3.5 stars (out of five). Rating: R, for frequent profanity, drug references and brief but explicit nudity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 10.3.08
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Simon Pegg is both very funny and quite shrewd; his recent film roles — starting with his breakout success in Shaun of the Dead
— have been carefully calculated to take maximum advantage of his sharp timing and pliable features, which can slide from woebegone to deeply mortified at the blink of an eye.  |
| Newly arrived British journalist Sidney Young (Simon Pegg), unable to make sense of his job at the pretigious Sharps magazine, gets little sympathy from fellow staffer Alison Olsen (Kirsten Dunst), who can't stand her office companion's rude, crude and boorish behavior. And the dead goldfish? A failed attempt, on Sidney's part, to gain the attention of a young starlet. |
His role as Sidney Young, the focus of How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, is certain to continue Pegg's winning streak.
Director Robert Weide's film — deftly scripted by Peter Straughan — is based on the best-selling 2001 memoir
by snarky British writer Toby Young, who mercilessly charted his move from London to New York, to become a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, a job for which, as it turned out, he was spectacularly unsuited. Expecting the prestigious magazine empire's corridors to be filled with the sort of clever, fast-talking journalists who had populated the Algonquin Round Table roughly 90 years earlier — an image reinforced by American movies such as His Girl Friday
and The Philadelphia Story
— Young instead discovered a rule-laden environment where all the hacks (writers) had long ago sold their souls to the flacks (publicists) who ruthlessly controlled access to their celebrities-of-the-moment. "We have this idea that America's this great informal place," Young comments, in the film's press notes, "like one giant speakeasy where everyone is completely themselves. But London's quite like that; New York is nothing like that. New York's much more like London was 100 years ago."
Pegg's Sidney is introduced while struggling to make ends meet at a low-rent scandal-rag vaguely patterned after Spy, by way of any smutty British newspaper that boasts Page 3 girls. After he tries to crash the annual BAFTA Awards — with a pig he blithely claims is "Babe 3" — his cheeky stunt piques the interest of Clayton Harding (Jeff Bridges), editor-in-chief of New York's prestigious Sharps magazine (Vanity Fair in all but name).
Harding offers Sidney a job, which the eager Brit accepts ... for all the wrong reasons.
Bridges is a howl, all the funnier for the degree to which Harding maintains a straight face while first gently explaining the ropes to the pushy young newcomer, and then — as time passes — finding ample cause to question the decision that brought Sidney to New York.
Because Sidney doesn't just fail to fit in with the Sharps atmosphere; he willfully refuses to. Dressed as if he expected to be joining the crew at Mad magazine — despite being surrounded by Prada-garbed models and tuxedo-clad executives — Sidney cannot believe that this icily formal office environment is for real; he keeps expecting people to appreciate and even participate in his irreverent sense of humor.
Worse yet, the writers at Sharps blithely consent to producing vacuous puff pieces disguised as "revealing glimpses" of equally vacant-eyed celebrities, rather than puncture their self-absorbed balloons in a manner that Sidney remembers Harding doing, back when he was just starting out in the biz, as the youthful editor of a tell-all mag dubbed Snipe.
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with the up-and-coming young female lead (Kat Dennings) from February's 
— both of which were public and critical, teen-oriented successes — and voila ... another picture certain to draw that prized youthful demographic. 
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. That film took its time and allowed us to bond with its young protagonists, while also setting up some unsettling what's-he-really-doing tension with the mysterious guy who lived next door; by the time we hit the exciting third act, we genuinely cared about out heroes. 
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, is one of the greatest — and most romantic — closing lines ever written for a film. 
. 
looking for character motivation. 
— despite the sympathetic treatment of its religious protagonist — was little more than a hiccup in Mandy Moore's slow rise up Hollywood's ladder of fame. 
, depending on your tolerance for such stuff, was either too maudlin for words or too sad to endure, although it certainly boasted a strong cast. 
, and first worked together all the way back in 
.
and 
, makes a smashing leap to big-screen stardom in a role perfectly suited to his talents. As dentist Bertram Pincus, Gervais displays a hilariously misanthropic streak that's softened just enough by the woebegone face of a lonely dog abandoned by its beloved master. 
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.