the company,” Mr. Hunter says, noting Dropbox is seeking people as young as college freshman.

Interns allow you to “try before you buy,” says Bump Technologies Inc. Chief Executive Dave Lieb, who plans to hire as many as 10 for next summer. He says the 30-person company pays intern engineers about $10,000 for a roughly 12-week stint, similar to what other tech start-ups say they pay.

Through last year’s intern program, Bump nabbed Tom Greany, an engineer who dropped out of Imperial College London to work on the company’s mobile app, which allows users to share data between phones by bumping them together. “To me, the choice was to help create the future or sit on the sidelines and think about it,” says the 23-year-old, who says he doesn’t know if he will return to school.

Ninety-three percent of early-stage Silicon Valley start-ups have hired or are hiring interns, according to InternMatch Inc., a website that helps college students find internships. The group surveyed companies that recently raised money from two Bay Area incubators, Y Combinator or 500 Startups.

In a new twist, venture capitalists have begun doing some intern legwork for their companies. Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, recruiting at 25 college campuses across the country, helped a cohort of its companies hire around 25 engineering interns for the coming summer through a new program called KPCB Engineering Fellows.

Kleiner’s companies, including Klout Inc. and Twitter Inc., started notifying their new interns last week.

“Competition for talent is so fierce,” says Kleiner partner Juliet de Baubigny. She says the firm may expand the program, which is currently for juniors in college, to others, including possibly high-school students.

Meanwhile, Facebook Inc. plans to hire 625 interns for next summer, up from 550 this year. Google hired 1,000 engineering interns this past summer, up 20% from the previous year. Yolanda Mangolini, Google’s director of talent and outreach programs, says the company is still figuring out its target for 2012, based on its overall staffing plan.

Google generally extends offers to the majority of its intern class, Ms. Mangolini says. “It is one of the primary ways we find full-time hires.”

Write to Jessica E. Vascellaro at jessica.vascellaro@wsj.com

Watch a clip from the film ‘Contraband’ starring Mark Walberg. (Video; Universal Pictures)

Only one thing moves slowly in “Contraband”—a container ship whose cargo includes a potential fortune in counterfeit bills. Everything and everyone else hurtles along at breakneck speed, leaving no time to dwell on the standard-brand plot, or the surfeit of events—including an episode of being buried alive—that could fill three more movies. Yet the pounding pace is matched by perfect clarity; you really do understand what’s going on, and come to accept all sorts of preposterous stuff as perfectly plausible. This is an uncommonly well-crafted action adventure, or an action misadventure, given how much goes wrong for the resourceful hero. It’s a genre film, not great art, though there’s a good joke about art—a pricey piece of action painting, appropriately enough—but it’s a thoroughly satisfying entertainment, and, in this season of lowered expectations, a nice surprise.

Mark Wahlberg is Chris Farraday, a master smuggler gone straight and determined to remain so; his performance is a masterly display of quick intelligence, easy warmth and cool authority. Ben Foster makes Chris’s friend Sebastian hard to read—intentionally and intriguingly so. Giovanni Ribisi’s psychopathic thug, Tim, has a chillingly pinched voice. Kate Beckinsale is strong and yet vulnerable as Chris’s wife, Kate. (How did they think up her name?) Caleb Landry Jones is Kate’s kid brother, Andy, a hapless fool who sets the plot in motion by forcing Chris to make one more smuggling run out of love for his family. (I told you the plot is generic, but did I say it doesn’t matter?) To prepare for the fateful run, Chris rounds up a team of trusted professionals, à la “Ocean’s 11,” but they’re grizzled merchant sailors on a container ship, under the command of J.K. Simmons’s malign Capt. Camp, that shuttles between New Orleans and Panama.

A container ship turns out to be a terrific place to shoot part of an action movie. At least it is for the adroit director of this one, Baltasar Kormákur, and his cinematographer, Barry Ackroyd. (The film editor was Elísabet Ronaldsdóttir.) Shooting aboard ship means giving the audience a chance to see colorful men who know how to do skillful things, and who do them with machines that fill the screen commandingly. (Watch out when a loss of hydraulic fluid sends the ship out of control.) Container ports prove impressive too, what with their giant cranes and controlled tumult. The density of detail is extraordinary throughout—police cars flashing their lights like swarms of fireflies in the New Orleans night; the labyrinthine slums of Panama City; a psychotic counterfeiter’s lair (when this guy says he’s thrown someone to the wolves, he isn’t speaking metaphorically); the fine points of counterfeiting. (If you plan to print your own money, make sure you do it on starch-free paper.)

“Contraband” was written by Aaron Guzikowski, Arnaldur Indridason and Óskar Jónasson. It’s an English-language remake of “Reykjavik-Rotterdam,” an Icelandic thriller in which the director—who was born in Iceland—played Mr. Wahlberg’s role. Of the Icelandic films that Mr. Kormákur has directed, I’ve seen only the creepily intense and extremely accomplished “Jar City”; he has also done a couple of English-language films that haven’t set the movie world on fire. This one, however, should do very good things for his international career. His touch is sure in the action sequences, and he’s willing to dial the action back at crucial junctures for intimate encounters involving Chris, his family and his incarcerated father. Instead of slowing the film down, these scenes enrich it. There’s nothing like emotional substance, even in an ostensibly unsubstantial thriller.

‘Joyful Noise’

Watch a clip from the upcoming film ‘Joyful Noise’ starring Queen Latifah and Dolly Parton. (Video: Warner Brothers)

The members of the poor, mostly black church choir at the center of Todd Graff’s would-be inspirational film lift their voices in song that makes you smile, and squander their voices on dialogue that makes you cringe (but also smile in oddly pleasurable disbelief). Queen Latifah’s Vi Rose Hill and Dolly Parton’s G.G. Sparrow have conflicting notions of how the choir should go about winning the National Joyful Noise Competition, which is the movie’s pretext for everything that happens after the first two minutes. Vi is a traditionalist, while G.G., the church’s longtime benefactor, wants to shake things up. Feel free to guess which view prevails.

One of the movie’s distinctions, if that’s the right word, is its disdain for any details that might interfere with the musical numbers. The people who made it know we already know the hoary plot: There’s a competition, they’ll win the semifinals, then they’ll go from their humble town in rural Georgia to glamorous Los Angeles and win the finals, though not without some cliffhanging complications. As a result, suspense plays second fiddle to the music, which is a good thing, since the music is pretty great, though also to the two leading ladies’ store of folk wisdom. That’s no so good, since Vi makes such statements as “I swear your train of thought makes all local stops,” and G.G. issues such warnings as “tryin’ to fool me is like tryin’ to sneak sunrise past a rooster.”

Another distinction is the movie’s willingness to address Ms. Parton’s physical appearance by referring to it directly. “I am who I am,” G.G. declares, to which Vi replies: “Maybe you were five procedures ago.” Ms. Latifah’s vibrant presence owes everything to her verve and vocal cords. When Vi lets loose with the gospel strains of “Fix Me,” gorgeous music fills the air and all’s right with the movie and everything else. The cast includes Romeo and Juliet surrogates played, and ardently sung, by Jeremy Jordan and Keke Palmer, and Kris Kristofferson doing one of the weirdest cameos in movie history.

‘Pina’

A couple of weeks ago, after Wim Wenders’s 3-D film about the late dance icon Pina Bausch had already opened in New York, the Journal’s dance critic, Robert Greskovic, wrote about it in detail. Now that “Pina” is in limited national release, as of Friday, I’ll add a few words of my own—not so much as a critic, though I do want to discuss the use of 3-D, but as someone who has viewed Bausch’s theatrical works over the years with a mixture of excitement and bafflement.

Sundance Selects

Ditta Miranda Jasjfi in ‘Pina.’

First the technology, which enhances its subject as cinema technology rarely does. Using 3-D was a stroke of genius, but only because it’s been used in such a self-effacing way. The sense of a proscenium is preserved, more or less, yet the invisible wall that stands between the camera and the dancers in most dance films disappears in this one. The 3-D camera gets close enough to the dancers to make them corporeal, and place them in tangible space, yet never intrudes on their dance.

As for the substance, Mr. Wenders manages a phenomenal trick of demystifying his subject (who died shortly before the film went into production) and preserving the profound mysteriousness of what she created. Pina the icon becomes Pina Bausch the enigmatic provocateuse who tells one of her dancers, “Don’t forget, you have to scare me,” and tells another, “You’re just going to have to learn to get crazier.” The images captured by the film—dancers in theatrical sets, dancers in surreal exterior settings—are deeply scary for their loneliness and pain, and crazily thrilling for the intensity of their joy.

DVD Focus

‘The Fighter’ (2010)

Mark Wahlberg had long championed this story about boxing in a blue-collar Boston family, and then, when financing finally came through, chose to play the role that’s initially distinguished by its passivity. He’s Micky Ward, a fighter who’s become a punching bag, but supports his family by absorbing physical punishment. Christian Bale is his trainer and half-brother, Dicky Ecklund, a wild-eyed, crack-addicted caricature of the boxer he once was. David O. Russell directed a superb cast that includes Melissa Leo as the family matriarch and Amy Adams as Micky’s tough and fearfully tender girlfriend.

‘Laurel Canyon’ (2002)

Kate Beckinsale plays opposite Christian Bale in Lisa Cholodenko’s pleasantly time-warped romantic comedy, set in a Los Angeles canyon where hippie culture survives in modern dress. She’s Alex, a beautiful young scholar and the fiancée of Sam, an earnest young psychiatrist who’s more vulnerable than Alex knows to the ministrations of Natascha McElhone’s resident physician from Israel. The movie’s high point—its very high point—is Frances McDormand’s sensational performance as Sam’s mother, Jane, a pansexual record producer who can’t suppress a nervous giggle when she introduces her strait-laced son to a gaggle of indolent musicians.

‘Bringing Down the House’ (2003)

Queen Latifah is Charlene, a lusty prison escapee who employs an Internet ruse to invade the home of Peter Sanderson, a repressed lawyer played by Steve Martin. Don’t expect too much of Mr. Martin in this sloppy sitcom, but do expect to be seduced and entertained by Ms. Latifah. Full-figured, amply-fleshed and almost preternaturally—though not groundlessly—self-confident, this rap star turned actress turned movie star makes the most of every moment on screen. She doesn’t steal scenes; she simply dominates them. Adam Shankman directed from a script by Jason Filardi.

Write to Joe Morgenstern at joe.morgenstern@wsj.com

By JEFF BENNETT and SUZANNE VRANICA

Chrysler Group/Associated Press

Clint Eastwood appeared in the ‘Halftime in America’ ad on Sunday.

Chrysler Group LLC’s U.S. dealers swung into action on Wednesday to rebut complaints that the auto maker’s emotional Super Bowl ad provided support to President Obama’s re-election campaign.

“We have no doubt that this ad had no political agenda of any kind but rather [was] a statement of fact and hope for the future for all of us and America,” the company’s National Dealer Council said following an emergency meeting.

The single airing of the auto maker’s “Halftime in America” two-minute commercial on Sunday during the Super Bowl sparked debate from living rooms to dealerships across the country. The controversy boosted viewership with more than five million people viewing the ad on YouTube.

Oliver Francois, Chrysler’s chief marketing officer and architect of the ad, said he finds the controversy perplexing. “It was designed to deliver emotions and I don’t think emotions have a party. There was zero political message. It was meant more of a rally cry to get together and what makes us strong is our collective power and not our individual disagreements.”

At issue is whether the ad’s intent was to sell cars or to help President Barack Obama in this fall’s presidential campaign. His administration provided bailout funding and ushered Chrysler and rival General Motors Co. through a quick bankruptcy protection process in 2009.

“To say it was a political favor is bull hockey,” said Valdosta, Ga., dealer Cass Burch, who owns two Chrysler stores. “That comment makes me want to fistfight somebody. Here I was overwhelmed with emotion and pride…It is bush league for them to take something that is so heroic and so patriotic about our company and to make it political.”

In the spot actor Clint Eastwood intones: “Seems that we’ve have lost our hearts at times. The fog of division, discord and blame, made it hard to see what lies ahead but after those trials we all rallied around what was right and acted as one. Because that is what we do. We find a way through tough times and if we can’t find a way then we’ll make one. All that matters now is what’s ahead. How do we come from behind? How do we come together and how do we win?”

The following day, the advertisement became fodder for talk shows after Republican commentator Karl Rove told Fox News he was offended by the commercial. He described it as “a sign of what happens when you have Chicago-style politics and the President of the United States and his political minions are in essence using our tax dollars to buy corporate advertising.”

Turns out Chrysler dealers don’t like this “halftime in America” stuff, and are quite miffed about the car maker’s controversial Super Bowl ad featuring Clint Eastwood. Jeff Bennett has details on The News Hub. Photo: Reuters

David Axelrod, Obama’s strategist, and Dan Pfeiffer, the White House communication director, praised the spot in tweets they posted to Twitter. Their reaction fueled complaints the ad touts the Detroit bailout ahead of the fall presidential election. The White House has said it wasn’t involved in the ad.

So far, the firestorm has had little effect on the Chrysler brand or on its sales, according to dealers and research companies that track consumer sentiment by monitoring social media websites, blogs, news websites and message boards.

Zeta Interactive, a New York-based marketing firm that mines 200 million different blogs and social media sites, said the buzz around Chrysler’s ad has been 83% positive. Collective Intellect, a tracking firm in Boulder, Colorado, said its research shows that since the spot aired, consumers’ affinity and favor of the Chrysler brand has increased.

Auto-shopping website Edmunds.com said it saw a 27% jump in consumers looking for information about Chrysler after the ad aired. The ongoing debate seems to have helped keep that momentum going. Edmunds.com said Tuesday’s traffic for the auto maker is showing a 23% increase, down slightly from Monday, but higher than all but two of the other auto brands that appeared in the game.

“Chrysler and its dealers have to be in heaven right now,” said John Durham, advertising professor at the University of San Francisco. “The shelf life of this ad has been significantly extended.” Super Bowl buzz “typically dies out shortly after the game.”

Some branding experts believe the political uproar isn’t resonating and is unlikely to tarnish the Chrysler brand.

“It is more of them talking to themselves,” said Charles Rashall, founder of brandadvisors, a branding firm in San Francisco, Calif. “Most people are fed up with that stuff.”

Write to Jeff Bennett at jeff.bennett@dowjones.com and Suzanne Vranica at suzanne.vranica@wsj.com