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- The title. How to Lose Your Lover, retitled (barely) from the original 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover, is far too reminiscent of 10 Thngs I Hate About You and the appallingly bad How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days. This film doesn't actually resemble either of those movies, but its too familiar a title to make people run to the cineplex.
- The star. Paul Schneider? Who is that? Well, you may have seen him as the cop in The Family Stone (another loser of a movie). And though he's genial enough, he comes a cross a bit like Liev Schreiber lite.
- The plot. Here's the gist: Owen (Schneider) is a quickie writer of celebrity biographies. They sell well, but the work is demeaning to the point of near suicide. Owen decides to give it all up and write a 'serious' biography of a Russian physicist, and he's dumping L.A. in the meantime, a process that means alienating all his friends, selling all his belongings, and otherwise ensuring that he won't wimp out and move back here, because he'll have nothing to come home to in the end. But wouldn't you know it, on the way out he mights Miss Right (Jennifer Westfeldt) at the airport! And he gets sucked into a romance with her. Intent on finding out if she's not long-term material, he pulls out all the stops to show her his absolute worst -- taking the bus instead of driving, meeting her parents on the first date, introducing her to his psycho friends (the ones left, anyway). Only nothing works. Cute, yes, but this was an episode of Seinfeld.
- The setting. Another movie of failed romance in Los Angeles? Ugh. You can almost hear the festival buyers groaning.
- The ending. Absolutely, hopelessly untenable. Ruins the movie.
- Tori Spelling.
Aside from all that, How to Lose Your Lover is actually a quite charming little film that's easy to watch (mainly for Westfeldt and a nasty Poppy Montgomery, playing Owen's best friend and a psychotic slut). Its answers to questions about love and relationships are either empty or just wrong, but the movie can be enjoyed on its sitcommish merits quite amicably before that aforementioned bad ending arrives. This isn't date night material, but it's a decent lazy-in-bed film to watch with your significant other. (If you're a heterosexual woman, you'll probably appreciate him all the more afterwards.)
