HOW TO LOSE FRIENDS AND ALIENATE PEOPLE
September 30th 2008 10:33
Directed by Robert B. Weide
Written By Peter Straughan
Stars: Jeff Bridges, Kirsten Dunst, Simon Pegg, Megan Fox, Danny Huston, Gillian Anderson
British journalist Toby Young’s memoir How to Lose friends and Alienate People chronicled his tumultuous run as a writer for the New York based magazine Vanity Fair. It’s a fairly caustic look at the mind of a celebrity wannabe whose ego and obnoxious humour offends most of his peers and leaves him a pariah at the magazine he intended to ‘take by storm’.
The film version begins with Sidney Young (Shaun of the Dead’s Simon Pegg) editing a UK based satirical magazine Post Modern Review. One day he receives a job offer from Clayton Harding (Jeff Bridges), editor of the prestigious New York based magazine Sharps. Young travels to New York with the intent of ‘taking Manhattan’ but instead discovers a rigid hierarchy. As a result, Young soon offends just about everyone including the effete Lawrence Maddox (Danny Huston) and the film’s designated love interest Alison Olsen (Kirsten Dunst). Young then becomes irrationally infatuated with starlet Sophie Maes (Transformers’ Megan Fox) and discovers that caustic put-downs and toppling tall poppies isn’t what cuts it in the highbrow magazine culture of Manhattan and selling his soul may well be the price of the fame he so desperately seeks.
Curb Your Enthusiasm director Robert B. Weide’s expert comic direction combined with Pegg’s affable delivery sees the end product feeling akin to Richard Curtis’s rom-com’s Notting Hill and Love Actually. No bad thing really, but a fair distance from the barbed humour of Young’s book. Regardless it’s wittily written and there’s some very funny sequences, notably Young’s calamitous babysitting of a Chihuahua and Megan Fox’s film-within-a–film where she stars as an uncomfortably eroticised Mother Teresa. Funny stuff.
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