Andrew McMurtryREVIEW: How To Lose Friends and Alienate People (2008)
October 26th 2008 09:09
"How To Lose Friends and Alienate People" is a great film. It begins by looking at Sidney Young (Simon Pegg) who is a budding journalist desperate to break his way into the "big time" which he sees as Hollywood. While his little magazine struggles along, picking fights with the big guys, it is really a veilled attempt by Young to try and get a big publishers attention. And he grabs the biggest in Sharp's magazine, which is the equivalent of Vanity Fair in the US. What follows is self sabotage after self sabotage, making himself the outcast of the magazine. While this happens, he becomes infatuated with the beautiful, new, up-and-coming actress Sophie Maes (Megan Fox). It eventually decends into a romance, with Sidney being very taken with his workmate Alison (Kirsten Dunst), who it turns out, is dating another guy, who is a bit of a prick. Sidney then knuckles down and begins to work his way up the social food chain of New York and then eventually breaks into his "Shangri-La" of Hollywood.
This film has several issues come through in it. One of them is the determination of a celebrity. What is a celebrity? I found this a hard question to answer because how can you define a person as a true celebrity if they are just getting their 15 minutes of fame. In the film, Sidney is on the TV in the airport while he is buying a ticket. The attendent asks him "Can I get your autograph?" She really wants his signature but he mistakes that and says back something along the lines of "Why do you want my autograph? Is it just because I'm on the TV?" That is a moment that crystalised my thought of fame being so fleeting that how can you really define a one-hit wonder or a reality TV contestant as a celebrity. At my university, we had a guest lecture from a former Big Brother runner-up in Australia, who also happened to be a journalist. When we had a Q&A at the end of the lecture a girl stood up and asked, "Can I have a hug?" This man was a reasonably successful journalist who was trying to forge on with his career post-realiity. And yet because of his name, he became that famous guy from Big Brother, which shows the power of fame, even if they don't become fully fledged celebrities.
Next is the fakeness of celebrity culture. Everyone is your best friend until you aren't cool anymore. This isn't just in America, it's everywhere. The problem of placing of the 15 minutes of fame with celebrity is the bigger you become, the harder you fall. And once you're down, there aren't many people willing to help you up. This is shown in the movie, firstly with Rachel Petkoff (Diana Kent), who is a film actress that had fallen off the radar as she had gotten older. Ignored by Sidney's boss, Lawrence Maddox (Danny Huston), she is dejected and just walks off. This showed the realisation of the fall from grace for a screen legend. The other is Sidney himself, who begins at the bottom and struggles because it is a culture with which he doesn't belong, until he is basically forced to assimilate into the American culture.
Well anyway that's enough about my musings of issues in this film. I thoroughly enjoyed this movie. I thought the comedy was funny in all the right ways at all the right times. The whole cast was wonderful and really showed the nature of modern celebrity. I thought it was Kirsten Dunst's best role yet. She will always be remembered for her roles in Spiderman and Bring It On especially but I like the direction she is taking with her career, mixing the box office successes with the cult movies like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I thought she was funny and quirky and just brilliant in her role as Alison Olsen, the novelist who is working at a magazine just to get some money. Simon Pegg continues to impress me after Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, two great funny movies. I have been looking on the net while this film has been out and I realise that this is a divisive film for some reason. People seem to hate it and have a problem with it and Simon Pegg for some reason. I'm an Australian so it may be different in Australia from America but I loved Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. I don't think he does roles that are meant to be taken too seriously. I don't really get why it flopped in America. Maybe it had something to do with it being too close to attacking the Hollywood culture and celebrity that many youth seem to aspire to.
"How To Lose Friends and Alienate People" is a great movie if you just want to see a movie and laugh. I really enjoyed it. It made me laugh more than any other movie I have seen in quite a while. I liked the story. I liked the cast. I really liked the whole movie. I'd give it a 4 out of 5.
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