The Brewhaha on..."Loser"

Dora:  “I hate Goths, I hate poor people, because they tend to be full of hate themselves.  I hate people with cell phones, like that guy over there.”
Jason Biggs:  “You just hate everything, don’t you?”
Dora:  “Well, not you, not you.  So what do you hate?”
Jason Biggs:  “I…I don’t hate anything.”
-Our couple, in a nutshell

 “ ‘Loser’ is about Paul, a college student of almost surreal niceness, who falls in love with Dora, a college student who persists in the wrong romantic choice almost to the point of perversion.”
-Roger Ebert

“Biggs and Suvari […] make a charming couple, and it's nice to see a youth love story where both participants aren't rich and popular. But Loser is supposed to be a comedy, and only Kinnear's scenes as the pompous prof are good for a giggle; the film's abrupt ending also leaves a less-than-satisfying taste.”
-TheMovieReport.com

“We can’t find the page you requested in this location.  The page may have moved or expired.”
-One of two positive reviews I found on Rotten Tomatoes

Just to be clear, I have never watched “American Pie,” or any of the “American Pie” series of “films.”  I hate Stiffler with a passion, I’m not crazy about that dad who keeps popping up, and Jason Biggs I’m more or less indifferent to.  I’m sure there’s a nice “message” behind those movies, and I’m sure if you look past that it’s actually pretty funny.  I’ve never really been interested in “teen movies” that are simply sitcoms stretched out into two and a half hours of your life, though.  “Oh, look, he just got his jimmy stuck in that pie!  This movie is a classic!  Oh, my, what’s that Stiffler doing to his grandma now?”

In the case of this week (month?)’s movie, though, the alternative is the 2000 film “Loser,” a prospect for a Lifetime Original starring Jason Biggs as…Jason Biggs, the same awkward, doggedly-nice, down-to-earth guy from “American Pie.”  Again, I make this statement assuming he played that sort of character in “American Pie,” having only seen the ending where he tracks down the redhead at band camp to engage in a sword fight to the death passionate teenage kiss with her. 

I also make the above statement upon noticing that the only other guys he hangs out with during the movie are the kind of college douchebags who are as far from “doggedly-nice” and “down-to-earth” as a character in a teen love story can possibly get.  They start by gluing together all of the pages in his textbook (“Do you have any idea how long that took?”) and then just keep snowballing from sitcom rivals into outright Voldemorts.  Within the first thirty or so minutes, I wanted to reach through my TV screen, shoot them, napalm them, and then stick their heads on pikes as a warning to all other college douchebags. 

I remember thinking to myself, “Well, maybe it’ll turn out they’re not so bad.  Maybe it’s just part of a well-intentioned, if gloriously misguided, plan to make Biggs’s character ‘cool,’ or initiate him into a fraternity.  Maybe these college douchebags are just noble sheep in wolf’s clothing along the lines of Severus Snape.”  Nope.  They’re just your run-of-the-mill college douchebags who act like douchebags because, as Alfred once said, “Some men just want to watch the world burn.”

All of this is done to highlight just how nice Jason Biggs is by comparison.  Except we don’t really need to know that.  We already know he’s a sympathetic character.  Despite the movie’s ever-present attempts to show how much of a klutz he is, we are also shown how good he is with pets and kids, how much work he puts into studying, how caring he is with the lead female.  Everyone else cheats, but he doesn’t.  Everyone else cheats on her and abandons her.  He freaking takes her off the streets and practically nurses her back to health, and then professes his undying love for her.  Compared to this bewildering movie universe of college douchebags, he’s the freaking messiah.

He’s so super-duper special and cosmically, impossibly nice that he freaking gives this sweet girl from the wrong side of the tracks to the only other romantic rival in the movie, the college professor she’s apparently been sleeping with for some time now.   This professor’s sole virtue seems to be that, besides the fact he’s sleeping with a college student, he’s slightly less douchey than the other characters.  He’s also smarter than everyone else, judging by the fact that he’s a senior professor of literature at the ripe old age of thirty-four and he has the female lead falling head over heels for him.

Now, at the end of the day, this probably isn’t the worst movie.  If nothing else, it’s the age-old tale of boy meets girl, boy falls in love with girl, the end.  Modern iterations try to throw in all sorts of twists and turns between “boy meets girl” and “the end,” but the story’s always the same.  The best tales of romance can do away with a lot of those annoying twists and turns and just try to give us a convincing story of what happens when boy meets girl, like with “(500) Days of Summer” or “Juno.”  Or “Shrek.”

The ultimate failing of “Loser” is that it tries to set up its main conflict between the “wrong” and “right” couple while at the same time deflating a lot of the tension before it’s even resolved.  This is probably the failing of many a romance film, where both characters are screaming out a resounding “I love you!” without anyone to calmly answer back, “I know.”

So overall, is “Loser” a good film?  Well, if you like teen movies about total douchebags and completely avoidable love triangles, then by all means, go for it.

Note:  The Brewsky is an enthusiastic contributor and movie reviewer who never calls.  Ever.