Full of high hopes, I set the DVD loose in the player and prepare for the best. Through the first scenes involving far too many seconds of gratuitous male nudity of the the main character Peter Bretter (Jason Segel)isn't most male nudity in movies gratuitous?we both stay the course thinking, "Well, it's certainly not going to continue in this vein." We've just seen the initiating breakup scene, where Sarah (Kristen Bell) arrives to Peter's apartment to give him the bad news, and he starts crying standing there and running around in the altogether. In the next few weeks Peter thrashes about having bouts of depressionpersonally I don't see getting all broken up over this little Superficial Sarahand meaningless sex, which, again, doesn't have to be anywhere near that explicit to get the point across.

Indeed, if there's one main objection I want to make covering the entire film, it's that writer and/or director seem to want to make physically explicit every conceivable interaction among the charactersespecially scenes that might otherwise be humorous in subtlety and implication. We don't get to have any imagination.

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Brian Wright Copyright 2008