`Loser’ weak teen movie by Heckerling

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In theaters

LOSER. 93 minutes. Rated PG-13; written and directed by Amy Heckerling.

When you’ve written and directed two of the best, most honest comedies about what it means to be a teen-ager at the end of the 20th century — 1982’s “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” and 1996’s “Clueless” — the expectations for your insight into teen culture at the turn of the new century is about as high as it gets.

Admittedly, it can’t be an easy gig to encapsulate and understand all the peculiarities of Generation Y, but if you’re going to try — and especially if you’re name is Amy Heckerling — the effort has to be better than the standard teen-age fare Hollywood keeps hauling into theaters.

The good news here is that Heckerling’s latest, “Loser,” is better than most of today’s teen-age films. The bad news? It’s nowhere near as great as her previous two efforts.

“Loser,” which is being marketed as a teen comedy, isn’t a comedy at all. It’s actually a romantic drama with one or two funny moments tossed in to spark the film’s misleading trailer.

Based on Heckerling’s college years, when the cash poor writer-director was forced to be creative when raising funds for tuition and living expenses, the film recalls this week’s other teen release, “The In Crowd,” and countless other teen-oriented films, in that it follows a disenfranchised outsider who doesn’t fit in.

In this case, that outsider is Paul Tanneck (Jason Biggs), a bright, likable dork from a small town who snags a scholarship to NYU, where his nasty, unlikable roommates immediately cast him as a loser because of his bad hair, floppy hat, unconventional looks and klutzy ways.

Enter Dora Diamond (Mena Suvari), a cute misfit involved in a messy relationship with her snotty, verbally abusive English professor (Greg Kinnear in a terrible performance), and it doesn’t take much to figure out where this film is going. Unlike “Fast Times” and “Clueless,” “Loser” leaves no lasting impression. Two films are occurring here at once — the charming, budding romance between Dora and Paul, which is sweet and should have been the only story told, and the drunken, druggy scenes of college life that only serve as an annoying distraction.

Worse, “Loser” follows “The In Crowd” in that it seems to exist only to sell its soundtrack; throughout, the film is peppered with so many strategically placed songs, it’s often unclear just who’s telling the story — Heckerling or the songwriters.

And that, for fans of Heckerling, is unacceptable, the sort of laziness that kills a film whose director should have turned only to herself, not to pop culture, to mine the truth out of her characters’ lives.

Grade: C-

On video

THE BEACH. 120 minutes. Rated R; directed by Danny Boyle. Written by John Hodge.

After sinking with the Titanic, Leonardo DiCaprio has now washed up on “The Beach,” director Danny Boyle’s attractive yet vapid adaptation of Alex Garland’s 1997 best-selling novel.

The film, just like the boring, disenfranchised Gen-Xers it follows, is superficial schlock, a flashy attempt to take Leo out of the mainstream and drop him straight into the deep blue lagoon of something pretentious — and “meaningful.”

It doesn’t work, and that’s because Boyle can’t save Leo from taking himself — and his hype — too seriously.

Throughout this film of paradise found, threatened and lost on a remote Thai island, a clear struggle is underfoot here, one that has to do with the commercial appeal of DiCaprio’s pinup boy status, and the actor’s now-famous snubbing of that status.

Anyone in the know knows that Leo wants to grow, but with the actor demanding $20 million per film, which he earned for “The Beach,” Hollywood is only ever going to allow him to grow so much.

And that’s the problem with “The Beach” — Leo’s greed and the Hollywood machine. Growth, in Hollywood, means art, which, to the studios, means box office poison. It’s the rare art film that’s wrapped around a multimillion-dollar budget.

Still, Boyle comes out swinging, trying his best to please everyone. With his camera firmly fixed on DiCaprio’s naked chest, Boyle goes about the painful process of shooting John Hodge’s winded script, a troubled bit of confection of seen-that, read-that cliches that tries its damnedest to consider all the merit, danger and madness of fleeing human civilization — when, really, all it does to DiCaprio is to hurl him into another iceberg.

Grade: D+

WHAT PLANET ARE YOU FROM? 100 minutes. Rated R; directed by Mike Nichols. Written by Garry Shandling, Michael Leeson, Ed Solomon and Peter Tolan.

Director Mike Nichols obviously set his phasers on “stun” when he made “What Planet Are You From?” a moldy little piece of sci-fi cheese that has the stink of failure all over it.

The film features a planet populated solely with men who are so evolved, they have no emotions and no genitalia, which apparently shrunk and fell off through thousands of years of cloning and disuse. (Men, take note.)

A quick glance at the credits confirms the film wasn’t produced by the members of the National Organization for Women, and that turns out to be the biggest surprise in a film that makes the fatal mistake of also neutering its comedy.

But poor Mike Nichols. What was the director of “The Graduate,” “Silkwood,” “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” and “Carnal Knowledge” thinking to make this, a film that fits one of its male aliens — Garry Shandling, of all people — with a humming, mechanical phallus before sending him to Earth so he can mate with a woman (Annette Bening) and thus begin a fierce takeover of our planet?

It’s difficult to know what Nichols saw in the script, which took no fewer than four writers — including Shandling — to pipe in from Mars, but since Nichols has directed so many good films, we’ll give him the benefit of the doubt here. This could, after all, be one of those films whose concept seemed funny on paper, but translated to screen in ways that would make even a Martian see red.

Grade: D

Christopher Smith is the Bangor Daily News film critic. His reviews appear Monday and Thursday in the NEWS, and Tuesday and Thursday on NEWS CENTER at 5:30 and NEWS CENTER at 11.

THE VIDEO CORNER

Renting a video? NEWS film critic Christopher Smith can help. Below are his grades of recent releases in video stores.

Drowning Mona — C- Magnolia — A- Angela’s Ashes — B- The Ninth Gate — C+ Ride with the Devil — C- What Planet Are You From? — D The Whole Nine Yards — B+ All About My Mother — A Down to You — D The Hurricane — A- My Dog Skip — B+ Scream 3 — B- Hanging Up — F The Talented Mr. Ripley — A Scream 3 — B- Anna and the King — A- Sweet and Lowdown — A- Topsy-Turvy — A Bicentennial Man — D+ Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo — C- The Emperor and the Assassin — B- The Green Mile — A Light it Up — C+ Play it to the Bone — D+ The Third Miracle — D Girl, Interrupted — B Miss Julie — C Next Friday — B- Man on the Moon — C- Snow Falling on Cedars — C American Movie — A Eye of the Beholder — F The End of the Affair — B+ Felicia’s Journey — B+ Sleepy Hollow — B- The World is Not Enough — B+ American Beauty — A Bringing Out the Dead — B-