Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
10/19/08
When I was a kid, I used
to think The Golden Raspberry Awards (aka The Razzies) were a hoot.
I'm not above doing a Ten Worst List here on the site, and we all get a
little cathartic buzz out of smacking back when the movies take our money
and don't give us entertainment in return. But as I've gotten older
and watched the Internet give a bloggy pulpit to everyone with an ax to
grind against “bad movies”, I've noticed a trend. Who're the Worst
Actors of every year? The highest paid, the biggest stars.
Who're the Worst Actresses? Covergirls, sex symbols and tabloid targets.
It seems to me like everybody who actually hates bad movies simply
stops buying tickets to them (I'm sure longtime readers have noticed there
are some genres that are rarely covered on this site; why go to see a movie
I'm 95% sure I won't like?). If you ask me, the culture of “Hating
Hollywood” these days has a lot more to do with an unhealthy obsession
with striking back at the guys who'd never party with you and the girls
who'd never sleep with you. That's why the Razzie crowd is gonna
LOVE How to Lose Friends & Alienate People, the new film version
of Toby Young's memoir of his unhappy run as a contributing editor at Vanity
Fair (with names changed, of course). Name-checking the greatness
of independent and foreign films, journalistic integrity and being a jerk
against the horrors of publicists, Tarantino wannabes and hot young starlets,
Lose chooses as its' hero an opportunistic horndog, then keeps telling
us everything he does is right because he's not “one of them”. There
are a few laughs here and there, but it can't escape the fundamental paradox
of self-loathing that infects most Hollywood satire. If these people
hate their jobs this much, how about putting down those cameras and going
to medical school?
We meet Sidney Young (Simon
Pegg) at the Apollo Awards (faux Golden Globes), where his voiceover explains
to us that he's made it to Hollywood's inner circle as the boyfriend of
starlet Sophie Maes (Megan Fox), who's promised to sleep with him if she
wins Best Actress, which she does. Flash back to the events that
got him there. Not too long before, he's the hack writer/editor of
London's Post Modern Review, a celebrity rag so desperate for a
celebrity scoop that he sneaks into a BAFTA after-party on the arm of a
pig he claims is Babe. Pig-based hijinx ensue (how many good movies
include pig-based hijinx? That is a question each of us must answer
for ourselves), and he's very loudly and very publicly thrown out.
But the stunt gets the attention of Sharp's Magazine editor
Clayton Harding (Jeff Bridges), who sees a bit of the younger version of
himself in Young, and hires him. Sidney shows up in New York City
ready to take the town, but finds that Big Apple women aren't as drawn
to short, unsuccessful jerks as he'd hoped. At Sharp's, the
inevitable flirtation begins between he and his immediate superior Allison
Olsen (Kirsten Dunst), who in turn is in a relationship with odious department
head Lawrence Maddox (Danny Huston). Sidney wants to “save” Sharp's
with the kind of “edgy” (read: smart-assed) reporting that made Harding's
first magazine an inspiration to him, but the Editor just won't publish
any of his work. All these concerns fade the moment the budding journalist
lays eyes on Sophie, the star of a Young Mother Teresa biopic being relentlessly
promoted by the evil Eleanor Johnson (Gillian Anderson). Eleanor
knows exactly how to play a man like Sidney, and soon enough, he's on his
knees begging her to let him write anything she wants him to in exchange
for a shot at the girl of his celluloid dreams. But as he rockets
up the ladder of success, might he be overlooking the girl who was really
meant for him?
Gee, ya think? All
of How to Lose Friends & Alienate People's problems can be boiled
down to a single one: Sidney Young is a jackass, unworthy of our
sympathy. It would be all well and good if the movie understood that,
and adjusted its' portrait of the Showbiz Axis of Ego accordingly.
But instead, being based on the undoubtably self-satisfied memoir of his
real-life counterpart, it thinks he's just swell. That, combined
with the effortless likability that's Pegg's trademark, manages to make
every last thing he does seem to be out of character. Maddox berates
him for sexual harassment in the workplace? Fine, he'll bring a transvestite
stripper to Maddox's office on Bring Your Daughter to Work Day. Why
bother knowing who anyone is or doing any research when you can just randomly
ask actors if they're gay? Sidney bemoans the lack of Dorothy Parkers
at Sharp's, but the only snippet of his prose we ever see if highlighted
by rhyming a director's name with “hack”. And I felt really sorry
for poor Allison, who's required to fall in love with this loser because,
compared to all the other men in her world, he actually is something of
a catch.
Allison emerges as the movie's
only likable character, a sad doormat who drinks way too much while clinging
to another of the movie's silly hooks of credibility: a novel she's
hand-writing in a tiny little diary barely big enough to contain a magazine
article. But she's honest and sincere and wants to be happy in a
way that has nothing to do with making other people miserable, which puts
her way ahead of the game. Dunst has a rarely-used gift for romantic
comedy, and even if her performance exists in a romance-free bubble, it's
pretty good. As for Sophie, she's never any more or less than she
appears, a young woman who knows exactly how men react to her and is happy
to use it to her advantage. Fox hits some very interesting notes,
and makes her character almost disturbingly detached from the world around
her. But the movie hates her for daring to be so hot, so it's not
really concerned with the fact that she's got major issues, including a
drug habit Sidney's only too happy to encourage. First movie ever
to include a scene where we're supposed to feel bad that the hero didn't
get a chance to race back to the girl of his dreams with that cocaine she
says “makes me really horny”? I hope so. Anderson delivers
the movie's best performance, pitch-perfect as the diabolical chessmaster
of a publicist who barely has to break a sweat to shape the world to her
desires. Maddox is a standard-issue heel, but Huston makes him feel
very real, while Bridges mostly phones in his peculiar role as a man who's
too much of a sell-out to let his inner loser roam free.
Director Robert B. Weide
stages all this with that certain desperation that overtakes a film when
its' mission to be funny is fundamentally at odds with material that's
not. When in doubt, he goes BIG for the laughs, making Sidney a slapstick
buffoon like an unpleasant English Urkel, while the rest of the movie seems
to be set right here in the Real World. And, to be sure, there are
some laughs to be had in the film's slapstick excesses, but none of them
are worth the damage they do to the plot. Really, is there anything
short of murder Sophie could be guilty of that makes what Sidney does at
the awards show anything other than a childish temper tantrum? I'm
sure writer Peter Straughan was hemmed in a bit by his source material,
but any movie that deems a character unworthy because “He thinks the cinema
started with Tarantino!” has spent waaaaaaaaaay too much time in film school.
There are, ultimately, three
kinds of movie buffs: the glass half full kind (“This was a really
good year for movies!”) and the glass half empty kind (“There hasn't been
a good year for movies since 1976!”). How to Lose Friends &
Alienate People (a title so ungainly my brain refuses to remember it)
is of interest only to the later crew, and even they would be better served
just rewatching something made in 1976. Show me a guy who wants to
be an artist and is heartbroken to find that the business of show is not
what he's hope for, and I might want to hear his story. But some
jackass who dreampt of making a living making fun of celebrities while
he partied with them is heartbroken to learn it's just not as cool as he'd
hoped? He can just pay his membership fee to the Golden Raspberry
Society like anybody else. |
