Seeing Other People (review)

It's kinda like an episode of some imaginary HBO series about love and sex and the best ways to screw it all up -- hardly surprising, as it comes from TV vets Maya Forbes (The Larry Sanders Show) and Wallace Wolodarsky (The Simpsons) -- and that's just fine. This small-scale flick manages a kind of knowing intimacy in its only slightly exaggerated characters and situations, like how we come to feel that the people on the TV shows we love are something like friends. Ed (Jay Mohr: Simone) and Alice (Julianne Nicholson: Passion of Mind) are barreling toward their wedding day when she decides she hadn't sowed enough wild oats before they met -- she wants some wild, meaningless sex before she settles down, and Ed reluctantly agrees. It's a recipe for disaster, of course, but even as things spiral rather sitcomishly out of control, there's a thread of honesty and reality running through it all, about how jealousy can infect us and regrets can haunt us and how precarious even the most solid relationship can be. Oh, and it's funny, too, in that head-smacking way that makes you wonder how your own creative romantic self-sabotage measures up against Ed and Alice's.