Even if you profess a deep like for Amanda Peet (I do) and Ashton Kutcher (the jury's still out), seven years of them is a bit much. That's what you get packed into two hours of A Lot Like Love, which is a lot like a lot of other romantic comedies that make two lovers of friends (When Harry Met Sally, Serendipity) and a lot not like the two witty and wise Richard Linklater movies — Before Sunrise and Before Sunset — that span the relationship between Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy for nearly a decade and leave you wanting more.

Directed without personality by Nigel Cole (Calendar Girls) from a killingly familiar script by Colin Patrick Lynch, the movie ambles backward in time, ting seven years earlier when Oliver (Kutcher) and Emily (Peet) meet on a plane from Los Angeles to New York. She lures him into a toilet for a quickie. He reacts by wanting more. "Don't ruin it," she says, leaving to get involved with a lot of losers who dump her until she finds one (Jeremy Sisto) to dump herself. Oliver spends so much time building his dot-com diaper business that he finds only one woman to dump him. Between affairs, Oliver and Emily lick each other's wounds and sometimes more than that — one night in the desert, Emily, now a photographer, takes a shot of them both naked standing on a rock. Is it art? I have my opinion. But as the film stopped counting back in years and switched to months, I panicked that it would slog on to weeks, hours and seconds before reaching its inevitable end. I was wrong. About A Lot Like Love leaving you wanting a lot less, I am right.

“Is It True”

As the British Invasion reached its peak in 1964, Brenda Lee went from Nashville to London to record one of her hardest-rocking hits, her perky vocal backed by a stuttering, squalling guitar. That guitar was played by session musician Jimmy Page, yet to skyrocket to fame with first the Yardbirds and then Led Zeppelin. "She said to me, 'I've come here to make a record with the British sound,'" remembered producer Mickie Most. "She felt she wouldn't get the same sound in Nashville because they're only just catching up on the British beat group sound of about six months ago."