How to Lose Friends & Alienate People

This is a fun movie but... it yaps around the ankles of its subject without ever moving in for a decent-sized, satisfying bite.

I'm told that several of these characters are easily recognisable to insiders, but outside that small coterie there's still a great deal to enjoy about Sidney's fish-out-of-water exploits.

Weide bypasses the impulse to push the film at the usual breakneck comedy movie pace, allowing the conflicts to build slowly and with more thought than the film's premise might otherwise suggest.

Quite apart from the insights into the strange world of showbiz celebrities, the film is enjoyable for its often witty script and the thoroughly engaging characters...

Simon Pegg's brilliant central performance and some very funny gags are drained by a limp finale which leaves all manner of plot strands hanging and characters left out to dry as the film stalls and sputters its way home.

The film version of Young's book is more slapstick than skewer, more loving portrait than leveling blow.

Comedies like this are rare for offering tangible characters we care about and comedy that affixes some significance to our periodic need for base humor.

Repetition is the ultimate enemy here.

You'd expect something better from Robert B. Weide.

What we have is a comedy that's not that great, a romance that's not that convincing and a movie that's sadly not that special. Now that's how you lose friends and alienate people.