Loser (PG-13, 2000)

In LOSER, Jason Biggs and Mena Suvari play Paul and Dora, freshmen at NYU. Paul has three roommates who think of college as a four-year party. Dora is desperate for money, so she takes a job as a waitress in a strip club and sleeps in Grand Central Station (after paying a homeless woman to tell her mother that she is sleeping in a dorm). And she's having an affair with a selfish and egotistical professor (Greg Kinnear). Paul and Dora seem to be destined for each other, but will they get together?

When a movie's on-screen explanation about what happens to the characters after it ends contains a typo ("aide" instead of "aid"), we get some idea of why it seems that so little attention was paid to other details like story and character. We see right away what a sweetheart Paul is, at his family's party celebrating his scholarship. Paul dances with his little sister and slips the money his grandfather urges on him back into his grandfather's own pocket. And we see right away how nice Dora is, putting ice on Paul's knee when he falls down the classroom steps. Biggs and Suvari are very appealing and make a great couple. We settle back, waiting for them to find out what we already know, that they're perfect for each other.

Unfortunately, it's a frustrating and annoying hour and a half until we get there. The other characters are all tedious and the plot developments are either lame "but I thought"-type misunderstandings or lamer lifts from better movies. The movie has an unfinished quality, as though someone was trying to create structure through editing that was not there in the script. There are several unnecessary cameos (David Spade, Andy Dick, Everclear) that seem to have been thrown in as an effort to pick things up. A lot of the plot twists and details are so dumb or unbelievable, even within the context of romantic comedy, that they are just distracting.