What the world needs now is a lot of things, but I suspect that one of them is not another movie about growing up in the Fifties. The motivation for the film's central character, Jack Twiller (ably played by Chris Young), is getting a date for the prom and, of course, getting laid. Jack's dream girl is Lily (Josie Bissett), a blond tease attached to the beefy school thug Angelo Gabooch (Beau Dremann). So Jack spends time goofing off with his buddies Crutch (Keith Coogan) and Floyd (John Cameron Mitchell). The boys soup up a jalopy, worship James Dean movies, dance to pop tunes of the era, measure their dicks with a ruler, get drunk, wreck their parents' houses and, well, you name the cliché — it's here.

William Kotzwinkle, author of the acclaimed novelization of "E.T.," adapted this script from his book "Jack in the Box." But the film's virtues are, at best, modest. For Kotzwinkle and Robert Shaye — the New Line studio chief who is making a sincere but inauspicious debut as a director — the Fifties strike a personal chord. Their nostalgia is underlined by a framing device showing the middle-aged Jack (Michael McKean) reflecting on his time of innocence. Jack never did get to go all the way with Lily back in 1956, but he did find an unlikely friend in tough-girl Gina (a very fine Tricia Leigh Fisher). The model for this kind of memory piece remains Barry Levinson's "Diner" (1982), which shook Fifties stereotypes for signs of life and present-day relevance. It's too bad Kotzwinkle and Shave prefer to see the past as rosy instead of real. "Book of Love" leaves you feeling buried in bland.

“All Along the Watchtower”

Jimi Hendrix got hold of Bob Dylan's early John Wesley Harding tapes and in late 1967 recorded a version of "All Along the Watchtower" with the Experience in London. Dissatisfied with that first development, Hendrix brought those tapes with him to New York in early 1968 when he began work on Electric Ladyland. Eddie Kramer, Hendrix's engineer at the time, told Rolling Stone that Hendrix "was still looked upon by his basically white audience as the mammoth black guitar hero. There was a constant fight within him to expand himself." Hendrix's successful take on Dylan's work has long been recognized by the songwriter. "I liked Jimi Hendrix's record of this and ever since he died I've been doing it that way," Dylan wrote in the liner notes to his Biograph box set. "Strange how when I sing it, I always feel it's a tribute to him in some kind of way."