Supposedly based on a real life story about a British journo to whom (most of these) events actually happened, How to lose friends and alienate people has a couple of decent comedic moments, but like the lead character Sidney Young is dangerously homogenised by the Hollywood system that it tries so vainly to lampoon.
While I’m on the topic is there any chance that all these Hollywood star and film companies might take a break from telling us how fake and vacuous Hollywood is? Or at least stop charging us $20 per film in the process…
Sidney Young (Simon Pegg) is a young journalistic tyro, a tell it like it is and damn the consequences creator of a satirical underground British magazine that digs up dirt and pulls the piss out of celebrities and the industry in general.
Then after an awards show mishap Sidney is miraculously handpicked by Clayton Harding (Jeff Bridges), only the editor of one of the biggest American magazines in that same industry ‘Sharp’s Magazine’.
Fine, thinks Sidney, I’ll tear down the fakeness and insincerity from the inside.
Sidney shows up for work as an irreverent t shirt wearing, hard partying, tactless wanker who thinks boss Clayton has lost his edge and that his co-workers Lawrence Maddox (Danny Huston) and Alison Olsen (Kirsten Dunst) are merely sheep toeing the company line, and that publicists like Eleanor (Gillian Anderson) and her aspiring it-girl Sophie Mays (Megan Fox) are symptomatic of the problems in Hollywood, where arse kissing and backstabbing are as entrenched as the designer labels and the who’s who that feature on the glossy pages.
Only a strange thing happens, Sidney initially wallows in the periphery while he is sarcastically poking fun at the machine, then finds success when he kowtows and compromises his principles… Ummm, is this the message we’re trying to relay here; forego everything that makes you an individual and become one of the mainstream, you’ll make more money, bang starlets and drive a nicer car?
So the huge mystery becomes will Sidney stay true to label and retain his non-conformist bent, or will he simply become part of the system he simultaneously loathes and adores?
Confusing message aside How to lose friends and alienate people does have a few choice moments but it relies a little too heavily on pratfalls, unfortunate Chihuahuas and trannie penises for my liking. While I love Simon Pegg and he will have a lifetime exemption from bad movies thanks to Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz he is largely wasted here, and I will forever remain confused as to what the ‘right message’ is with this film, as it seems to extol the virtues of both the ‘one of us’ conformism and the ‘I’m an individual that remains true to his values’ individualism.
Final Rating – 6.5 / 10. Neither the acerbic poke at Hollywood nor a sobering warning against mindlessly following the masses, the film gets caught in it’s own confused anti-moralising. At least there are some pretty people in it…
