Ryan McNeil
Is it truly possible to shake up the system? Many of us stand as outsiders, staring up at the machine and feel the deep desire to grab a wrench and throw it with all our might. But to do the most damage, one has to get inside the machine. What happens if once inside, life doesn’t seem all that bad…and one no longer feels the need to rage against this plush, posh machine after all?
HOW TO LOSE FRIENDS AND ALIENATE PEOPLE takes dead aim at the style & celebrity media machine, but can it resist the lure long enough to be a satire with some actual bite?
Based on the memoir of the same name, the movie is the story of Sidney Young (Simon Pegg), a British writer who runs a magazine that takes special glee in kicking the shins of the rich and privliged. One day Sidney gets a call from American publisher Clayton harding (Jeff Bridges) with an invitation to come to New York and work write for Sharps Magazine – a glossy Vanity Fair-esque bible of what’s hot, and what’s not. Feeling he’s hit the big time, Sidney jumps at the chance, but it doesn’t take long from he to be yanked back down to earth by the cold hand of reality. The fact is, he’s just become a very small trout in a very rough river, and his swim upstream will be a tough one.
Within his first few weeks on the job, Sidney meets two women who will be pivitol in his new American life. First there is Alison Olsen (Kristen Dunst). Sidney first meets her at a bar and comes across with all the class and charm of strip club patron. Alison, the sort who goes to diners and bars to work on a book she’s writing by hand, is amazingly unimpressed. As fate would have it, Alison and Sidney will be working together at Sharps. It would be fair to say that their working relationship gets off on the wrong foot as a consequence, but probably more accurate to say that their relationship has had its foot stepped on by a drunken dancer. Twice.
The other woman is new Hollywood starlet Sophie Maes (Megan Fox). Sophie is a hybrid of every young lady currently keeping TMZ and Perez Hilton in business. She always looks like her brain is far away from whatever’s happening, she’s fully bought into the hype machine that will rocket her to stardom, and knows how to behave at a party in just the right way to score herself tabloid headlines the next day. Sidney falls all over himself trying to win her attention, if not her affection, and seems to see her as his entire reason to succeed in this custom-tailor’d, hype-driving world of modren media.
The movie starts off amazingly well, showing how badly an average schlub sticks out in the world of style media. The whole scene is a game – a strange labyrinth people are supposed to wander through until they can find their way to the centre, where they’ll get the deluxe condo, the expensive suit, be on all the VIP lists, and knoww all the important people. While Sidney survives an amazing amount of screw-ups along the way, he eventually finds the right path and gets exactly where he always wanted to be. What he fails to see, is how much of himself he had to sacrifice to arrive there.
What’s rather disappointing is how the movie devolves from this in the final act to become a very-ordinary romantic comedy. I haven’t read the book, so obviously I can’t talk about the differences in the story, but I have a hard time believing that the final thirty minutes are as pivitol on the page as they are on the screen. It’s a pity too, since the story that comes on like a tiger ready to devour the style media, ultimate gets its claws clipped right when it could go for a killing blow.
Despite this, the movie is worth seeing if only to watch Simon Pegg. The man looks like he should be waiting tables at Red Lobster, but lives life with the energy and joy of Tigger. He bumbles through enough situations to make Inspector Clousseau proud, and speaks for all of us when he questions why the media machine works the way it does. Constantly wearing a look like he’s on the wrong side of the velvet rope, Pegg’s work in this movie takes his usual wit and raises it up a level. (Sidenote – if you’ve never seen his work in movies like SHAUN OF THE DEAD or HOT FUZZ, stop reading this piece and proceed to Blockbuster right now.)
Also memorable in this movie, but for much the wrong reasons, is Megan Fox as Sophie. Sophie is a swizzle-stick of an ingenue with a constant ‘come-hither’ expression. As I watched her play the girl who hasn’t made it to the big time, so much as she woke up one day and found the big time waiting outside her bedroom door…I couldn’t help but wonder how little of a stretch this was for Fox. Maybe if the part wasn’t played by an actress who’s spent the last year splashed in every issue of Maxim and FHM, I’d feel differently.
HOW TO LOSE FRIENDS AND ALIENATE PEOPLE seems to get right where it needs to be to make its message heard the loudest, but its right at this point where it chickens out and decides to slink back into the crowd of so many movies that have come before. Instead of saying something important, and taking the shot where THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA chickened out, the movies withers down into something ordinary and misses a chance to truly succeed.
Where this movie has succeeded is in making me want to read the book it was based on, so if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to the bookstore.
Great review – I agree on all points, as it happens. It should have amounted to something either funnier or more subversive, but about halfway through it surrendered to formula. Hilarious note about Fox, btw…