Product Details

• Actors: Jason Biggs, Mena Suvari, Zak Orth, Thomas Sadoski, Jimmi Simpson
• Directors: Amy Heckerling
• Format: Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, NTSC
• Language: English
• Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
• Number of tapes: 1
• Studio: Sony Pictures
• VHS Release Date: May 8, 2001
• Run Time: 95 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (90 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B000051S30
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #48,123 in Video (See Bestsellers in Video)

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

Writer-director Amy Heckerling has a way with teen comedies, from Fast Times at Ridgemont High to Clueless and now Loser. She manages to take the clichés of life in school and spin them into cinematic gold. Part of her secret is that she genuinely seems to respect all of her characters, even the unsavory ones. In Loser, Paul Tannek (Jason Biggs from American Pie) is a farm-town boy who's gotten himself a scholarship to a fancy Manhattan college. He's worried that he's not going to fit in with the sophisticated city crowd. Well, he's right to worry. He doesn't fit in, which his three dorm-mates are quick to remind him. The only person he can talk to is Dora (Mena Suvari from American Beauty), a cocktail waitress-student who's having an affair with a pretentious lit teacher (Greg Kinnear).

Biggs is great in this movie, the perfect straight man, setting up jokes that wouldn't work without his reactions to them. In fact, the whole movie is so well-cast--Suvari is charming, Kinnear is entertainingly smug, the three dorm-mates are fun to dislike--that the actors, working in tandem with Heckerling, give a life to characters that in less talented hands would have been revealed as over-determined and exaggerated. Pardon the blurb, but it's true: Loser is a winner.--Andy Spletzer

From The New Yorker

Jason Biggs, the boy who had an encounter with a pastry in "American Pie," and Mena Suvari, who wanted to be perfect in "American Beauty," get matched up in a minor but pleASINg college-romance movie. Jason is an earnest fellow victimized by cheating undergraduate louts; Mena is a tough cookie, working her way through school, who has an affair with a smarmy young literature professor (Greg Kinnear). Except for the two heroes, everyone is caricatured (Kinnear is no better than a sitcom sleazebag), but some of the flip college idiom devised by writer-director Amy Heckerling is amusing, and the young stars, as they fumble their way to love, are often charming together. A movie for the tenderhearted only. Shot in the area around New York University. -David Denby
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Cute and entertaining, December 30, 2000

By	Karen Bierman Hirsh (Greenwich, CT) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I rented this movie on a snowy day along with several other films and was pleasantly surprised. I was looking for something light and fun and that is exactly what I got.

Jason Biggs, who played the charming but goofy lead in American Pie, is Paul a guy who moves from the mid-west to New York City to go to College and is immeadiately overwhelmed by "city" life. His roomates are horrible and only add to his inability to fit in.

In class Paul meets Dora, Mena Suvari - who was also in American Pie as well as American Beauty. As Paul gets to know Dora he begins to see that life in the big city is not all bad. Jason Biggs, Mena Suvari and Greg Kinnear were all good in this movie - the plot was not as strong as most of Amy Heckerling's past high school type comedy's such as Fast Time or Clueless but this film was still cute.

Loser would make a cute date film or would be good when you are looking for something light.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Mildly Entertaining- Good Chemistry Between Biggs and Suvari, August 19, 2005

By	Only-A-Child - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

This review is from: Loser (DVD)

Although "Loser" is a solid effort and is generally enjoyable, it was certainly not what director Amy Heckerling needed at that point in her career. After the great success of "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" and "Clueless" she pretty much went in the director dumper with this one. Ironically the problem was not her directing but her writing. Solid production could not entirely compensate for this flawed screenplay because the flaws are in the characters themselves, they are simply not believable.

This is usually fatal because it is hard for viewers to care about characters with whom they cannot identify. Fortunately for writer Heckerling, director Heckerling cast the best two actors in "American Pie", Jason Biggs and Mena Suvari, as her leads. They have such unexpectedly good chemistry together that you will yourself to believe in them, even if Paul is moronically nice and Dora is moronically moronic (her failure to connect the bad relationship dots for almost the entire film is not consistent with a character who is portrayed as extremely perceptive and self-aware). Suvari looks and even sounds like Jennifer Jason Leigh which may have you flashing back to "Fast Times".

Excellent performances by Biggs, Suvari, and Greg Kinnear (as Professor Alcott) save the day or at least salvage the film. They get little assistance from anyone else in Heckerling's cast (although Dan Ackroyd is decent in a small and very straight role) as the supporting players are either neutral or less than zero. Worst of all are they guys who play Paul's three roommates. They start out as typically "Party Hard" college students but overnight morph into date rape scum and academic blackmailers. Heckerling provides nothing to explain this transformation, which is especially strange because she includes early scenes intended to show that one of the roommates is sincerely trying to help Paul with his adjustment to college in the big city.

Heckerling based her "Clueless" screenplay on Jane Austin's "Emma". Franz Kafka is her reference point for "Loser"; a strange choice given Kafka famous line "women are traps which lie in wait for men everywhere, in order to drag them down into the finite". The choice of the Dora Diamond name is an obvious homage to Kafka's girlfriend Dora Dymant. The screenplay for "Loser" is not a total loss, it has good individual lines like: "I love self-loathing complaint rock you can dance to".

Perhaps the best scene is Heckerling's homage to the Berkeley fountain scene in "The Graduate" as the dejected Paul wonders around the city while the soundtrack plays Simon and Garfunkel's "Scarborough Fair". The rest of the soundtrack is also good.

Apparently Heckerling could not resist shooting herself in the foot at the very end as she included on-screen notes documenting the comeuppance received by each of the bad characters. Not only is this tired and unoriginal ("American Graffiti" and "Animal House" made use of this along with a high school film I judged last spring) but the notes themselves are not even mildly amusing.

Then again, what do I know? I'm only a child.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Seen "The Apartment"? Then You've Seen "Loser.", December 20, 2000

By	Matthew Weaver "cesarfaison" (Spokane) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

The plot of the movie starring Jack Lemmon and Shirley Maclaine, and the plot of the movie starring Jason Biggs and Mena Suvari are one and the same. Hapless loser (Lemmon, Biggs) gets picked on by the guys at work/roommates in college, while carrying a torch for pretty girl (Maclaine, Suvari) who's enmeshed in an affair with boss/college professor (Greg Kinnear in LOSER). When girl nearly overdoses, loser comes to rescue.

Not that it's a bad movie; there are worse things that could be remade. And Suvari's hot; too bad she'd married. But it's a shame more people in Hollywood can't be original.