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Like the title, everything in "50 Ways To Leave Your Lover" is swiped or cribbed from another, greater source.In this monstrosity, Paul Schneider, plays the main character Owen, a weedy author of pot boiler murderer biographies who aspires to become a legitimate, serious author. Far from being a sympathetic schlep who we can sympathize with for falling short of his dreams, Owen comes off as a petty, whiny, vindictive loser who does more to sabotage his own efforts than the supposedly cynical, money-is-everything city that surrounds him.Given an opportunity to enter the world of legitimate literature by writing the biography of a scientist, Owen for some reason feels the need to leave the city in the rudest way possible. Ostensibly, this is so he will never be tempted to come back but it comes off as a contrived way to allow our hero to scandalize, verbally brutalize, and otherwise act in a horribly anti-social way to everyone that he has been associating with over the past few years. But then, just as he has burned every single bridge imaginable, he meets and falls madly in love with the girl of his dreams. Oh, the humanity...Aside from some highly derivative dialog (you'll notice some Albert Brooks-esquire lines and deliveries in there) there is a scene involving lime Jell-O that will have you screaming, "That's EXACTLY like the lobster scene in "Annie Hall!" None of Owen's pranks, and the situations that arise from them, are particularly original, clever, or compelling and so when you come to the highly predictable end you are almost relieved. That is, ALMOST. A likelier scenario is that you will be left feeling gypped of your time and money, with your intelligence thoroughly insulted.
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