LOVE AND OTHER DRUGS: disease of the week plus nakedness

Imagine LOVE AND OTHER DRUGS as a long dance to a familiar tune. The dancers start out attempting to impose different steps but find themselves inexorably drawn back to the more traditional moves.and by the final bars they're dancing the steps the tune was written to be danced to.

Which is a roundabout way of saying LOVE AND OTHER DRUGS tries to put a different spin on the age old boy-meets-girl story but winds up right back where it had struggled to avoid going. Jake Gyllenhaal - looking like a ridiculously sculpted model in a fashion ad in Vanity Fair - is the boy. Anne Hathaway - all eyes and teeth - is the girl.
Boy meets girl, boy and girl bang like a stable door, boy falls in love with girl, girl rejects boy, boy tries to win girl back etc etc. All this is further complicated by girl being in the early stages of Parkinson's Disease and using her illness as a reason to avoid emotional entanglements, and the boy being a shallow, smooth, screw'em and leave 'em, career obsessed type.
Other than the excessive nudity on the part of the two stars LOVE AND OTHER DRUGS really isn't that different from the countless young-love-meets-disease-of-the-week movies churned out by US tv since the early 1970s. There's tears, laughter, broken hearts and gut-wrenching decisions in profusion (plus the invention of Viagra) as the story works its way to it's disappointingly predictable conclusion, so sit back, lower your expectations, and prepare to be entertained in an 'it was okay' kind of way..