Tagline: "It's Monday morning, Bridget has woken up with a headache, a hangover and her boss."

Length: 97 minutes
MPAA Rating: R for language and some strong sexuality

A rather ordinary-looking young woman is lying in bed with her handsome new lover when the telephone rings. She picks up the phone and says to the caller, "Bridget Jones, wanton sex goddess with a very bad man between her thighs." Then she listens a moment before continuing, "Mum. Hi." This is the kind of humor you’re in for when the British romantic comedy "Bridget Jones’s Diary" is at its best.

Set in London, the movie is about contemporary urban thirty-somethings looking for romance, and Renee Zellweger is memorable in the title role. I laughed hard and often during the first half, and most of the slower second half was reasonably amusing, but I would have been happier if the film were a few minutes shorter. The romance is very stylized in the movie, and at no time did I have the impression that any of the characters were physically attracted to each other.

Bridget Jones (Zellweger) is a ditsy 32-year-old single woman who meets an attractive attorney named Mark Darcy (Colin Firth) at a party. Moments later she overhears him characterize her as a "verbally incontinent spinster who smokes like a chimney, drinks like a fish, and dresses like her mother." This incident causes her to resolve to lose weight, cut down on cigarettes and alcohol, and get a man in her life.

Bridget works at a publishing house, where she’s involved in supporting the launch of a book called "Kafka’s Motorbike," and soon she begins a sexual relationship with her boss Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant). She has great fun at first, but when the relationship hits a rough spot, she quits the publishing house and takes a new job as a reporter on a television show called "Sit Up, Britain." Meanwhile, Bridget’s mother leaves her father and has an affair with a TV shopping channel host.

The movie has a light touch when it shows the slightly overweight Bridget facing the dilemma of which underpants to wear when trying to seduce her handsome boss. She decides to pass up wearing sexy panties and instead wears large, plain underpants designed to make her look thinner. But her choice leads to embarrassment when her boss gets amorous and discovers her unattractive underwear. Later, with a different man she avoids making the same mistake by donning sexy panties, which she calls "genuinely tiny knickers," but this leads to a different problem when she runs out into the street in them.

The special features on the DVD are mildly interesting. On the "Behind-the-Scenes Featurette" we get to meet first-time director Sharon Maguire and also Helen Fielding, who wrote the bestselling novel on which the movie is based. The DVD also contains an audio commentary by Maguire and four of the newspaper columns that Fielding wrote that eventually went into the novel. Also on the DVD are seven deleted scenes and two music videos.

Selected Special Features on the DVD:

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