Screen: Reviews

OK, I made that last bit up. But my point is that in trying to make an adaptation which pleases everyone, you end up losing the bite which made it interesting in the first place.

How To Lose Friends And Alienate People is a funny film, a nice light slapstick caper featuring the always-likeable Simon Pegg.

But it’s a world away from the memoir of the same name, which chronicled British journo Toby Young’s slow death in the offices of New York’s Vanity Fair.

Toby arrived in Manhattan in the mid-’90s, only to antagonise leading celebrities with his blundering egomania.

The book attempts to tear down the offices of the celebrity press with wit and bitterness, and the venom in his relationship with former editor Graydon Carter is wafted around like a dusty carpet.

The film re-models this flawed protagonist as the sort of hapless goofball we’ve seen in any number of comedies, and plonks him in The Devil Wears Prada newsroom. So while this is intended as a skewering of the media’s toadying approach to celebrity, it’s too soft to take a proper chunk out of its subject.

That said, once you take it out of its context, this is an enjoyable film.

Gillian Anderson is particularly fun as a ferocious publicist, Jeff Bridges roars as the magazine’s editor, and Megan Fox is more than just eye candy as a rising starlet.

In effect, it offers you a fun tour of the crazy world of magazines, but never really threatens to tear up the place as expected.

DRAMA
Brideshead Revisited (12A)
2/5

It takes a special kind of idiot to try and “improve” a masterpiece by drawing on it in crayon.

There’s always one maniac who has to show himself up by tinkering clumsily with greatness, whether its Gus Van Sant and his remake of Psycho or Puff Daddy mangling of Led Zep’s Kashmir into the soiled maggot called Come Wit’ Me.

But if you thought the wrath of prog rock fans was bad, just you wait until you start messing with classic literature.

Sadly, with this condensed stab at Evelyn Waugh’s novel, the knives – and the pince nez – look set to be pulled out.

The original 1980s TV serialisation ran for the best part of 11 hours, but this two-hour simplification gets around that by absent-mindedly stepping on the nuances of the plot like a kid frolicking onto a slug.

Charles Ryder’s long association with the rich Catholic Flyte family is chipped into a stale love triangle, in which he turns his attentions from brother Sebastian to sister Julia, while mostly making eyes at the clan’s money.

In the absence of detail, the cast become caricatures, from the now-dutiful Julia to the despotic mother Lady Marchmain, who wants her daughter to marry a good Catholic.

There’s a lot of competition out there in the period drama world, but making the source less interesting isn’t going to win any prizes.

You can’t help but feel that the film-makers have wasted a good cast, from future Watchmen star Matthew Goode to experienced rent-a-Brit actress Emma Thompson. But then it’s a curiously British trait to drop everything for the chance to don corsets on camera.

THRILLER
88 Minutes (15)
1/5

Even great actors have off days.

But for a legendary actor like Al Pacino, 88 Minutes is far worse than that. It’s the sort of god-awful, rancid husk of a film that makes rational adults cry like heartbroken teens in the aisles, and gets established thespians whisked around the back and shot like Old Yeller.

It’s not that Al Pacino is awful. It’s that he’s no better than the rest of the dull cast, and brings no relief from a plot which as half-witted and formulaic as a night of BBC Three re-runs.

Pacino plays a forensic psychiatrist who puts a serial killer on death row, but then finds himself chasing a copycat murderer. What’s more, he also gets a phone call saying he’s only got 88 minutes left to live.

Sadly, you’ll experience more suspense watching popcorn go off in a microwave. Without any fire and a decent script, Pacino is just a guy shouting. And to be honest he should be saving that sort of shouting for his agent.