A men-are-from-Mars-women-are-from-Venus romantic comedy, a substantial subject and amply amusing. It tells you a lot about the film, though, that the gist of it may be summed up in the title of a pop-psych best seller. Our Martian man, a middle-school math teacher, is also (note the year: 2003) a Boston Red Sox fan who emphatically brings home to you the term's derivation from fanatic: his apartment is wall-to-wall team collectibles (baseball-cap lamp, baseball-glove telephone, and so on), right down to the New York Yankee toilet paper. Our Venusian woman, an up-and-coming corporate dynamo, is defined nonetheless by her manlessness at age "twenty-ten," is habitually disappointed in her relationships with her male mirror-images, is willing out of desperation to give an uncompetitive Nice Guy a try, is even willing to assimilate in toto his lore and legend of Fenway Park (the Green Monster, Pesky's Pole, the Curse of the Bambino, "Bucky Friggin' Dent," Buckner, etc.), while expecting no comparable contortions on the part of the guy. A pair of two-dimensional cutouts; shadowless stereotypes. Any psychological interest will have to be transferred onto the filmmakers themselves, in their setting-up of frighteningly confident and successful female characters and then vengefully subjecting the entire sex to just-for-fun physical abuse: beaned by a football; pukingly food-poisoned; dropped twenty feet to the floor at an indoor rock-climbing exhibit; knocked flat on the back by a punch at the gym; knocked unconscious by a foul ball. In fairness, this is pretty toned down for a Farrelly brothers comedy. (And with Matthew Leonetti doing the camerawork, the image has been considerably toned up.) Presumably the softening of tone owes to the fact that the script was placed in other hands, those of Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel, who must have had to rewrite on the fly when the 2004 playoffs yielded a Happy Ending that even Hollywood would have scarcely dared dream up. Jimmy Fallon, Drew Barrymore. (2005) — Duncan Shepherd