Jezebel: toby young

How To Lose Friends And Alienate People? Dress Like They Did At The Film's Premiere!

Sadie — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 10:30:00 EDT

Graydon Carter's bete noire, the adaptation of Toby Young's How to Lose Friends and Alienate People (a thinly veiled account of the author's misadventures at a Vanity Fair-like glossy) is here. Or, anyway, in London, where it premiered last night at The Empire Leicester Square. I'll just put it out there: the clothes were not good. Gillian Anderson continued her maternity-fueled winning streak, Martin Freeman and date looked cute, and there was just enough British eccentricity to keep things afloat — but barely. Some frump, some dowd, some tack and a heaping helping of Fug, after the jump!

The Good:
Gillian Anderson is one of those women who magically looks 100x better-dressed when pregnant! This is a little — first time this week! — "Ascotte Gavotte," but very pretty.
Hey, beggars can't be choosers, okay? This was not a good night for fashion, so Margo Stilley's "acceptable" gets automatically bumped.
Yes, I love Martin "Tim Canterbury" Freeman, but I genuinely think he and his 40s-inflected date look cute.
Awesome. No, seriously, even had Miriam Margolyes not appeared in both the Cold Comfort Farm movie and that BBC A Little Princess from the 80s that's probably the best miniseries ever made ever, she would get points here.

The Bad:
If one must sport a sack like Connie Huq, popular wisdom holds that a dainty shoe is the only possible palliative.
We can deny it no longer. Barbie fashion, a la Isabella Calthorpe's neon leopard, is clearly the look for fall.
Hannah Waddingham's pleat-a-palooza is further damning evidence.
I found Anna Popplewell very adorable in the Narnia movies, but frumpy and Minnie are a case of two wrongs. And we all know what that doesn't make.
ElectroVamp are double trouble!

The Ugly:
I, too, admire Sandra Day O'Connor. Unlike Edith Bowman, I don't feel the need to shorten her old Supreme Court robes into a minidress and pair it with lace tights and tap shoes.

[Images via Getty]

Loose Lips

Jessica — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 12:40:00 EDT

Kirsten Dunst: drunk with power! According to author and screenwriter Toby Young, Dunst had him banned from the set of the film he wrote, How To Lose Friends and Alienate People. Young said, "[Dunst] overheard me giving the producer a 'note' on her performance in a particular scene…Kirsten overheard this exchange and interpreted it as a complaint about her acting ability. It was after this, apparently, that she took Bob [Weide, director] to one side and asked if I could be kept at arm's length in future." • Uh, I guess there were rumors floating around that Paris Hilton is pregnant? Well she's not. Hooray! • Drudge is reporting that Oprah is vehemently against hosting Sarah Palin on her show. Apparently Oprah has blocked people in the past — notably Clarence Thomas — from her show before. [Perez, Mirror, Drudge]

Toby Young: Sex and the City Depicts An "Essentially Pre-Feminist Society"

Jessica — Mon, 12 May 2008 15:30:00 EDT

One of the things that stuck in my craw about the Sarah Jessica Parker profile in New York Mag was when SJP claimed that Carrie didn't care about Big's money. "I really don't think that money was a criteria," Parker told writer Emily Nussbaum. "It never would have occurred to her to take money from a man." British writer and Candace Bushnell buddy argues that Carrie does indeed care about money. In fact, she and the other SatC heroines care so much about money that, Young writes, "once you remove the pixie dust of female camaraderie, contemporary New York emerges as an essentially pre-feminist society in which the courtship rituals are strikingly similar to those depicted in the novels of Jane Austen."

Young, the author of the memoir How To Lose Friends and Alienate People, continues:

[In New York] Women are second-class citizens who are expected to use their youth and beauty as commodities in order to secure their economic wellbeing. Sex and the City is set in this world, but it conceals its brutality behind a veneer of cocktails and laughter. In reality, female friendship is the first thing to be sacrificed in the cut-throat competition for rich husbands. To my mind, Sex and the City is the equivalent of one of those Soviet propaganda films in which the factory workers are depicted as happy, singing citizens of tomorrow. The truth is that women like Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda are wretched, unhappy and isolated. The key to their survival is not the sisterhood, but a combination of slimming pills and anti-depressants.

I think Young exaggerates a bit — he sounds like he was scorned by many of these ruthless husband hunters — but for the most part, I agree with him. Anytime one of the Sex and the City characters dated a man with bleak economic prospects she was ultimately punished. When Carrie dated Berger, the relationship ended because he couldn't deal with her monetary success and his relative literary failure. As for Miranda, her relationship failed with Steve when he was just a bartender with no ambition, but was revived when he became a successful bar owner, despite his middle class roots. Of course, most women want to date men who have the same level of education that they do, but why didn't any of the women ever date a teacher? Or someone who worked for a non-profit? The reason is pretty obvious. Even though Sarah Jessica Parker thinks that Carrie didn't care about her boyfriends' money, the glittering aura of wealth is part of the Sex world, and very much defines its social rules.

So Did It Teach Us Anything That Came In Useful Along The Way? [Guardian]

Cameron Diaz's Trick In A Box

Anna — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 10:28:19 EDT

*Inspired by Shirley MacLaine's assertion that the best parts for actresses fall into one of the above categories.
Cameron Diaz is set to flex her vocal chords and, we imagine, Achilles tendons: The Shrek star has signed onto star in The Box, a Ring-like horror film in which she will play "a young woman given a mysterious box by a stranger [and] told that certain things will happen depending on which buttons she presses," reports Variety. In other casting news, Megan Fox has just signed onto appear in the film adaptation of the Toby Young memoir How To Lose Friends And Alienate People. The Angelina Jolie "lookalike" will be playing "a young Hollywood starlet getting her first taste of fame." (What does "fame" taste like? Hard-core drug use and blood-filled vials!)

Cameron Diaz To Star In 'The Box [Variety]
Fox Making 'Friends' For Weide Pic [HollywoodReporter]