REVIEWED - A LOT LIKE LOVE: AN hour or so after the credits rolled on A Lot Like Love, I found myself tempted to return to the cinema to check if the film had started yet. Detailing seven years of brief encounters between two not-quite lovers, this attractively packaged romantic comedy plays like a lengthy prologue to a movie you probably don't want to see.
Unlike When Harry Met Sally, which begins with the two leads agreeing to cordially loathe one another, A Lot Like Love never satisfactorily explains why its heroes take so long to get properly hitched.
Amanda Peet's blithe adventuress and Ashton Kutcher's bumptious internet entrepreneur first meet up in the late 1990s outside LAX airport en route to the same flight to New York City. (We know it's the dark ages because people are still smoking in bars.)
After cementing their friendship by humping in the plane's lavatory, the two spend a happy day frolicking before a number of Woody Allen's favourite locations. Then, perhaps subconsciously aware that the words "Three Years Later" are about to impose themselves upon the screen, they split amicably to continue affairs with partners played by less famous actors. Reunions occur every few years.
Round these parts we are quite tolerant of Ashton Kutcher. Though psychologically weightless, Demi's pool boy appears to have a keen awareness of his own preposterousness. Every action seems to say: "I'm a goof, but I know it." Amanda Peet - clacking joke-shop teeth mounted in a too-small doll's head - is less obviously suited to comedy, but this remains a bearable romantic pairing.
It's a shame, then, that Nigel Cole, the English director of Saving Grace and Calendar Girls, couldn't find something more interesting to do with it. Fully 50 percent of the picture - Peet's burgeoning career as a photographer, Kutcher's failure to sell nappies online, various unsatisfactory love affairs - is padding, and what remains is rendered frustrating by the principals' stubborn refusal to accept the bleeding obvious.
Playing in selected cinemas with A Lot Like Love, to which it acts as a bracing antidote, is Denis McArdle's allegorical vignette Burning the Bed. Featuring the perennially gloomy Gina McKee and the taut Aidan Gillen as a disintegrating romantic couple, this has been impressing festival audiences since its completion in 2003.
