The Last Movie I Saw

I never intended this blog to be primarily about politics, but the first couple of weeks are certainly slanted that way. To try and balance the scales a little, I thought I'd give a capsule review of the last new movie I saw: How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, directed by Robert Weide, and starring Simon Pegg, Kirsten Dunst, Danny Huston, Gillian Anderson, Megan Fox, and Jeff Bridges.

I found the film to be mildly entertaining, not least because it focuses on the media and its corruption through celebrification (is that a word?). Living in a remote corner of the Northern Rockies, I also get a nostalgic kick out of seeing images of the Manhattan skyline on the big screen. The film starts out strong and funny, but slowly devolves into a pretty standard love story/revelation that success is not all its cracked up to be. The cast is uniformly strong, though I wish Jeff Bridges had more to do. I also liked that, in a kind of backhanded way, the film gave some respect to the study of philosophy and philosophers, which in movies like this are more often subjects of ridicule. I wish I had something more interesting to say about the film, but it just wasn't that consequential, though as I said above, at least entertaining throughout.

A couple of footnotes: the director Robert Weide some years ago directed a documentary for PBS on the great political comedian Mort Sahl, who I've also done some research on recently. I believe How to Lose Friends... is Weide's first feature film, and I'd say a worthy effort. Also, I'm a long-time fan of Kirsten Dunst (going back to her work in a really funny political satire on Watergate called Dick), and in watching her in this film, I was struck by a comparison with an earlier starlet who she reminds me of in many ways, namely Paula Prentiss. They don't exactly look alike, except for their slender physiques, but there's definitely something similar in the way they speak, although Dunst's voice isn't as deep as Prentiss' was. Anyway, that's one of the things I do at the movies, think of who contemporary stars remind me of from earlier films.