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Having directed Curb Your Enthusiasm for years, Robert Weide should be the expert in training his camera on distasteful characters and still retaining an audience. But here he turns caustic British journalist Toby Young into a lovable loser cliché and his story into a formula rom-com. Young as portrayed in the film adaptation of his memoir isn't Toby Young at all. Instead, he's Sidney Young — played by Simon Pegg as  self-absorbed, certainly, but basically a sarcastic idealist who finds humility via his experiences in the soul-numbing world of New York publishing. As seems to be a pattern forming in his American films, Pegg does what he can with extremely limited material, but even his comic charm can't overcome such by-the-numbers situations. There are glimpses of the celeb-skewering satire that could have been, as when Young's only question for an actor on a press junket for an animated film concerns whether his character, and then the actor himself, is gay (the actual incident involved Nathan Lane). But every time this mordant humor starts to creep in, it skitters back to the enervating safety of Pegg's romance with Kirsten Dunst. Alienating people in this case apparently involves boring them with comic laziness. —Shaun Brady

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Official Site: www.how2losefriends.com

Rating:	R
Director:	Robert B. Weide
Cast:	Simon Pegg, Kirsten Dunst, Danny Huston, Gillian Anderson, Megan Fox, Max Minghella, Jeff Bridges, Margo Stilley, Kimberly Magness, Eliezer Meyer
Release Date:	October 3, 2008 (Nationwide)
Running Time:	110
Distributor:	MGM
Producer:	Stephen Woolley, Elizabeth Karlsen
Genre:	Comedy
Advisory:	for language, some graphic nudity and brief drug material