The world of fashion provides a fat target for the less-than-eagle-eyed straight-to-video feature Intern, a film as feeble as Robert Altman's Ready To Wear without Ini Kamoze to herald the hotsteppers. Directed by TV journeyman Michael Lange (whose résumé stretches from Knots Landing in 1979 to Snoops in 1999, a 20-year tradition of mediocrity) from a script by neophytes Caroline Doyle and Jill Kopelman, Intern follows Dominique Swain, playing a put-upon but good-spirited intern for Skirt magazine, through a rambling month of unpaid overtime, unprompted brow-beating, and unabashed enthusiasm. Swain proved a lively force of nature when she played the estimable title character in Adrian Lyne's Lolita, but here, a few years older, she struggles like a pinned butterfly. When not acting self-consciously fidgety or bouncy, she fixes her gaze slightly off-camera in a "prompt-me" stare. Part of that can be attributed to Doyle and Kopelman, who, believing that an excess of words equates to cleverness, are apt to call someone "an obsequious, ass-licking, meretricious sycophant" rather than a simple "brown-nosing jerk." Taken together, Intern's many mincing gay stereotypes are less offensive than such arbitrarily quirky characters as the fashion insider with Tourette's, a vehicle for attempts to give this goofy toss-off a spray of earthy realism through the liberal use of profanity. To the same end, Intern is sprinkled with an overly generous bunch of cameos, although it's hard to tell where the cameoing ends and the acting begins. Do Tommy Hilfiger, Diane von Fürstenberg, and Gwyneth Paltrow really play "themselves" any more than Kathy Griffin, Joan Rivers, Peggy Lipton, and Paulina Porizkova play "characters"? Also on-board is Henry Fool's James Urbaniak, for the indie flavor not already provided by the "cramped spaces and muffled voices" sound design, and Ben Pullen as Swain's love interest, an art director who holds her attention when she's not rooting out a spy from Vogue. Since public self-regard and private self-hatred are already standard accessories for fashionistas, Intern may play well to those in the industry. All others should keep browsing the racks.