Capo
Administrator
Posts: 7,847
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Post by Capo on Oct 6, 2008 16:18:13 GMT
How to Lose Friends & Alienate People Robert B. Weide 2008 | UK
A writer for a British gossip magazine takes up a position at a lucrative New York equivalent, but his new colleagues don't take well to him.
Half-way through this comedy, all laughs fly out the window (with a dead dog, actually), and in retrospect, the viewer realises that all comedy hitherto was basically a succession of cheap if well-timed visual gags. It's the sort of thing Pegg does very well, but his delivery of dialogue is too erratic to sustain any accumulated humour; the script is particularly weak, and a better one would have perhaps challenged both Pegg and his audience a lot more. Cheap gags have their place, of course, but not in a film that asks to be taken seriously - and satire of the celebrity world probably ought to be more profound and scathing than this. The final act is clumsy and ludicrous: with the narrative heading absolutely nowhere, and with no dramatic obstacles for our protagonist to overcome (and thus failing miserably at its attempted drama), the makers start grasping at any cliché and/or reference they can find (Manhattan and Lost in Translation, to name but two) and hope for the best. The overall result is a watchable mess that grows increasingly messy than it does watchable.
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RNL
Global Moderator
Posts: 6,624
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Post by RNL on Oct 6, 2008 17:36:21 GMT
Backwards, this title is.
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