Movie Nation

Only decades of affection for the wonderful Mexican actor Diego Luna‘s screen performances and a recognition of “Well, his heart’s in the right place” can temper the tone of any review of his new chat show/series for Amazon, “Pan y Circo, (Bread and Circus).”

Blame it on the timing, round table (actually rectangular) discussions where experts and advocates discuss Mexico’s seemingly intractable social, cultural and political problems might have been a better idea, pre-pandemic.

And yes, there’s a Zoom meeting/discussion about COVID-19 and the country’s response to it, shoehorned in as a seventh episode of what must have been planned as a six episode series.

But the framework, the top tier of thinkers, activists, scientists and politicians discussing poverty, gender violence, drugs and environmental catastrophe at multi-course sit-down dinners prepared by Mexico’s finest chefs? What the hell was he thinking?

Amazon has produced a slick, shiny and topical docu-talk show that could very be the most elitist program in the history of Mexico.

I’m not sure of the order the programs will appear in on Amazon’s menu, as the preview copies of all the shows were mislabeled when sent to me. But “#NiUnamas (Not One More),” is so shockingly tone-deaf you’d think the guy signed on for a musical without taking singing lessons.

A wealthy, famous actor hosting six women — activists, a rapper, a mother of a “femicide” victim, government and NGO officials — in a discussion of Mexico’s culturally entrenched mistreatment, sexualization, dismissal, abuse and violence against women, just plays…wrong.

The discussion itself, intercut with clips of TV news coverage of protests and murders, the silly presentations of women in film and on TV (weather forecast stripteases and the like), is far ranging, pointed and civil. But over the course of three courses, and 40 minutes, you have to wonder “What’s the point?”

And that’s the least elite panel of the seven that Luna gathers. The rest of the series, underscored by free form jazz drumming, has a President of Colombia and others fairly high up the ladder talking about the social fabric fraying that leads to a decades-long “war on drugs,” which the panel generally agrees (in Spanish, with English subtitles) “has been lost.”

The chat, peppered with statistical graphics and illustrative video of slums, climate catastrophes, abortion, “round trip migrants,” drug violence and the like, is generally enlightened, if limited in scope. And then there’s a chef — Enrique Olvera, Alexander Suástegui — serving up another course and describing the molé or what have you as she or he does.

It’s jarring and grating at the same time.

The effect is not unlike the first time you run into any TV series from another culture. You try to approach it on that culture’s level, recognize the different values, ways of thinking and approach. The production values are sparkling, the amount of information packed into each show’s opening (narrated by Luna) impresses.

But then Luna’s pal and sometime co-star Gael García Bernal shows up for the dinner panel on drugs, and you just throw up your hands.

The only way this could be more ridiculous is if George Clooney was hosting, and invited Leo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt to talk about climate change and sustainability while visiting the finest restaurants of say, Italy.

Rich Latin elites solve Mexico’s problems over 40 minute chats eating haute cuisine — WTF TV.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Diego Luna, Zara Snapp, Juan Manuel Santos, Elena Reygadas, Enrique Olvera, Alexander Suástegui, Gael García Bernal many others

Credits: Created by Diego Luna, directed by Greg Allen. An Amazon series.

Running time: Seven episodes @ :38 minutes each.

Stark, poetic and somewhat frustrating, “Song Without a Name (Canción sin nombre)” patiently weaves together several story threads to capture what life was like during Peru’s 1980s collapse.

It was, as headlines show us, a country awash in corruption and violence, with hyper-inflation, racial strife and attacks by the Shining Path guerillas crushing the culture and hitting the very poor the hardest.

It is this world that Georgina (Pamela Mendoza) and Leo (Lucio Rojas) are about to bring a child. The film begins with a ceremonial baby shower, Catholic blessings and ancient Incan incantations, garments and dance by friends and relatives in their treeless village high in the mountains.

Each day, they trek into town — him to labor in a produce warehouse, her to buy potatoes which she then hawks on the streets for money that is worth less every day she earns it.

Hearing repeated ads for the San Benito Foundation and its “free” childbirth clinic sends Georgina to Lima for her first doctor’s visit, and then back — by bus and in labor — to give birth. Only she never sees her daughter. It is “in the hospital for tests,” the women tell her. “You’ll see her tomorrow.”

Georgina’s cries and shrieks don’t move them, and she’s hustled out the door, screaming “Where have they taken her?” into the night.

Mountain people of the Quechua can’t get the attention of distracted, disinterested police. It’s only when she cries her way into the offices of “La Reforma,” a newspaper, that someone will listen. Pedro (Tommy Párraga) is a brooding loner, a reporter dragged from scenes of Shining Path members slaughtered by government troops and government scandals to this strange crime.

He hears her out, and the secretive Radio Mundo DJ who doesn’t want to allow him access to the “client” who bought the ads and a dismissive family court judge processing shady adoptions overseas in bulk all sugges to him that he’s on to something. The threats tell him it’s something big.

And Pedro has his own secrets, which the presence of a handsome Cuban actor (Maykol Hernández) in his building, always running lines from “The Glass Menagerie,” reveal.

Melina León’s debut feature, a Camera d’Or nominee at Cannes, is filled with striking images of fog-shrouded mountainsides, treks through a moonscape of sand, dirt and poverty.

The human drama battered in this landscape is one long lament, symbolized by the sad songs of Georgina and her people, and the contemptuous nursery rhymes of children at the mysterious, disappearing “clinic,” jump-rope chants about how little value women have there.

Georgina and Leo’s relationship will be grist, ground up in the racism that gives them no help, only contempt, when they seek police intervention. Such treatment is eye-opening to the very poor, who are ripe for recruitment to any group that promises to upend an evil, repressive system.

León’s dawdling storytelling gives short shrift to Leo’s radicalization and robs the babynapping investigation of its urgency. We barely give a thought to fearing for Pedro in a country where journalists are just as susceptible to “disappearing” as babies of the indigenous poor.

The whole gay romance in a homophobic culture angle plays like another distraction, something else that slows “Song Without a Name” down when it’s barely moving as it is.

But Mendoza’s turn as a naïve, “not in the system” young mother whose present and future are literally stolen from her is just heartbreaking. Almost every moment León wanders off to show us, at her leisure, something or someone else, “Song Without a Name” forgets the words and the music of the lament her film is singing.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Pamela Mendoza, Tommy Párraga, Lucio Rojas, Maykol Hernández

Credits: Directed by Melina León, script by Melina León, Michael J. White. A Film Movement+ release.

Running time: 1:37

It was the late 1980s when the idea folks at Walt Disney Animation had their first meeting with the man who was to bring Disney Animation back from the dead. After an insistent courtship by Jeffrey Katzenberg, Mr. “Little Shop of Horrors,” Howard Ashman, was taking a look at the story problems vexing the team starting production on “The Little Mermaid.”

“He literally taught us how to tell a story with a song,” one animator present recalls. Ashman, a lyricist and playwright by trade, broke down the need for “a want song” in the first act, which became Ariel the Little Mermaid’s sweeping “Part of Your World” in the film, a song he had to threaten to quit the film over to keep Disney’s suits from cutting.

The villain? Let’s base her on Divine, the drag queen John Waters made famous in “Pink Flamingos,” “Polyester” and “Hairspray.” Give her a real “show stopper.” Cast an old broad of Broadway to play her.

And Ariel needs a sidekick. We’ve got this crab…

“Why not make him Jamaican?”

Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg get much of the credit for “saving” Disney in the ’80s. But as the documentary “Howard,” directed by “Beauty and the Beast” producer Don Hahn makes clear, it was their most inspired hire that made the Mouse matter again.

Most anybody watching the finished “Little Mermaid” could pick a moment where “it” happened. Grown women and men burst into tears at Jodi Benson singing the soaring “Part of Your World.” Children sat slack-jawed in awe of evil Ursula (sung by Pat Carroll) as she cried crocodile (OK, octopus) tears over those “Poor, Unfortunate Souls.”

And when Sebastian the crab (Samuel E. Wright) Jamaican-vamped through lyrics like “When the sardine begins the beguine it’s music to me,” we were hooked, the die was cast and Disney had the first of a string of blockbusters that took the company out of the crapper and put it on course to become the world’s greatest and most valuable entertainment brand.

“Howard” is an over-due and delayed (it was finished in 2017) appreciation of the musical theater genius who lit up Broadway and then announced that “the last great place to do Broadway musicals is animation,” and put his mind to “Mermaid,” “Aladdin” and “Beauty and the Beast,” the Holy Trinity of the Disney Animation Revival.

It’s a warm story with a tragic end, taking us from young Howard’s early enthusiasm for staging “vignettes” for his family (sister Sarah Gillespie is a major interview subject here), his high school and college immersion in the greasepaint of the theater, his rise to stardom and his untimely death, a gay man killed by the plague of the ’80s and ’90s, AIDS.

We hear a lot from his main writing partner, Menken, from various Broadway and Disney folks in awe of his talent, slow to see his illness, quick to recognize, in his frantic final months, that “the work really did keep him going.”

Archival TV interviews of him capture him in the middle of his early Off-Off Broadway success, starting his own theater company, turning a Kurt Vonnegut story, “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater” into a musical, conjuring up a blockbuster out of the daft cult horror film “Little Shop of Horrors,” putting everything he had — money included — in adapting the dark comedy about beauty pageants, “Smile,” for the stage — only to see it fail.

But one of the stars of his big failure was remembered when he signed on at Disney. Jodi Benson became a household name thanks to “The Little Mermaid.”

Ashman’s personal life is explored, from childhood through the adult relationships — both nurturing and self-destructive — that shaped him. The irony of him doing press, and a major public Q & A about “Mermaid” on the day he was diagnosed, stings.

We see footage of Ashman coaching actors through songs and most gloriously, hear his “demo” versions of those songs — singing to Menken’s accompaniment on piano through “Poor Unfortunate Souls” and “Prince Ali” (from “Aladdin”) and others.

“Howard” doesn’t reinvent the documentary biography, and once we get past his college friends, it can seem seriously Disney “in house.” But it is still a lovely appreciation of the man and his singular talent, wit that he channeled into lyrics that have become a monument to his genius in the decades since his death.

On the screen, on the stage, and back on the screen again, “tale as old as time, song as old as rhyme” still brings viewers to tears, the ultimate testimonial to a mercurial talent taken away too soon.

MPAA Rating: unrated, general audiences

Cast: Howard Ashman, Paige O’Hara, Sarah Gillespie, Alan Menken, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Peter Schneider.

Credits: Written and directed by Don Hahn. A Disney+ release.

Running time: 1:34

Bert Stern only directed one documentary. But “Jazz on a Summer’s Day” is widely considered the greatest jazz performance documentary ever, a 1959 classic that was designated to be preserved as part of the Smithsonian’s National Film Registry.

The film, newly-restored and heading back into virtual cinemas Aug. 12 (stream it through your favorite indie theater), is a glorious celluloid time capsule. None of the grit and grain of black and white or the pixelated blandness of today’s digital. Stern captured one place at one moment in time, and does so with an artful and fun movie shot in the fluid beauty of  motion picture film — Color by Deluxe.

Jazz had already been eclipsed by blues, rock’n roll and folk when the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival rolled around. Blues shouter Big Maybelle and rock progenitor Chuck Berry were on the bill. And when the film was finished, it didn’t figure in the Oscars, didn’t even premiere in the US. Sweden got first crack at it, because jazz hadn’t faded in Scandinavia.

But here are Louis Armstrong and Jack Teagarten, with Armstrong’s “All Stars,” popping through improvisation-rich standards, Dinah Washington taking “All of Me” for a spin, Sonny Stitt and George Shearing and Chico Hamilton and Thelonious Monk leading ensembles through signature numbers.

Mahalia Jackson, O’Day, Maybelle and Washington perform, dressed to the nines in summer wear of a more conservative age — white gloves and in Maybelle’s case, a white tiara to match.

That’s half of the glory here. It’s not just the music, which became a best-selling jazz concert (soundtrack) LP. It’s the look, the feel, the optimism of this moment in time. Integrated audiences sitting (mostly) in rapt attention, men in sport coats, women in hats, performers on stage dressed for the occasion as well. Watching this documentary, you could sense a country of reasonable, smart people ready for any change the world threw at them.

Stern intercuts other summer 1958 Newport, Rhode Island events with the festival stage footage — kids and parents on the beach, bands jamming in the ancient seaside boarding houses (Rheingold beer at hand), a Dixieland combo riding through town in a Beverly Hillbillies jalopy (staged for the movie) or jamming at seaside or on a tiny train at a children’s fairground.  Collectible cars from the “brass automobile” era (pre-1920) toodle down the streets.

And offshore? The sea was filled with sails as spectator boats crowded Rhode Island Sound to watch the lovely 12 meter yachts race in the 1958 America’s Cup — Britain’s “Spectre” vs. America’s “Columbia.”  It was “Columbia” 4, “Spectre” 0, for those keeping score at home.

Stern turned out an important concert film, documenting Chuck Berry at his pre-arrest peak, playing before slack-jawed jazzmen on stage as he duck-walked through “Sweet Little Sixteen,” Shearing losing himself in a bossa nova with his combo, Maybelle blasting through “All Night Long.”

But “Jazz on a Summer’s Day” is a work of beauty in and of itself — gorgeous images, an America at its serene and confident peak, with integrated Newport stages and audiences far from the civil rights struggles erupting in the rest of the country — all filmed and edited into an 85 minute movie that captures both a moment, and the possibilities that moment promised.

MPAA Rating: unrated, general audiences

Cast: Louis Armstrong, Anita O’Day, Dinah Washington, Thelonious Monk, Chuck Berry, Mahalia Jackson, George Shearing, Gerry Mulligan

Credits: Directed by Bert Stern. A Kino Lorber release.

Running time: 1:23

Seaside locations on the scenic Kentish coast, a period piece story set “during the war” and a stellar cast can’t quite make the debut feature of playwright-turned-writer/director Jessica Swale come off.

She’s probably kicking herself over “Summerland” as it is, what with wasting a rare pairing of Gemma Arterton and Gugu Mbatha-Raw. So I’ll leave my boots off for this review, no matter how disappointing the film.

It’s a sad, drab tale told by pretty faces in a pretty place, a slow-footed story wrapped in the most boring part of myths and legends — the academic study of them — and a love story tested by too-convenient coincidences.

We don’t have to ask who took lots of notes during “deus ex machina” week at playwrighting school, in other words.

An impatient older woman (Penelope Wilton of “Downton Abbey”) smokes and types away in 1975. Something gives her a case of the flashbacks, and she remembers a long ago summer in Kent, when she was even grumpier.

Alice Lamb (Arterton) is a loner who won’t let a little thing like World War II keep her from hunting for “the reality” behind famous bits of folklore and myth. She’s hated in the town, and her nicknames are many, which the headmaster at St. Nicholas School (Tom Courtenay) will list, when prompted.

“Bad apple,” “the beast on the beach,” “the witch,” “a Nazi” — that’s what the kids, and the adults, all say about her. Stomping about in trousers, chasing schoolboys who sabotage her mailbox and making littler kids cry are what “provoke” the locals. Not that she cares.

Then she’s abruptly “assigned” a little boy (Lucas Bond) who’s been evacuated from London, as children were in the early years of the war. All her outraged protesting gets her is a “We’ve all got to do our bit” lecture that lasts about as long as that sentence.

Her “find somebody else to take him” and “Don’t expect me to cook for you” barking isn’t what a lonely child needs to hear in a stranger’s home in a remote village. But she’s Miss “You’ve got to toughen up…Nobody likes a coward.”

But but “I always have milk before bedtime.”

“Good for you.”

Oh, she’ll soften. Maybe. A little bit. Eventually. His constant questions are the start of it, his thin grasp of her research — about King Arthur, Morgan Le Fay, “floating castles” (mirages) — makes her a teacher, whether she wants to be, or not.

“Summerland” is a piece of pagan myth that gives the film it’s title, and little else. Viking heaven? Kind of.

That’s kind of interesting but thinly developed. Even less screen time is devoted to his equally reluctant “partner” at school, Edie (Dixie Egerickx). She’s “an individualist” who doesn’t believe in “partners” or “sharing.” It’s all a pose. They become pals.

Alice spends part of each day rummaging through the kid’s things, picking up his story and reminiscing — yes, there are flashbacks within the flashback — to her long lost college friend (Mbatha-Raw) who was her one true love, back when both were flappers.

As her connection to Frank grows, she shares a little of that past with him.

Arterton does her utmost to make Alice funny-mean and lonely by choice. The script doesn’t give her many good moments, just a lovely deflated look when Alice gets the news that women often got “during the war” and most movies set “during the war” feel the need to replicate.

Mbatha-Raw has absolutely nothing to play, and whatever promise might have come from casting these two opposite each other is wiped away in flashbacks that serve a structural purpose, but fail to give them the emotional connection we need for us to feel the pain of their separation.

Courtenay and Wilton are similarly wasted, accomplished actors who sparkle when given a sliver of a chance, but so limited in screen time as to smother their contributions.

Even the kid with, his anachronistically long hair, fails to register.

Swale did some of her homework in setting her story mostly in 1942 or 1943. But no way this doctoral student of hers would have the petrol to galivant about looking for mirages when “there’s a war on.” Not that early in the war.

But it’s not period detail that lets “Summerland” down. It’s not moving beyond the story’s naturally watchable qualities (cast, setting, period) to give us a film that ever feels it doesn’t need one contrived situation after another just to stagger to its feet. Not that it ever moves those feet once it does, mind you.

MPAA Rating:  PG for thematic content, some suggestive comments, language, and smoking

Cast: Gemma Arterton, Gugu MBatha-Raw, Lucas Bond, Penelope Wilton and Tom Courtenay.

Written and directed by Jessica Swale. An IFC release.

Running time: 1:39

Don’t see a lot of Wilford Brimley interviews Youtube archived from chat shows.

But Craig Ferguson had him on, and with a little coaxing and a lot of rooting from the audience, the veteran character actor, who just passed away at 86, just delights.

First time I noticed him was as a folksy decent rancher helping “The Electric Horseman” make his escape with a race horse turned Vegas show horse.

Never a big fan of “Cocoon,” but he was wonderful in decades of films — “The Natural,” “The China Syndrome,” “Harry and Son,” “Absence of Malice,” “Brubaker” among them, generally cast as “decent,” common sensical and righteous. He was so grumpily beloved that he became a breakfast oatmeal spokesman, a TV diabetes activist and a guy who was in on the joke when “Seinfeld” cast him as the Postmaster General.

He toured with shows like “Love Letters,” worked here and there,and lived an interesting life on and off camera. 

“The Burnt Orange Heresy” is a ham-fisted thriller with a cast so “on the nose” it shows little imagination on the part of the filmmakers, who seem determined to leave the viewer unchallenged.

But what it has going for it atones for those shortcomings.

It takes place in a villa on Italy’s gorgeous Lake Como, for starters.

Mick Jagger plays a posh, ruthlessly unscrupulous art dealer and collector. Claes Bang of “The Square” is a scrambling, unethical fraud of an art critic. Elizabeth Debicki of “Widows” portrays a mysterious, willowy and sexy siren with a possible hidden agenda.

And Donald Sutherland is a reclusive artist of legendary reputation and no “surviving” works for dealers to haggle over.

Not a stretch for any of them, especially Sutherland, who twinkles whenever he isn’t playing the heavy, and doesn’t so much speak as “intone,” especially in this part.

“May I be direct, in the modern way?” Jerome Debney, his character, never is. “A favorite spot of mine,” he says, showing a guest a rocky beach on the lake, “one must labor to apprehend it.”

Who talks like that? Archetypes on a novelist’s page, of course. But the plummy locutions, the pithy digs at art, artists, “legends” and critics can be a quotable delight, and often are in Scott B. Smith’s script, adapted from Charles Willeford’s book.

Bang is James Figueras, an art critic who scrapes out a living publishing reviews, here and there, and giving this cleverly calculated lecture to art fans and tourists in cities around the world.

He weaves this florid metaphor, critics as “the banks of a river,” with the river “art flowing between us.” Then he, with a slapdash-looking work of modern art as his prop, proceeds to weave a back-story for the painting that convinces the unsophisticated that no no, this is a work with meaning and genius behind it.

It’s all a ruse, a joke and a lesson. No, we shouldn’t care that Hemingway’s mommy dressed him like a girl or how much your indie film cost. The work’s merits should be manifestly obvious. But critics, and art dealers and collectors, traffic in “the myth” as often as what’s inside the frame. Beware of such “critics,” Figueras and the novelistwarn us. They’re manipulators of reality.

A brazen American (Debicki) approaches, flirts and confronts James with the word “liar” so quickly they’re bound to wind up in. “Berenice,” she says her name is. From “Duluth,” she insists. It’s “the telling details” in such lies that put them over, he notes. And he should know. He’s an expert.

Jagger is Cassidy, the art dealer who invites James — and by extension his “freshly minted” friend — to his villa on Lake Como, ostensibly to get the guy to write a gallery catalog or some such. But what slithery Brit really has in mind is something rarer. He’s housing a famous artist on his property, one whose works have all burned in gallery fires. He wants one of whatever Debney (Sutherland) has been working on.

And being the criminal once-removed type, Cassidy the collector blackmails James into “procuring” such, by whatever means the enterprising and unscrupulous “critic” deems necessary.

When the two outsiders meet the J.D. Salinger of painters, there’s no drama — just pretentious musings about “blue.” But with four people capable of lies and trickery involved, deceit and dares, death and destruction await.

Director Giuseppe Capotondi (the speed-dating thriller “The Double Hour” was his) can’t hide the story’s too-few/too-obvious secrets. So he wisely leaves this one to the cast, letting them turn the script’s anecdotes, reminiscences and unreliable “history” into fascinating word pictures.

This is a storyteller’s movie, one where we can’t really trust any story to be true. That’s something of a cheat, because we are set up to believe there are bigger deceptions going on and hidden agendas that simply don’t pan out or are left hanging.

Even the third act’s twists have a prescribed order about them.

But if you can’t revel in Jagger’s delivery of every I’m-rich-and-you-have-no-idea-what-I’m-capable-of smiled threat, you’re missing out.

“I should never let a thing’s worth obscure the value.”

If you can’t take pleasure in Sutherland’s boring tales from an artist’s past, anecdotes freighted with gravitas because a “great artist” mouths them, this might not be for you.

“I saw a blue once, genuine blue, you understand.”

And if you can’t hear the danger in all the sexy but unromantic banter between James and Berenice —  “You treat serious things as if they’re trivial, and trivial things as if they’re serious.” — “The Burnt Orange Heresy” will be a mystery you won’t see the value in unraveling.

MPAA Rating: R, for some sexual content/nudity, language, drug use and violence

Cast: Claes Bang, Elizabeth Debicki, Mick Jagger and Donald Sutherland

Credits: Directed by Giuseppe Capotondi, script by Scott B. Smith based on the Charles Willeford novel. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Running time: 1:38

Betcha good money that this is the ENTIRE movie. Seriously, every twist and action beat is previewed in this Oct release. Every one of them.

It could still be gritty and entertaining, and Liam always gives fair value. But hey, give away the whole movie in the trailer? Not cricket.

“Seriously Single” is a seriously inconsequential Buppie rom-com from South Africa, a movie with a few laughs, lots of wigs and costume changes and little else.

But it’s very existence makes it another movie that points to the massive footprint Netflix is establishing in international cinema. It’s lame in a lot of perfectly conventional ways. In the U.S. this story of a Black woman desperate to not be alone, and to get married, and learning to see that trait in guys she’s dating, would be set in Atlanta and might very well have Tyler Perry’s name attached to it.

Beautiful Black professionals mingling and mixing, drinking and sexually getting around, with their white collar jobs funding all these clothes, apartments-with-a-view? Seen it.

But we’ve never seen it Johannesburg. Netflix is spreading formulaic rom-coms like this from Peru to Italy, France to South Africa.

Yay.

Dineo, played with a lot of spunk and spark by Fulu Mugovhani, works in social media marketing and cannot stand to be without romance, a man in her life. But everybody in her office, whether they speak Zulu or Xhosa, English or Afrikaans, knows her romances have a two to three month life span.

She loves being in love, and gives every relationship the full court press, right from the start. She ends up socially stalking her exes, because she scares them off.

“You men don’t get how hard we love!”

Vivacious roommate and BFF Noni (Tumi Morake) is always dragging her “back out there,” pushing to up her “bounce-back game.” That’s what brings her to Lunga (Bohang Moeko), a good-looking guy with a “just roll with it” game.

“Sometimes, relationships aren’t meant to last. We should enjoy them while we can.”

“Why hold onto the past when your future can be right in front of you?”

She’s all about having “someone to come home to.”

“I say it’s better to have someone to come home with!”

She falls for it and falls for him. Noni may cluck that “You’re already picking out baby names,” but Dineo isn’t hearing it. Yes, she’s headed for another fall.

Meanwhile, Noni’s ethos — never sleep with a guy more than once, “otherwise, it’s a ‘relationship,” is tested when hunky bartender Max (Yonda Thomas) gives her all his attention.

Who will change? Who will learn her lesson? Guess. Come on, it’s easy.

“Seriously Single” suggests we seriously need to rethink what we label as “generic” crutches in such romantic comedies. Yes, they’re conventional and worn out — the clubs, “doing shots,” Instagramming (renamed here) your “fun,” having your shame “go viral.”

Here, that’s in the form of Dineo’s wigless rant about faithless, feckless men not wanting what she wants, getting her labeled “#DesperateBae.”

That directors Katleho Ramaphakela and Rethabile Ramaphakela and screenwriter Lwazi Mvusi put that trope in a South African film suggests that either Netflix is handing a checklist to filmmakers in Spain, Italy, Colombia or wherever, or this “generic” device is now universal.

The viral rant, by the way? Funny. Morake gets most of the scattered funny lines and double-takes.

Mogovhani makes a perfectly cute, interesting, plucky and pouty heroine. And the little of South Africa that we see — integrated workplaces, beautiful and distinctly-decorated apartments, Africa-meets-nightclub-couture fashions — dazzles.

Leave the closed captioning on, because there’s a dizzying array of dialects listed. But in any language, this weary, overlong rom-com doesn’t deliver enough that’s distinctive about the “rom” or much of anything that’s funny in the “com” to come off.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, sexual situations, alcohol abuse, profanity
Cast: Fulu Mugovhani, Tumi Morake, Bohang Moeko, Yonda Thomas.

Credits: Directed by Katleho Ramaphakela, Rethabile Ramaphakela, script by Lwazi Mvusi. Netflix release.

Running time: 1:47