How to Lose Friends and Alienate People

My vow see to every movie released in theaters in the U.S. in 2008 was complicated by the fact that in mid September I set out on what would amount to a six-week road trip across the continent. Just before leaving, I had finally "caught up" to all the current releases in my hometown in Colorado, but I knew I would quickly fall behind.

One can certainly see movies on the road, but the nature of my trip---camping in state parks---made it nearly impossible to see any movies in the evening. I resigned myself to the fact that I would wind up seeing many movies on DVD that were released during the fall.

As it happened, the turnover was slower than I thought, even with all the new premieres every week, and by the time I got to the East Coast in late October, the majority of those movies were still playing in theaters in the major cities.

Of course, there were a few I missed, movies that came out and then disappeared after only a few weeks. The list was short, but the titles on it seemed to me to provide a negative indicator of the tastes of the movie-going public.

Among the five movies I could identify as having come and gone so quickly was How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, a Simon Pegg comedy vehicle. You couldn't go to a movie in my hometown during August without seeing a trailer for this---they were promoting the hell out of it. The title seemed a perfect match for the tone of the trailer---it felt revolting and probably barely watchable. The fact that it disappeared so cleanly told me that my initial impression was probably correct.

Then to my surprise, it showed up last week in the listings for the second-run Regal multiplex up near Manchester, New Hampshire. Despite what I thought about it, I was delighted to have the chance to cross it off my list, especially at a discounted price.

I tracked it on the Google movie listings last week. Movies often stay in second-run houses for months, even lousy releases, but by Tuesday of this week, the upcoming listings showed that How to Lose Friends and Alienate People was ending its resurrected run after only a single week. I could almost hear the theater manager grumbling, "I can't believe I had to devote a whole auditorium-week to this turkey."

So that was my prejudice about it when I drove up to the north side of Manchester on Thursday, the last possible day I could see this movie in theaters. I caught the 12:50 show. I was the only one there.

Something was wrong with the projector. Evermoving bands of lights flickered across the screen during the trailers and then during the movie itself. It was hypnotically distracting. It took about fifteen minutes before my brain finally could filter them out and begin really "enjoying" the movie. I put that it quotes because I was all primed to hate it, and to go home and write about how much it sucked.

About half an hour into the movie, I was still looking for that flush of suckdom, that gaping hole in the fabric of art and taste that would illuminate me into why the movie had done so poorly.

It wasn't a great movie, by any means, but an uncomfortable feeling overtook me in my seat as I began to actually enjoy watching it. Perhaps it was the magic of low expectations.

Its humor was skewed toward the intellectual, the sophisticated, and the cynical. It occurred to me that it simply wasn't lowbrow enough for the subject matter, even though it had plenty of sight gags and sexual references.

It certainly did have flaws. The premise of the story is that Simon Pegg's character is a cynical independent magazine publisher in London who crashes celebrity parties in order to mock the vapidity of the famous. In the set-up phase of the story, he is hired by a bigtime fashion and celebrity magazine publisher in New York City played by Jeff Daniels. Pegg's character is brought on board as a junior staff member who is at first given the task of identifying celebrities for photo captions.

The obvious question that went unasked by all the characters during the first half of the movie, but which Simon Pegg's character finally asks of Daniels' character at the midpoint is "Why did you hire me?". Even then, we don't really get an answer.

That puts the movie in the category of "stories with an absurd and unexplained premise." In a sense, it fatally dooms the movie because it never really allows us to understand why the hell Pegg's character wants to work there, or what Daniel's agenda is either (although we get speculation). We never really get to understand the mission of the hero, but rather get a view of (male) characters without any apparent mission.

Pegg's character thus epitomizes the mushy goalless postmodern hero, who in his inferiority (according to classical standards), he falls back on the one goal that all inferior men fall back upon---chasing tail. Worst yet, he is chasing vapid celebrity tail. The object of his chase is not his true love, but a starlet as empty as his goals in life. This actually buttresses the power of the story.

The story never really addresses what his goals are. His journey as a character is reduced to a simple rejection of his aimless trajectory, at which point he can reject the starlet and find true love in the form of Kirsten Dunst's character (who unlike the hero actually had explicit goals, and a path in life). Thus the real story was a romance, the key to which was the hero's awareness of his own aimless inferiority. I can live with that.

I never found the key to hating this movie. By the end, I almost felt as if I had adopted an orphaned animal by coming to appreciate it a little. I came to suspect that the title (it was listed as "How to Lose" on the outdoor marquee), coupled with its trenchant skewering of celebrity culture and our participation in it, was simply too off-putting for most people. For reasons having to do the story, it might have better to call it something like "Seven Rooms" or the "The Sweeter Life," or even "The Celebrity Stalker."