A nicely acted film that is more fun to watch than to think about. It’s literate, intelligent, very funny, and strangely false. This film stars Michael Douglas as a very stoned, successful novelist with terror in his heart. His younger wife (#4?) leaves him. He teaches writing and has, in his class, a disturbed and brilliant writer played marvelously by Toby Maguire. He also has a pregnant girlfriend (the U chancellor, played by Frances Macdormand) and a wacko gay (bi?) book agent played well by Robert Downey. The girlfriend is married to a stodgy English prof with a thing for Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe. Theft, novels, writing blocks, fear, sex, drugs, all come up in this story. But the women all ring false. You know why she wants him: he’s sexy, debauched, and loves the richness of language and wordplay at an intense personal level. Why does he care at all about her?. Who knows. None of it rings true. Oh well, we both liked it a lot while we watched it, and there are lots of genuinely laugh-out-loud lines. Smartly written. Best thing about it, Douglas plays a burnout really well He pushes himself into the debauched and does it credibly. Bogus ending doesn’t work. It’s utterly false and almost spoils the film for me.