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Trailer Review: How to Lose Friends and Alienate People

Posted by Paul Clark


Continuing Memoir Week here at Trailer Review… today, it’s Simon Pegg’s turn. Here Pegg stars as a British journalist who finally gets his shot at the big time with a top-flight entertainment rag. I’m tempted to say that the story parallels my own experiences here at Screengrab, except that I don’t get to interact with the likes of Kirsten Dunst and Megan Fox on a daily basis. Besides, I’d like to think I don’t make a jackass of myself the way Pegg does here, invariably behaving in ways that are more befitting of a frat house than the offices of a widely-read periodical. Sadly, this looks like pretty dire stuff, which is unfortunate given how much I usually like Pegg. As with Ricky Gervais last week, perhaps Pegg’s screen persona is so specific that he doesn’t quite mesh with many filmmakers’ visions, and it takes a regular collaborator (in Pegg’s case, Edgar Wright) to use him properly. Or maybe, just maybe, the material just kind of sucks.


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Comments

danrimage said:

I'm not a fan of Pegg's (except in the excellent Big Train, where he was one of the strongest members of the best ensemble comedy team of the 90s), finding him sort of amiably ignorable at best, but I have nothing but deep, deep, all-consuming, boiling HATRED for Toby Young, whose memoir this is based on. Like everything else the little prick's done it's a sneering,self-serving, self-absorbed,  ill-researched, petulant pile of whiny, memememe, knee-jerk shite, unfit for human consumption. Young basically epitomises everything that is catastrophically wrong with the privileged, sarcastic, Kevin-the-teenager clones who populate the pages of the UK's broadsheets and 'culture' mags. Everyone who ever thought that this movie was a good idea should be hunted down and  captured,the better to live put the rest of their lives strapped to a chair in the kind of scenario you would find in one of Eli Roth's Hostel movies.

August 6, 2008 2:35 PM