How To Lose Friends & Alienate People

by Jarrod Walker | October 22, 2008 16:29 | Edited October 24, 2008 10:11

"Funny stuff."

British journalist Toby Young's memoir How To Lose Friends & 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 that he intended to "take by storm".

The film version begins with Sidney Young (Shaun Of The Dead's Simon Pegg) editing the 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 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 aren't what cut it in the highbrow magazine culture of Manhattan. Selling his soul may well be the price of the fame that Sidney 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' rom-coms 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 are 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