The book "How to Lose Friends and Alienate People," an account by British journalist Toby Young of his stint working for Vanity Fair, reads like "The Devil Wears Prada" for guys. It's a sharply aimed skewering of New York media circles and their sycophantic orbit around celebrity culture.

The movie based on Young's 2002 memoir is a good bit blunter. One early laugh comes at the expense of a pig urinating on a woman's feet at the BAFTA awards, the British equivalent of the Oscars.

And it doesn't get much better, or much smarter, than that.

Standing in for Young, Simon Pegg plays Sidney, a loutish Englishman recruited by Sharps magazine editor Clayton Harding (Jeff Bridges) to inject some vinegar into the glossy mag's coverage of Hollywood. Bridges's imperious take on VF editor Graydon Carter, by the way, is one of the better things about the film.

But Sidney, who always seems a couple of pints shy of a soccer hooligan, ends up only annoying everyone on the magazine's staff, most notably his immediate supervisor, Alison (Kirsten Dunst). I suppose his antics (hiring a stripper to perform in the office, killing a starlet's dog) are meant to make him seem raffish, but they only remove any sense of irony from the film's title. The book's narrator at least was self-aware and didn't really kill the dog. Sidney is just an idiot.

Which makes Alison's initial hatred of him understandable. And her eventual softening all the more perplexing. (Wait -- don't tell me you didn't see that coming.)

Yes, in the end, what was good enough for the printed page -- a comic chronicle of our obsession with the shallow -- has been turned into the object of its own derision. This story of two crazy kids who don't seem to realize they're meant for each other is just the sort of movie that Sidney, or at least Toby Young, would make fun of.

-- Michael O'Sullivan (Oct. 3, 2008)

Contains crude language, nudity, sexual references and drug content.