ANY movie in which the hero accidentally kills a Chihuahua can’t be a total loss, but “How To Lose Friends & Alienate People” comes pretty darned close.
Very loosely based on Toby Young’s dishy exposé about his brief, disastrous career as a staff writer at Vanity Fair, this heavy-handed, unfunny movie extracts most of Young’s venom – and, to play it doubly safe, changes the names of the no-longer-guilty parties.
Right. As if VF editor Graydon Carter, arguably the most star-struck journalist in our galaxy, would be offended by being portrayed so sympathetically by Jeff Bridges.
Besides the dead dog, Bridges’ silky charmer and Gillian Anderson, as an uber-flack who really calls the shots at the magazine, are the only bright spots in this ham-fisted production, the disappointing feature debut of Robert B. Weide (“Curb Your Enthusiasm”).
As portrayed by a frantically mugging Simon Pegg, “Sidney” Young is the crass idiot son of a dead movie star and a British lord. He edits a British version of Spy magazine and crashes a star-filled party with a pig on a leash.
This and an unflattering portrait of Carter – sorry, Clayton Harding – get Sidney an invitation to actually write for Clayton’s VF, here called Sharps. It’s an especially ironic name, given that the satire makes the movie version of “The Devil Wears Prada” look positive by comparison.
Even people whose closest contact with the entertainment industry is, uh, VF are unlikely to be as surprised as Sidney that glossy magazines need and want to suck up to celebrities – no matter how untalented – to sell their magazines.
Sidney, of course, is determined not to do this. But he knows that if he does a puff piece on a Tarantino-esque director (Max Minghella in the film’s biggest blown opportunity), the flack will grant an audience with a gorgeous but airheaded starlet (Megan Fox) with whom Sidney has become besotted.
All of this plays out precisely as you would expect, including the Paris Hilton jokes and Sidney’s obliviousness to the alleged charms of a colleague (Kirsten Dunst at her worst) who is having an affair with their treacherous supervisor (Danny Huston).
I haven’t even gotten into the thudding, on-the-nose dialogue, some of it taken from Young’s book. Someone describes his writing as “snarky, bitter, witless.” The last part pretty well sums up this movie.
HOW TO LOSE FRIENDS & ALIENATE PEOPLE
Take them to this movie.
Running time: 109 minutes. Rated R (profanity, graphic nudity, drugs). At the Empire, the Lincoln Square, the Tower East, others.