About two pounds of fatty tissue and 34 lactiferous ducts. Nothing more than modified sweat glands. Platypuses don't have them; the females just ooze a nutrient-enriched sweat from their bellies. Most of the three or four thousand cultures we have information on don't care whether they're big or small, or whether anybody else sees them or not. So why do bosoms cause so much trouble? Dr. Saunders (Schwimmer) is a recent med school graduate. Dr. Larson (Cooper) is an older reconstructive surgeon. They couldn't be more mismatched. Larson is conservative and arrogant. He wears suits and ties. Saunders is an inventive Schmuck with a droopy face and childishly peeved voice that's all the funnier when it tries to express outrage. They become partners and Larson funds Saunders' invention, a kind of Blue Ice for breasts. But no plastic surgeon becomes an overnight star. Larson and Saunders are ridiculed by other staff at the Texas Medical Center -- "beauticians". Larson sits alone at a party, drunk, and is finally approached by another doctor who gestures at an empty chair. "Anybody using this?" he asks. "Help yourself," replies Larson. The other guy picks up the empty chair and walks off with it.Saunders, though, is a salesman. It was infra-dig for doctors to advertise. But Saunders implants an ad in the local paper, so to speak, that generates enough business to make both of them filthy rich. Larson starts to hog all the credit. The two men go their separate ways.On his own, Saunders forges ahead with the willing compliance of his patients. "So when can we schedule?", they ask him eagerly. His patients begin to speak in public of the empowerment they now feel with their bigger bosoms. And the bosoms get bigger and bigger. They go from around 200 ccs to double that. Some of the breasts become monstrous soccer balls, so grotesquely out of proportion that the patients have trouble finding clothes. The dissatisfied, the distorted, the bereft flock to Saunders to be reborn. Saunders gets into the 70s thing. Disco, coke, a Playboy mansion of his own. His maid takes a visitor through the bunny-filled 14-million-square-foot megabarn and points out the "real marble" floors and mentions that "there are lots of impressionist paintings -- from France." Saunders sucks fruit-juice cocktails through a twirled neon-green plastic straw. He's Citizen Saunders.Then the downhill plunge. We are by now into the age of Oprah and Phil. A handful of ex-patients who have gotten diseases such as lupus and rheumatoid arthritis turn up on TV and sensationalize their illnesses, blaming them on Dr. Saunders and his damme implants. Feminists claim that before their implants they were treated with respect at the bank. Now their fellow employees whistle at them and ogle them. The lawyers descend on the problem like a flock of vultures. Trouble with your implants? "Call 1-800-RUPTURE." Suits are brought against the company manufacturing the implants, although the link between illness and implants is more emotional than scientific. Both doctors businesses bite the dust. Larson dies of a heart attack, Saunders when his Porsche is mangled by an 18-wheeler.It shouldn't be funny but it is. Both of these guys are rapacious in their own separate ways -- Larson for money and fame, Saunders for the satisfaction of his stimulus hunger. They're as transparent in their needs as Harpo Marx. And the poor guys can't escape the breasts. The breasts are all around them, haunting them. They can't go to a private club without some ex-patient lap dancing and thrusting her hypermastic chest into their faces. Their eggs, sunnyside up, look like two breast with nipples. A birthday cake for Larson looks like it's decorated with a simulacrum of Mt. Everest, with K-2 right next door. The bottom of Saunders' swimming pool is decorated with a painting of a pair of breasts. And there is humor in the dialog as well. At the beginning, Saunders has finally found his first volunteer, a sexy young woman willing to have her breasts molded in plastic. She stands there wrinkling her nose with distaste at Saunders' modest apartment. "I thought doctors were supposed to -- have money," she comments acidly. Saunders is meanwhile plastering her breasts with goo, smoothing the stuff, squeezing her breasts. "How about after?" he asks. "Maybe we could go bowling."The movie is really quite amusing, and it's a good lesson in sociology too. The human brain seems to prefer simple solutions to complicated ones. Thus, for instance, a lot of viewers are likely to blame Drs. Larson and Saunders for the whole crazy fad of huge breasts. But, simple as such apportionment of blame may be, it would be wrong. It takes two to tango -- or in this case, many more than two. The women are only too happy to have their breasts change. First, a little bigger, then gargantuan, then smaller again, and maybe a little bigger next time. But it's not only the women who are to blame. They operate within a cultural setting that in some ways they see as demanding a perfection of them that they simply can't offer. And who's behind that culture? Men? Well, yes, in a way too. But men in other cultures don't ordinarily care whether their mates have big breasts or not. Our own men didn't either, back in the 1920s, when flappers bound their bosoms to make them smaller. Something rotten in the culture? If so, then all cultures are rotten because they all decorate their bodies somehow -- with paint, tattoos, lip rings, neck bands, or scars.The issue the movie really deals with is not breasts at all, but human nature. This could be the story of the hula hoop. That's what makes it funny. We can afford to laugh because, although it is ourselves we are laughing at, we're being ridiculed in a movie that disguises itself as a story about chests.

The fact that women respond more positively to this film than men is sad for two reasons: 1)"Breast Men" exploits the hell out of breasts, 2)It places the blame for breast implants, including their problems, entirely on women--who want to look sexy for men--not on social pressures. "Breast Men" could have made its point--that women want men to notice their breasts and often resolve to implants--just as effectively with only a tenth of the amount of breasts shown. The filmmaker's used this theme as their opportunity to showcase female nudity. Kubrick did it in "Eyes Wide Shut." I'm a male hetero and even I think the film went too far. I mean, did we really need the stripping and the coke-off-the-tit scenes? As for who to place the blame on for the breast implant controversy, the film clearly argues that it is the women. Schwimmer doesn't have to do any scheming to come up with the implant idea--he just notices his neighbor's concern over her own breast size. And after the ad for breast implants is put out, women flock to the doctor's office. Furthermore, it is a woman who pushes Schwimmer into giving her grotesquely large breast implants, not some horny guy. In addition, all of the talking breasts and the woman on the Phil Donahue Show make it clear that they want or had breast implants for their own personal satisfaction, not someone else's. Even ordinary women, like the one in the studio audience, are obsessed with having large breasts. Breast implants are portrayed as a negative thing only in that they can be hazardous to a woman's health. Neither the morality nor the objectifying consequence they have on women are addressed for more than 5 seconds. I'd like to sell the Bay Bridge to any woman who thinks "Breast Men" takes a serious, critical look at the world of breast implants. If women do think so, however, and agree with the film's blaming of women as the ones responsible for society's fascination with big breasts, then that reveals a sad truth about women that I would rather believe isn't true. Women in this film value themselves entirely on their breast size, and if that's true in reality--as the female response to this film seems to indicate--women can't blame us men for seeing them as nothing more than a pair of breasts.

I watched this film with the view of learning more about the story than the quality of the film itself, but was pleasantly surprised. The black humour is subtle, but enjoyable. David Schwimmer starts out in his usual "little lost boy"-type routine but develops nicely into the role. Plus, it's always nice to see the gorgeous Lisa Marie on screen.

I usually hate made-for-TV biopics -- arguably the sloppiest, most formulaic, and most boring genre of film. This witty picture about the inventors of the silicone breast implant is an exception: it sticks to the formula, but it always keeps its tongue in its cheek. Filled with visual jokes and inspired casting (Lyle Lovett as a chemist!), it's about as good as this kind of picture can be -- which is a lot better than I thought.