Toby Young may be an annoying attention-seeker (his latest wheeze is to organise a protest in favour of UK government cuts) but he can write, certainly has a way with a title, and although his memoir of his time in the U.S. has a self-deprecating attitude, has had a reasonable successful career. Simon Pegg has also had a reasonably successful career, but as a comic actor playing hopeless losers. But someone chose to cast Pegg as Young, and make a disappointingly slapstick film based loosely on Young's story, devoid of any subtlety or plausibility. Most disappointingly, the film has been turned into that most depressing of genre movies, the rom-com. The problem here is not with the idea of romantic comedy per se, but its drearily mundane conventional realisation, and it's as if the makers of this film have gone out of their way to replace any hint of originality with the formula: so goofish Young is surrounded by impossibly beautiful women, but spends most of his time in the company of a deep, artistic woman who can't stand him for most of the movie but who eventually falls in love with him. Both the rom and the com and predictably crass; and the innate interest in Young's tale is utterly unrealised, in this example of how to lose audiences and alienate people.
