THE weather says it's winter, the calendar says it's spring - and "Anger Management," an often hilarious crowd-pleaser teaming Adam Sandler and Jack Nicholson, both returning to familiar territory after their recent ventures into art films, sure looks like the first blockbuster hit of the summer season.

That's not to say it's a wonderful movie.

Like many of Sandler's films, it's a collection of inspired moments set amid juvenile penis-and-fart jokes, pointless cameos, and a schmaltzy ending you can see coming at least half an hour away.

But at the same time, it's great fun watching Nicholson, after subdued turns in "The Pledge" and "About Schmidt," hamming up a storm as Buddy Rydell, a certifiably mad shrink.

Buddy is assigned by a judge (the late Lynne Thigpen) to help Dave Buznick (Sandler), a hapless designer of fashions for overweight cats, deal with his anger issues after he's thrown off a plane for air rage.

Like other Sandler characters (including the one in Paul Thomas Anderson's pretentious and offputting "Punch-Drunk Love"), Dave's rage stems partly from his inability to stick up for himself.

Buddy's unorthodox treatment is largely devoted to assertiveness training through a series of confrontations.

First, Buddy moves in with a stunned Dave, with whom he proceeds to share a bed in an episode shamelessly swiped from "Planes, Trains and Automobiles."

Then Buddy starts playing head games, forcing Dave to confront his homophobia by having him pick up a transvestite prostitute (Woody Harrelson).

And then Dave - who faces jail time if he doesn't go along with Buddy's increasingly irrational scenarios - has to cheat on his sweet, poetry-writing fiancée Linda (Marisa Tomei in a thankless role) by propositioning a woman (a quite funny Heather Graham) in a bar.

Having determined that Dave's problems stemmed from having his tiny endowment exposed by a pants-pulling grade-school bully, Buddy goads our hero into a fight with the former bully (John C. Reilly), who is now a Buddhist monk.

These are all amusing episodes, though perhaps not as funny as Buddy forcing Dave to sing "I Feel Pretty" in a car on the Queensboro Bridge, or Buddy - in a nod to a famous real-life incident involving Nicholson - smashing a car windshield with a golf club.

Less amusing is the dragged-out climax, which has Buddy romancing Linda as Dave seethes.

The film's direction is attributed to Peter Segal ("Nutty Professor II") and the screenplay to the previously unproduced David Dorfman, but the real auteur here is obviously Sandler.

As usual, Sandler tries to have it both ways with homophobic humor and lots of gay characters - including Luis Guzman as a flaming Latino, Kevin Nealon as Dave's gay lawyer, and a pair of lesbian porn stars who are constantly kissing.

He also drags in such dubious cinematic luminaries as Rudy Giuliani, basketball coach Bobby Knight and assorted Yankees - along with John Turturro, who is actually funny as a group-therapy member whose post-traumatic stress stems from the day-long war in Grenada.

"Anger Management" is a ragged piece of filmmaking, but the odds are you'll have as good a time watching it as Nicholson and Sandler seemed to have making it.