Movie Nation

Husband and wife folk-pop duo Jim Hanft and Samanta Yonak were newlyweds, married after a years long partnership as “Jim & Sam,” when they decided that one epic stunt was the key to them breaking through in the music business.

They would spend 2017 “playing one show a day, every day” as a way of keeping at it, pushing that “career progress” stone up a hill by “making something happen, every single day” musically.

It was a cute gimmick and a clever stunt, and it featured a rigorously-booked tour and a willingness to risk going broke in the process and a need for being generously flexible in their definition of a “gig.”

Because shows fall through. Weather acts up. Planning doesn’t take into account traffic jams. And being newlyweds, the stress of all that and this desire for success just might show up on stage.

“After So Many Days” is their self-filmed (cell phone cameras, mostly) account of that 365 day odyssey, skipping back and forth across the US, flying to Sweden more than once (apparently) to kick off Swedish and European tours, opening for LP in Brussels, having a “big break” show at South by Southwest go badly, playing in an aviation museum’s hangar in England, jamming on a ski lift, talking a London liquor store owner into letting them sing him a song, just to get that day’s gig in.

Hell, they sing to a drive-through barista at Starbucks at one point.

All of which, along with the fact that you’ve never heard of Jim & Sam,” point to a “Well, that didn’t work out as planned” documentary, an hour and twenty-six minutes of snatches of lovely harmonies singing mostly-forgettable tunes, rental cars and flights (not seen, mostly), bickering (gently) onstage and off, nothing here to mourn as tragedy or exult in as triumph.

They take this “crazy” chance on themselves, subleasing their LA flat to help finance the trip, “because NOT doing it would seem even crazier.”

They get advice from a European club owner/soup kitchen operator that “If you live the dream, the dream becomes real.”

And they play in a New York ice cream shop during a blizzard that cancels a raft of New England tour dates, stop and sing for a friendly and appreciative herd of cattle in Europe and even play through a sickbed performance in a UK hotel, summoning guests to come here even though one “band” member has a cold.

The mishmash of travel footage, marked only by show numbers (201, 242, etc) can be confusing, especially if you do the math and wonder what they did on LONG travel days where performing might not be possible, much less practical.

You come away a little impressed, if not particularly enthused. Remember “Once?” Singing couple falls in love singing duets? There’s nothing remotely emotional or as uplifting as any of the songs and scenes in that (fictional, improvised) film from a few years back.

“After So Many Days” lacks drama and pathos, and the humor is mostly in the vein of “Can you believe they’re playing in a Starbucks drive-thru and calling that a ‘gig?” The songs are limited to snippets, the travelogue — LOTS of trips to Sweden, where they have studio access and “fans” — is more impressive for the passport stamps than in the shows sampled.

They’re a cute couple, in that generic skinny jeans way. They harmonize well, and their songs have a (tiny) hint of edge to them. Are they still together? Are they still touring? Or is the song “Calling it Quits,” listed on assorted lyric websites, their farewell to “the dream?”

If so, at least they documented “our biggest show,” opening for LP in Belgium, getting a Euro-crowd to sing along with their drinking ballad, “Saturday Night and you’re all f—-d up again.”

“After So Many Days,” they’ll always have Brussels.

MPAA Rating: unrated, profanity

Cast: Jim Hanft, Samantha Yonack

Credits: Directed by Jim Hanft and Samantha Yonack, script by Natalia Anderson, Kyle Weber, Jim Hanft and Natalia Anderson.

Running time: 1:26

This is not your grandmother’s — OK your GREAT grandmother’s — “Rebecca,” not the “Rebecca” of Du Maurier and Hitchcock.

And hang me for heresy, that’s not the worst thing in the world. The original plays as fusty and old-fashioned and its story beats and revelations are common currency in film culture these days.

So when this lavish, lush, well-cast and well-acted new Netflix “Rebecca” goes off the rails, as it were, it’s not necessarily going “wrong.” Although sometimes it is.

But it’s far more “faithful” than you’d expect from a trio of screenwriters who gave us “Race” (Jesse Owens bio pic), “Seberg,” “Kick-Ass” and “Kingsmen.” And it’s far more opulent and almost literary, not what one would guess you’d get from the director of the violent thrillers “Free Fire” and “High Rise.”

For Armie Hammer, playing a wealthy British widower to “the manner born” is no stretch.

“Downton Abbey” veteran Lily James is easy to see in a 1930s period piece. But this version of our unnamed “new” Mrs. de Winter gives us the plucky, working class James of “Baby Driver” and “Yesterday.”

Kristin Scott Thomas as the icy, scheming head of household staff Mrs. Danvers? That’s the very definition of “on the nose casting.”

But for me, the icing on the cake, the reason I’m endorsing this “Rebecca” and others are not, is first act scene-stealer Ann Dowd. The “Compliance” and “Handmaid’s Tale” veteran knocks it straight out of the park as our unnamed heroine’s imperious and cruel employer, Mrs. Van Hopper. She is everything one hates about the archetype of Old Money — insufferable, stupid and venal.

As an American snob who has hired an English “lady companion,” Dowd’s withering delivery of every insult is to be relished, none more than the final one she has to offer. Our “lady companion” has won the heart of the brooding but charming and seemingly kind Maxim de Winter (Hammer) after meeting him in Monte Carlo.

“When you trap a man between your legs,” she hisses, “they don’t stay around for long.”

The quick courtship of the rich man who was widowed just a year before raises eyebrows, infuriates the between-World-Wars French hotel staff and makes us fret for the working class girl swept up in wealth, comfort and mystery the moment she arrives at the estate the family has held “since the Tudors.”

That would be Manderlay, of “Last night I went to Manderlay again,” one of the most famous opening lines in all of mystery literature.

That’s what the new Mrs. de Winter is caught up in — “mystery.” How much did Max love the late Rebecca? How did she die? Why will he not speak of that, even though he mentions his “late wife” more often than any newlywed would like to hear?

Is she in danger?

Here is where James’ version of the heroine stands apart. There’s nothing passive about the character, or her way of playing her. She has agency, takes the initiative and merits the line “She’s far smarter than she looks” when it’s said of her later on.

She hears of “Max’s famous temper,” and spends too much time walking on glass around him. But she reaches for answers, snoops about. And she tries desperately to hold her own against the officious and callous ruler of the household staff, Mrs. Danvers.

Kristin Scott Thomas makes the woman’s every look and every line a judgment, hostile in intent. “When Mrs. de Winter was alive” seems to start every sentence. “Mrs. de Winter was very particular about her sauces,” punctuates a dinner menu insult.

Say hello to the genre’s biggest bitch.

And therein lies the fundamental flaw in any traditional adaption of “Rebecca,” reason enough to make this one different. Danvers is obviously hostile and prone to gas-lighting her new mistress. The doubt, the hunch that “maybe there’s a ghost” or that maybe this new situation is making the new Mrs. de Winter mad, or that she does or doesn’t know what her too-new husband is capable of, was always a hard sell. Why not dispense with some of that?

Hammer suggests plenty of menace, displacing the charm and simple kindness that started the romance.

Playing up other characters — the caddish cousin Jack (Sam Riley, a “bounder” if ever there was one) and Max’s sympathetic sister (Keeley Hawes, terrific) shows how this novel was malleable and rich enough to merit mini-series treatment back in the ’90s.

The settings are stunning, the motorcars — Max’s 1930s Bentley 3.5 litre roadster merits mention by the characters in the film — glorious.

But pint-sized James — you never realize how short her other leading men were until you see her paired with Hammer — carries this “Rebecca,” and I think carries it off, even as it’s taking us places no “Rebecca” has ever gone before.

It’s not a classic and not “Hitchcock,” but hell, thanks to James, Hammer, Thomas and Dowd, it’ll do.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some sexual content, partial nudity, thematic elements and smoking

Cast: Lily James, Armie Hammer, Kristen Scott Thomas and Ann Dowd

Credits: Directed by Ben Wheatley, script by Jane Goldman, Joe Shrapnel and Anna Waterhouse, based on the novel by Daphne Du Maurier. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:03

I was wondering why my post about the recognizable (to me, anyway) voice on TV ad from last summer was blowing up this am.

It’s because people weren’t recognizing the instantly recognizable voice on last night’s World Series ad unveiled by The Biden Campaign.

Sam Elliott, anyone? By the way, Jeffrey Wright of “Westworld” and Felix Leiter in the Daniel Craig Bond films was the previous killer voice over Biden star.

This ad? It’s game over in Trumpland. No wonder Putin loving-wingnut America is losing its collective minds over it. An actual man’s man movie star is articulating a better tomorrow than the ditch the NRA, their Russian financiers, Julian Assange and “low information” voters have driven us into.

Here’s a film star memoir that took me by surprise.

Not that Val Kilmer’s “I’m Your Huckleberry” is all that confessional, or filled with gossip and Big Revelations. It’s not.

But it’s a breezy, sometimes self-effacing, sometimes egotistical peek under the hood of a fascinating figure in recent film history.

Think he’ll dodge the “What happened to Val Kilmer?” question, about his looks and career? His health issues — throat cancer, bloating related to that — is right there in the prologue.

Figure he won’t address his rep as “difficult” and a “diva?” That comes through in a sentence or two about his first professional teen acting gig, a commercial…that he WALKED out on. The way he skips by that suggests that maybe he doesn’t see that as a “tell.”

He owns up to the relative privilege of his childhood (Dad was a boom or bust business type), is generous about all the women he’s been linked to over the decades — Mare Winningham was his high school love, Cher, Joanne Whalley, etc. — and jabs “THE Julliard School,” where he was, at 16, “the youngest (actor) ever admitted (no idea if that’s true)” even as he owns up to being a ham, and hamming up his first role there.

The fact that he played the lead in “Richard III” should tell you what a mercurial talent he was, even as a boy. Kilmer sprinted out of the gate faster than any actor of his generation. So what happened?

Some of that’s here, between the lines admissions, etc. Actors by the nature of their profession like having too much drama in their personal lives, he explains. And I believe him. Some of it we gather from his similarities to one of the guys he played — Jim Morrison of The Doors. Kilmer’s “a poet,” a free spirit and a Brando-admiring “rebel” who parlayed fame into a lifestyle that was as Hollywood-free as possible, even as he gained that “reputation.”

He cut up with Robert Downey Jr. on the set of his best film and calls him a “brother.” Wonder if Downey signs off on that?

He name drops like an old pro, Willie and Brando to KRS1. He flogs his Christian Science faith like a man staring death in the face.

I’ve interviewed him a couple of times over the years, and that diva thing never really made itself obvious in these chats. A little full of himself, sure. “Above it all” strut, all that.

But consider the work. He’s turned half a dozen films into great or near great acting exercises.

I’d call “Spartan,” “Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang,” “Heat,” “Tombstone,” “Thunderheart” (that Brando bond with Native American causes), “The Doors” and “Wonderland” his best. But “True Romance,” “Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans,” a pretty fun one-off “Batman” and that damned “Top Gun” (He’s back in the sequel, kids.) made some noise and impact on the culture. “The Ghost and the Darkness,” “At First Sight,” and on and on he went.

“Alexander” and his experiences making an epic mess out of “The Island of Doctor Moreau” could make their own books, if he was more open about admitting his sins.

But when he describes the tragic death of his younger brother just as Val was about to enter “THE Julliard School” with an “I felt abandoned,” you understand why. Looking in the mirror doesn’t mean you see and will accurately describe everything in it.

Still, you can’t say we haven’t enjoyed “the show” he’s put on. As he points to all the various ways “Huckleberry” has wound around his life, from the real-life plant in his desert SoCal youth, to falling for Twain as a kid, to “Tombstone” and Doc Holliday (the origin of the title line of the book) to playing “Citizen Twain” in a one-man show, Kilmer’s the sort of narcissistic, creative eccentric that you can’t help but be tickled by. His memoir’s just more proof of that.

VAL KILMER — I’M YOUR HUCKLEBERRY: A Memoir, Simon & Schuster, 303 pages, $27.99.

Oh to be young, male, misogynistic, xenophobic, homophobic, Islamophobic and alcoholic in modern day St. Petersburg.

They are “Three Comrades” living in Putin’s Proud Boys Russia, a lawless land where men like them drift through young adulthood with no moral compass and limited ambition — to make enough money to reduce the humiliation that working stiffs in a rigged “winner take all” economy endure.

As with his “Anomie,” Vladimir Kozlov paints a bleak portrait of Russian life via a generation that has known only cruelty and repression living in a totalitarian kleptocracy. The rule of law has evaporated (cops are only for the rich), the rule of the Almighty Ruble is all that counts and patriotism, vodka and bullying are all they have to cling to.

So, cautionary to any Western country drifting in that direction? You bet.

Kozlov sets this up as a mockumentary, and pretty much abandons that after we’re introduced to Gosha (Ivan Shary), Vlad (Andrei Yasinsky) and Gleb (Evgeniy Zarubin). They’re brokers, of a sort — young salesman at a small, cutthroat firm run by brutish founder Potapov (Dmitriy Grishin) like he’s seen “Boiler Room” a few too many times.

But in a down economy, there are no sales and the office the three 20somethings share is deflatingly quiet in between their long cigarette breaks. Well, it’s quiet save for hothead Gleb’s curses and phone-slamming.

In their introductions, spoken directly to the camera, they confess (in Russian, with English subtitles) that “I don’t like my job very much,” with sweater-wearing Gosha the only one with a girlfriend and real “plans” and all “very critical” of the Russia they struggle to live in.

There’s nothing for it in this land of the midnight sun (it’s set in spring) but to go out after work, “just for two drinks,” ome cigarettes and some more conversation. Olya (Olga Serikova), the blonde from down the hall? She can be talked into joining them even though she knows what “your ‘two drinks'” means.

That’s how it starts, downing beers and bitching at a brightly-lit pub that looks like a Chili’s, but without the warmth and charm. The sexist, brutish chatter whenever Olya leaves the table makes us fear for her safety. But she knows them, and knows to skip after two drinks.

It’s what happens as the night wears on that turns the evening fraught and the “Three Comrades” into every ugly stereotype listed in the opening of this review. An old woman begs for change and takes abuse. Two young women walking home are accosted, approached and threatened. A Russian punk band’s fans get an earful after a desultory club set, and one is promptly pummeled when Gleb, the ringleader, likes the three-to-one odds and the chance to batter a guy actually out on a date.

“Incels” you can’t help but think. Remembering Gosha, with his mild-mannered sweaters and attentive phone call from a woman, has a girlfriend changes nothing. These three proles are liquored up and up for a little ultraviolence. It comes like “Clockwork.”

Kozlov keeps the tone disquieting, even in scenes where we might logically assume we can relax. We can see the groupthink that runs this pack, with Gleb the one who instigates, lumpish Vlad, the least ambitious, is quickest to join in with Gosha close behind.

A “foreigner” from part of the former Soviet Empire talks to “one of our women?” He gets it, too.

There’s even an overtly political interlude, as an unemployed Afghan War veteran (Nikolay Sayapin) cadges a drink off them and sadly and cynically lays out how bleak the country’s prospects are in its struggles against America and the “communist capitalists” of China. “We’re all alone” with nothing but “losers” (Venezuela, North Korea, et al) in their corner, outclassed, outhustled and outsmarted at every turn. All is lost.

Unless the West lets people who emulate The Russian Way take charge.

“Three Comrades” is short but not rushed, and rough viewing almost from start to finish. The documentary style (hand held camera, even in chases) adds to the sad reality of it all, lives of drunken, hate-filled desperation.

Forget the propaganda and the endless endorsements of pot-bellied Proud Boys, rednecks and Republicans for Russia. This is the reality of Putinworld. How anyone, especially any woman, would want to live like this beggars belief.

MPAA Rating: Unrated, violence, alcohol abuse, smoking, profanity

Cast: Evgeniy Zarubin, Ivan Shary, Andrei Yasinsky, Olga Serikova, Dmitriy Grishin, Ksenia Plyusnina, Nikolay Sayapin

Credits: Written and directed by Vladimir Kozlov. An IndiePix release.

Running time: 1:11

“The Mothman Legacy” is a soberly straightforward account of the 1960s Point Pleasant, West Virginia supernatural “creature” that spawned books and movies, most famously, “The Mothman Prophecies,” a 2002 feature which starred Richard Gere, Laura Linney, Debra Messing and Will Patton.

Writer-director Seth Breedlove takes the utterly credulous tack in tackling this phenomenon, hearing out eyewitness accounts, throwing a few special effects at the screen, as well as lots of sketchings and lurid watercolors depicting what this “man-sized insect” or “bird man” (the first descriptions) might look like, laying out a timeline of alleged sightings and tying the creature’s arrival (not limited to West Virginia) to assorted disasters.

Is the Mothman a harbinger of doom? The Silver Bridge collapse killed over 60 people in Point Pleasant just after the first reported sightings of the creature in the mid-60s. A TWA Jet crash (illustrated with a still photograph of a TWA Lockheed propeller plane) followed one person’s sighting.

Breedlove has interview subjects tie the Mothman to Celtic folklore and the Scots-Irish who settled that part of the world, and documents some of the ways Point Pleasant has exploited its notoriety — a statue in town, a museum of Mothman lore, an annual festival. It’s an Appalachian Roswell.

But his film fails to do even the most basic things to lend it credibility. He’s not going for a “mockumentary” here, and he avoids having even the barest hint of fun with this whole dying-town-exploits-supernatural-hook for tourism thing.

People talk about the author of the book that popularized the Mothman and his “prophecies,” John Keel. But there are no extant TV or audio interviews of him included in the film.

The endless recreations and re-imaginings of a creature that some speculated might be a sandhill crane or large screech owl, mistaken for something larger in the dark, don’t hide the fact that there’s no “bigfoot walk” footage, no still photos even. The faked Mothman on a water tower, etc. shots aren’t identified as “recreations” either.

So Breedlove isn’t playing straight with the viewer, not in the least.

We visit an actual spot or two where a sighting occurred, but those visits are aren’t spooky, and even the creepy “what I saw on the road” or “heard, like it had fallen from helicopter” on the roof anecdotes fail to chill.

The documentary leans most heavily on museum curator Jeff Wamsley, a poster child for “supernatural fanboy over 50” and his daughter, Ashley. He set up a website, shortly after “The Blair Witch Project” came out, and two years before the first “Mothman” movie. No mention is made of how the two are related — the wholly “faked” event filmed and marketed online, paving the way for the “Mothman” following a similar path to the screen.

The screenwriter Richard Hatem is here, and while it’s asking too much to try and talk one of the film’s stars, I wonder if they even tried. Hell, there’s not even a clip from the movie. Any of the movies.

For the dry and straightforward approach to pay off and “sell” this extraordinary claim to viewers, the gullible and the skeptical, there have to be “real” gotchas, old interviews (surely some of these were taped) and not just a narrator, boring us to death with the function of “stories” within human culture, and mentioning “Jeff re-interviewed many of the eyewitnesses.” No tape of those “interviews” either?

Lacking that “original” source material (a few newspaper clippings don’t suffice), this “Legacy” is impossible to accept as a journalistic documentary” and not entertaining enough to pass for “mockumentary.”

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Jeff Wamsley, Ashley Wamsley, narrated by Lyle Blackburn

Written and directed by Seth Breedlove. A 1091 release.

Running time: 1:17

Viola and Chadwick, an Oscar contender from Netflix.

Seth Rogen, a comedy mocking a dictator and an international incident.

It’s cinematic ancient history now, but “Medium Cool” was a docudrama that caused quite a stir in its day. Haskell Wexler, a cameraman, took us inside the protests, riots and media circus that was the 1968 Democratic National Convention to tell a story of a reporter caught up in that maelstrom. In essence, he embedded an actor (Robert Forster) in a real news event and telling a fictional story that reflected and dissected what we’d seen on our TV screens during that turbulent time.

That’s what Miguel Silveira was going for in “American Thief.” Hackers and conspiracy buffs collide in the run up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, people manipulated into taking actions that destroy the public trust and roil internecine discontent, and thus might help some foreign entity rattle America and reduce our status in the world.

As if that could ever happen.

It’s a cryptic, gloomy and paranoid thriller about hackers, election interference, the omnipotent personal data mining resource of the Internet, how it is used against us by marketers and how foreign operators can use that same data to turn us on each other.

Ben Becher plays a seriously paranoid conspiracy “nut” living in a van, vlogging his “Man in a Van” Jeremiads onto the World Wide Web. He’s something of a mad prophet of the digital era, video lecturing his followers with Deep Truths about Big Data.

“What we buy, what we do, where we go when we do it, who we do it with, ALL of that information is being saved and stored in a building like that” he inveighs, pointing his camera at a generic Manhattan high rise. “The marketing algorithms are just the tip of the iceberg.”

The big question of our age is “What is going on?” Even Hunter doesn’t know that. He’s just asking the questions, dropping onto and off of the grid in his quest.

Toncruz, Diop and Meeks are young hackers seeking their own truths. The youngest of them, Toncruz (screen newcomer Xisko Maximo Monroe), is adept at breaking into servers or individual computers, pranking random people who “think they’re safe” by luring them into clicking on that one link that allows him to harvest their password, so he can steal their intimate photos or whatever and scare the hell out of them.

His fellow hacker Meeks (Julia Morrison) watches and learns, his nerdy pal Diop (Khadim Diop) eggs him on in Toncruz’s more cautionary-than-predatory version of the “Fappening.”

They’re tuned in and wired, and politically aware enough at 20 (or so) to attend rallies, speeches and organizing meetings for various causes in the days leading up to the election.

“No one LISTENS,” they complain to each other after another attempt at warning the masses about what “the government” has on you. They want to take action, but for different reasons. Toncruz is all about payback.

“It can’t be about revenge,” Diop counsels,” It has to be about JUSTICE.”

But Toncruz is also using his hacking for something more personal. He breaks into the NYPD system to track down a policeman acquitted of shooting a black man during a routine “stop and frisk.” The man was Toncruz’s father, and the old video archived on the case shows he was there as his dad was killed trying to shield him from a trigger happy cop.

These are smart people tapping into “the great question of our time” from different angles. And that makes them online risk takers. All of them start getting mysterious messages, mid-hack. Somebody has “made” them. What does that someone want? And how does it figure into Toncruz’s past, America’s election and our enemies in the world?

Brazilian born, this isn’t director Silvera’s first docudrama. His “Carnaval Blues” told a fictional story within the whirl of Brazil’s famous festival/bacchannal. Here, he weaves street and park (public speech) footage of his actors mixing in with the witnesses to the historic 2016 presidential election with archival news footage, and the odd deep dive into the Internet for old Black Panther speeches from the early ’70s, into his narrative.

The conspiracy here is more far-fetched than fascinating. And the film’s brief running time means we don’t follow the characters deeply into any story thread. The film plays like a long prospectus for a story that will be considerably more involved and engrossing, and probably 30 minutes longer when it’s fully fleshed out.

I like the technique and the idea of the story being told more than I like the story itself, in this case.

“American Thief” has disillusioned Bernie Sanders fans fuming about their ballot choices, dismayed Clinton and one could argue democracy fans not able to hide their shocked faces on Times Square, tearfully passionate activists beginning the process of resisting and a fictional story that ties to Stuxnet blowback.

Sure. Why not? There’s just not quite enough here to make all of that a film as coherent and dramatically satisfying as it is disquieting.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Xisko Maximo Monroe, Khadim Diop, Ben Becher, Julia Morrison, Josefina Scaro

Credits: Directed by Miguel Silveira, script by Miguel Silveira, Michel Stolnicki. A Film Movement+ release.

Running time: 1:18

Sometimes in movie romances, Ilsa leaves Rick, Andie chooses rich Blane over true-blue Ducky and some poor woman ends up with Adam Sandler.

And if it can happen in Hollywood, why not in Indonesia?

“Love Like the Falling Rain” is a dull, bloodless romance that drifts into the insipid zone, so bereft of heat or charm that it almost doesn’t matter that the “hero” is a heel to Miss Right, because he can’t stop loving his “best friend,” the one who dates everybody else in school before she’ll even consider him.

Attractive leads, lovely Indonesian scenery, and endless scenes in an ice cream shop can’t hide the fact that “Vin” (short for Kevin), our narrator, is mooning, whiny sap over Nara, who REALLY wishes he’d fall for his enviro-science club colleague so that she can get on with dating the brooding rock climber Ned (short for Juned).

For Vin (Jefri Nichol), his cute neighbor Nara (Aurora Ribero) is “the first girl to make me understand what love is.”

His understanding? Give a girl a ride to school (private high school, I think) on your bicycle every day since forever, be her confessor/helpmate, perpetually trapped in “the friend zone,” and if you’re lucky, she’ll tell you how she pines for Niko. Or Bimo. Or when she gets around to him, Ned (Axel Matthew Thomas).

Vin can’t blurt out how he truly feels, but damned if he send every signal but that. He sulks. He begs. He stalks off. Nara either doesn’t have a clue, or is hellbent on pretending she doesn’t see his attachment because that would mess up her “best friends forever” dream.

Her “Why haven’t I heard about your love life?” might work for the truly naive. But as self-centered as Nara comes off, you’ve got to wonder how she would have even noticed.

Rude, short-tempered Ned is carrying some grudge at the fairer sex. Naturally, he’s catnip to Nara. But no worries. She wants him to date Tiara (Nadya Arina), who is in his “One Tree, One Million Benefits” initiative work group. And if that’s what Nara wants…

The performances are so bland that the viewer is even less likely to “root for” this or that couple, an essential in movie romances.

We’re left grasping at straws — sometimes literally. Among the little slices of Indonesian teen-agerdom is the ever-green Vin impressing Tiara by politely asking the waitress at a cafe, “Please don’t use straws.”

The third act’s melodramatic turns do nothing to change our minds about who should end up with whom. Perhaps the cultural disconnect is driving this, as this was a popular novel before Netflix bought the rights to make it an Indonesian film.

So many romances have ended with the couple soaked to the skin in a “We’re so in love we never noticed its raining” downpour. “Love Like the Falling Rain” just makes one want to give everybody a towel and send them home.

MPAA Rating: TV-14

Cast: Jefri Nichol, Aurora Ribero, Axel Matthew Thomas, Nadya Arina

Credits: Directed by Lasja Fauzia, script by Piu Syarif and Upi Avianto, based on a Boy Cando novel. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:27