This movie is a bad case of Simon Pegg trying to pay the bills.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Simon Pegg. “Hot Fuzz” and “Shaun of the Dead” are two of my favorite movies. However, these two movies include the behind-the-scene hands of Edgar Wright, who is completely absent from “How to Lose Your Friends and Alienate People,” and it shows.

The movie is based on a memoir by British author Toby Young, who has been made famous by appearing as a guest star on such groundbreaking series as “The Weakest Link” and “ The 100 X-Rated Movies that Changed the World.”

The author fancies himself an intelligent man, but if the book is anything like the screenplay then, well, he isn’t.

The film follows Sidney Young, a magazine editor trying to cope with the fast pace of the film industry in an attempt to be accepted by the hi-profile super-elite.

The script plays out like a bad joke, the kind that annoying kid tells the class trying to sound ironic even though he isn’t nearly ironic. It is constantly skipping over character development in return for bad jokes and crude humor.

One would assume that there would be a foreseeable line drawn in the sand; usually crude movies are crude and plot driven movies are plot driven. However, this film doesn’t seem to be able to figure out which it wants to be.

There are obvious plot devices; Sidney Young fails at an attempt to impress a girl and so chooses to toss away all his ethics and write puff pieces in order to get ahead.

However, there is also an impromptu strip scene in which a she-male is, well, revealed. I would go so far as to say that this could have been cut, but was left in for shock value.

My last beef with this film is the title: “How to Lose Your Friends and Alienate People” would infer that the main character, Young, has friends to lose and people to alienate.

The fact is at no point in the story does Young have friends, and at no point does he alienate anyone but himself. It is a small yet annoying point; the title doesn’t fit the film. Might I suggest, instead, that it be named, “Obnoxious Jokes in an Attempt at Appearing Intellectual.”