How to Lose Friends and Alienate People

by Emma Davies     Issue 875

4 stars

Synopsis: Sardonic journalist Sidney Young (Simon Pegg) is sick and tired of being shut out of the celebrity party. Unfortunately, his magazine ‘The Post-Modern Review’ is no-budget, non-professional and going nowhere, leaving him to try and blag his way into post-awards bashes by the most ridiculous of means. When, after one particularly disastrous attempt involving a pig, Sidney is offered a job at New York’s ‘Sharps’ magazine, he eagerly accepts, hoping that his big break has arrived. Put on the celebrity gossip section, will he sink or swim? The title gives a hefty clue there, and he soon makes a name for himself as the magazine’s resident “Idiot Savant, without the Savant”.

How to Lose Friends and Alienate People takes its basis from Toby Young’s memoir of the same name and transposes it onto the basic Hollywood comedy of errors formula, with the typical “stay true to yourself” moral and predictably happy ending. It’s not a reinvention of the wheel – more a Devil Wears Prada with a British male lead. Kirsten Dunst ticks the obligatory “inevitable love interest totty” box as Sidney’s ‘Sharps’ co-worker Alison Olsen, and Danny Huston is the basic sleazy boss. It’s Pegg who takes his role to a whole new level, taking the part of the classic underdog arsehole from the memoir and adding his own loveable spin to it. By the end of the film you’ll be rooting for him despite yourself.

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