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Liz Hoggard's rating
Reader rating
What are they looking at? Pegg with Megan Fox
Baring all: Megan Fox goes for a revealing look
Premiere people: Simon Pegg who plays Toby Young in the film and actresses Margo Stilley and Gillian Anderson
Everyone assumes the life of a journalist is the most glamorous job in the world. If ever a film disproved that notion it's this movie.
Cocky British hack Toby Young took himself off to America assuming he was going to conquer the world.
He was a disaster. And many of his real-life cock-ups make it to the film. Like the time he booked a strippagram as a birthday surprise for a colleague on Take Your Daughters To Work Day. Or the night he took pity on a lovelorn transsexual and ended up "outed" by his flatmate.
But on the back of his humiliation he wrote a book, How To Lose Friends & Alienate People, about his short-lived stint as a partyloving, contributing editor on Vanity Fair.
Now, ironically, the screen version is set to do well regardless of what critics say.
Because Young is played by Simon Pegg (the lovable star of Shaun Of The Dead and Hot Fuzz). And the great thing about this film, although it's set in a ridiculously privileged glossy magazine world, is it's about the two things that matter to us most: love and work.
Pegg makes Young (commonly regarded as a loathsome narcissist) endearing in a very British, self-deprecating way. Think Hugh Grant with less hair.
But then casting Pegg is the masterstroke - and the problem - of the movie. Because inevitably we lose the edgy charm of Young's memoir, which had an unpopular anti-hero and dared to question the whole notion of celebrity. After all Young ended up in Manhattan after the tragic death of his mother from cancer.
The film lacks A-list credentials (filming takes place at the Baftas rather than the Oscars). It's possibly too much of a Brit-American hybrid to succeed. Remember the great successes - Bend It Like Beckham, Four Weddings And A Funeral - were unashamedly English.
On the plus side we get witty, acerbic performances by Jeff Bridges (in a fright wig) as Toby's editor, Graydon Carter, and Kirsten Dunst as Young's real-life girlfriend (now wife) Caroline.
The appeal of How To Lose Friends & Alienate People is it understands our very English obsession with work. Young truly believed that Carter wanted him to shake up the world of celebrity journalism. Cue our boy arriving on his first day for work at Vanity Fair in a T-shirt emblazoned with "Young, dumb and full of come".
He was wildly wrong of course - Carter knew which side his bread was buttered. But it's a clever romcom that understands our real love affair is with the boss.
How To Lose Friends & Alienate People is released 3 October.
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
Badly disappointed. A poor film of a modern classic book.
And Simon Pegg, great though he was in Spaced, just doesn't have the edge for a role like this, as the reviewer rightly alluded to.
In short, I don't think Young has anything like enough to do with the making of this film - if he had, it would have been a whole lot better.
- Ben Duckworth, Cambridge, UK
megan fox is buff
- None, slough
Lacks A-list credentials.? If anybody is on the A-List in Hollywood - it is Kirsten Dunst!
- Brian Taylor, Oxford UK
Morning:
12°c
