I enjoyed parts of this Zooey Deschanel/Joseph Gordon-Levitt romance very much—in fact, I found the majority of it to be light, observant and cheering. I was a little put off by the opening disclaimer, which gave the usual warning that none of the characters should be mistaken for any real people, living or dead. “Especially you, Jenny Beckman,” it added. “Bitch.” This seems to indicate a few unresolved issues on the parts of the writers, Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber, and director Marc Webb. But the movie quickly sets about confronting those issues. It is, in fact, a movie about being the other guy: the one who doesn’t get the girl at the end of the picture, the one who realizes that he was a footnote in her life and feels rather crummy about it. But I couldn’t decide if (500) Days of Summer felt so familiar because I’d lived it, or because I’d seen it before. The jumbled chronology is a fresh approach, with Webb bouncing through the 500 days of a doomed relationship as if rifling through a Rolodex or—a more appropriate metaphor for this couple—hitting “shuffle” on an iPod. The narrator admonishes at the movie’s beginning, “This is not a love story,” and that’s true—love stories require two people. And Deschanel is a recognizable person only in relation to Gordon-Levitt. There are no real girls in (500) Days of Summer. R. AARON MESH