How To Lose Friends & Alienate People is the adaptation of Toby Young‘s memoir of the same title, directed by Robert B. Weide and starring Simon Pegg, Kirsten Dunst, Megan Fox, Jeff Bridges and Gillian Anderson.

Plot:
Sidney Young (Simon Pegg), a moderately unsuccessful British celebrity journalist, gets a call from Sharps Magazine (thinly disguised Vanity Fair) one day to come to New York. Thinking he has arrived careerwise at last, he jumps on the plane, leaving everything behind only to discover that he has to work his way up from the bottom, while drooling over upcoming actress Sophie Maes (Megan Fox) and befriending co-worker Alison Olsen (Kirsten Dunst).

In this case I will go with Roger Ebert’s opinion on the movie:

How to Lose Friends & Alienate People” is possibly the best movie that could be made about Toby Young that isn’t rated NC-17.

Though I have to add that I don’t think the rating would have changed much.

[SPOILERS]

The execution of the movie is fine. Nothing spectacular, but nothing bad either. The biggest problem I had was the source material resp. the script. Apart from it being a story we have already seen about a thousand times, I just didn’t think that most of it was very funny: The arrogant self-proclaimed genius always wearing sunglasses and dressed in black is a cliché if ever I saw one. The scene with the stripper. [While I can appreciate the humour in sending a stripper to work on Bring Your Daughters To Work Day, why did she have to be transsexual (with of course the added ick-factor – “I have cock on my hand” being a direct quote)? Plus, I didn’t see any indication before that Bobby was a stripper – is it just assumed that all transsexuals are strippers or what?] The pig. The dog.

There were some fine jokes, too, though. I loved the alternative healer/dentist (and Sidney’s subsequent search for him) or the EN-GEL-LAND screaming. I also thought the thing with the goldfish hilarious. But the best thing probably was their Mother Teresa trailer:

Simon Pegg was very good, which is not surprising. [I really have a soft spot for him for various reasons, but he’s of course proved his comic talent.] I also like Gillian Anderson’s performance, but Jeff Bridges was sadly underused and Kirsten Dunst and Megan Fox were pretty forgettable.

Still, I laughed and it was a diverting movie. Simon Pegg just wasn’t enough of a reason to watch it again or like it much.