Movie Nation

By turns glorious and thrilling, revealing and well — mythic and fictional — Martin Scorsese’s “Rolling Thunder Revue” joins the ranks of epic concert tour documentaries, capturing a moment in American roots music and the icon who conjured it.

Put it on the pantheon with “Don’t Look Back,” “Mad Dogs & Englishmen,” “Gimme Shelter” and “Festival Express” as a document of one of those incredible music made during a road show that lost somebody — if not everybody — a lot of money.

But when “promoter” Jim Gianopolus takes the credit for coming up with “the idea” for the tour, and sums up the financials for “Rolling Thunder,” he calls it a “disaster, a catastrophe,” we can’t actually tell how much of a debacle it was. Because Jim Gianopolus was never a concert promoter. He’s with Paramount Pictures, and Scorsese has him “playing” a promoter.

It doesn’t exactly spoil the grandiose feel of it all to see Sharon Stone telling a marvelous whopper about how Bob Dylan came up with the idea for wearing face paint thanks to her hanging out on the tour and wearing her KISS t-shirt.

But damn, Marty. Your movie’s 2:22 long and otherwise lovely and immersive. Why stick Michael Murphy as his “Tanner ’88” character in here, “remembering” how Jimmy Carter got him on the tour when “Tanner” was but a young Congressman?

Yeah, that’s a moment when anybody watching this who’s the least bit hip and yet hasn’t read a review maybe catches on that Scorsese and Dylan are having them on. A little. But yeah, you’re also wasting our time, Marty, because the movie doesn’t need the fiction.

Dylan saying, “I don’t remember a THING about Rolling Thunder. It happened so long ago I wasn’t even born.” is enough of a reminder. The man’s a changeling, a shaman and a con-artist. We remember. He’s not to be taken at his word.

The film’s full title is “Conjuring the Rolling Thunder Re-Vue,” and it begins with a little black and white silent cinema “magic,” and a lot of context — a Dylan small venue/too-many sidemen and women “Medicine Show” journey in the middle of the American Bicentennial, 1976, a last big hurrah for Americana music in America’s most Americana-obsessed moment.

“Saigon had fallen,” Dylan remembers. “People seemed to have lost their sense of conviction, for some reason.”

“Two people tried to shoot the president (Ford) in the same month!”

Scorsese builds on this interview and scores of others, some dating from the actual tour, and uses extensive concert footage and even snippets of Dylan’s abortive feature film project, “Renaldo and Clara” (scripted by Sam Shepard, interviewed here shortly before his death) to create this tribute to the “the inspired Dylan” who, as the late poet and tour-performer Allen Ginsberg remembered, was “back” and the reason for the tour in the first place.

You can’t help but think that nostalgia for the “family” of folk music, the hootenanny nature of folk music/poet parties, was part of Dylan’s thinking in pulling this economically unsustainable delight together. He missed what he’d once been.

Tour dates took them from Plymouth to Lowell and Bangor, Lakeland to Salt Lake City and odd points in between.

And along the way, Bob and Allen G. would visit Jack Kerouac’s grave in Lowell, Massachusetts, Bob would stop by CBS Records in New York to sit (stand) in on a planning session for the marketing of his epic (The Ballad of) “Hurricane.”

He’d drink beer from a can, goof around with the huge entourage and interact with women at after-parties, quizzing them, re-string his guitar just like the broke folkie he once was.

And then the next day, he’d launch into ethereal duets with his former love, Joan Baez, and tear through re-interpretations of the Bob Dylan Songbook, a tight but gloriously shambolic, impromptu-seeming band running through a setlist only the Maestro could explain. Which he never does.

Stand-out fiddler Scarlet Rivera related (back then) how she met Dylan — he almost hit her with his car. We see the exotic beauty and violin virtuoso swaying and playing, following his lead at his right shoulder, start to finish, in performance after performance.

Her playing defined this period in Dylan’s music, for some.

We see Bob Dylan driving an RV, back in the day, just like a future retiree. And in between hearing him in glorious voice, passionately reinventing his vast repertoire, we get another clue as to how seriously we should be taking his present-day explanations for what happened, and why.

He’s jokey, self-effacing, contrary and…coherent. There’s little of his mystical, cryptic have-one-over-on-us nonsense that long defined how he treated questions of any sort.

Dude must be acting the part.

A couple of favorite moments — the solemn, monk-like (dressed in dark raincoats) procession of touring musicians getting the under-the-falls tour at Niagara, and young Bob remembering a folk protest song from prodigious memory, “The Ballad of Ira Hayes,” by his contemporary Peter La Farge and playing it, off the cuff, on a visit to an Indian reservation.

Damn.

The film’s fakery aside, “Rolling Thunder Revue” feels right at home among Scorsese’s music documentaries about the Stones, Dylan, The Blues, The Band and George Harrison, films not just to watch, but to savor and revel in.

And as you can tell from the links included in this review, it’s a real down-the-Internet rabbit hole for anybody really into the subject (like Scorsese), the times, the lucky souls who got to participate, and the fans who, in one sequence after the lights have come back up, sit slack-jawed and weeping at the music they’d just experienced.

Cast: Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Allen Ginsburg, Roger McGuinn, Ronee Blakely, Sam Shepard, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Sharon Stone and Joni Mitchell

Credits: Directed by Martin Scorsese. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:22

Yeah, I know “summer” has moved up and up the calendar, thanks to climate change and Hollywood’s eagerness to jump start the blockbuster season.

But we can’t count April, or shouldn’t. So leave those “Avengers” at home. And nothing that’s opened since has shown any signs of owning the hottest season of the year at the box office.

“Godzilla, King of Monsters” is fading. “Dark Phoenix” didn’t rise. “Secret Life of Pets 2” is nobody’s idea of a secret smash. “Aladdin” may prove heard to surpass, as it is still making money off the Disney princess (and prince) fanbase. Over $250 this weekend, for sure. Yes, it opened in what is “spring,” calendar-wise. Still a “summer” movie.

The big money has yet to enter the game. “Shaft” won’t show, “Men in Black: International” figures to fold early.

There are five potentially summer-owning blockbusters on the calendar. Where’s the smart bet?

J. J. Brewis over at SBD, Sports Betting Dime, says “The Lion King” live-action (with digital critters) remake is the surest thing. They give it +300 odds to better “Aladdin,” which is enough for me to raise an eyebrow. I may take that bet.

“Toy Story 4” seems like a far safer wager and guess, +600 odds from SBD. Pixar is going to make a mint or Disney will start looking into folding them into the regular Disney Feature Animation. That’s MY prediction. Pixar’s had some up and down years (which explains “Toy Story 4,” a sequel they need more than we need to see) while the Mouse House has had “Frozen” and has “Frozen 2” and Disney’s classic cartoons are becoming live-action features that make another bundle off the same script, songs and “property.”

Why keep Pixar? Its innovative time might have passed and IF “Toy Story 4” doesn’t blow up the box office, surely the Fox-layoff-happy Disney will have to give the post-Pixar animation market some thought.

The summer of sequels continues with yet another “Fast and Furious,” which is how Universal is titling its spinoff, “Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs and Shaw.” As if anybody could not figure it out, but why gamble with your bottom line?

That has 6 to one odds of being the summer’s biggest stand-out smash.

And oh yes, your “friendly neighborhood Spider-Man” takes a trip, falls for a new MJ and shows up in time to own July and potentially the rest of the box office season until schools re-open. SBD figures “Spider-Man: Far from Home” is a +400 shot to make the most money (for Sony, which will need it after “MIB: International”).

So you’ve got your odds, and maybe you watch the box office (as I do) and visit Box Office Mojo and chew the fat over prognostications over on The Box Office Theory and are ready to try your luck at beating Vegas. Or SBD.

Anything to spice up an otherwise sequel-slammed summer at the movies, right?

His code-name is “T,” in the “Men in Black” fashion. But in the London office, everybody calls him (Liam Neeson) “High T.”

Get it? Good. That’s a rare thing, a joke that lands, even softly.

And in his sage advice to his younger charges in “Men in Black: International,” he leans a bit on squishy, B.S. pop- psyche Oprahspeak entirely too hard.

“The universe has a way of putting you where you’re supposed to be at the moment you’re supposed to be there,” he purrs.

But what universe put “Men in Black” back on screens after that franchise had shown little sign of life? And who thought F. Gary Gray, who started his career with junk stoner comedies before graduating to thrillers and then the fine NWA bio-pic “Straight Outta Compton” behind the camera? Let’s not blame that on “the universe.”

Oh. Right. He followed “MIB” director Barry Sonnenfeld before, doing “Be Cool,” the sequel to “Get Shorty.” A lifeless retread, so how’d that work out?

“International” reboots the franchise with the fetching, droll Tessa Thompson and the self-mocking hunk Chris Hemsworth, putting Emma Thompson in charge of the New York HQ and Neeson in London.

So far, so good, right?

Tess T. plays Molly, who saw an alien as a little girl and made E.T.’s her life’s work and getting her own black suit, tie and sunglasses her obsession. She grew up to be a hacker and space invader tracker who uses those skills to stalk MIB agents after an assignment back to their headquarters, and from there to bluff her way into a job with O (Emma T., no relation.).

O: “We don’t hire. We recruit!”

Molly: “I look good in black.”

Cute.

Just like that, she’s in, and the picture perfunctorily skips to shipping this “probie” (probationary agent) to London, where she finagles sidekick status to swaggering Agent H (Hemsworth), a heroic goof we’ve seen save The Eiffel Tower, Paris and the World from “The Hive,” who are now back and working their way from Marrakesh into Europe in pursuit of…something.

A clever touch. The villains are “Les Twins,” a French dance duo turned into scowling Islamo-menacing aliens that no mere “MIB” can foil.

The new “pet” alien is the sole survivor of a tiny race caught up in the mayhem, a hamster-sized palace guard named “Pawn” (“Pawnie” to his new pals) and voiced, to amusing effect, by Kumail Nanjiani of “The Big Sick.”

Not amusing enough, but that’s kind of what we’re dealing with, here. The remixed theme song plays back at a slower tempo, here, and damned if that doesn’t infest the entire movie. It’s like a slow-walked comedy. So director Gray may have absorbed some, but not all of the Sonnenfeld comic ethos (“Comedy is fast,” he once lectured me. “And close-up.” The bigger the lens, the bigger the face in the camera, the funnier according to Sonnenfeld and now Gray.).

“Mission: Impossible” villain Rebecca Ferguson plays a heavy who shows up later, Rafe Spall is a grumpy London HQ nemesis for Agent H and nobody else is even given the chance to register — no funny alien voices, nada.

Thompson’s best moments are early on, trying to apply for jobs that will get her to the Men in Black. Hemsworth has a little fun in the part, but he’s going at half-speed, like everything else. Watch for one good sight gag involving a tool that’s been a favorite prop in his action career.

The aliens are far more lifelike than they ever were in the Will Smith/Tommie Lee Jones “MIB” movies, but the shiny ray guns are as generic as ever and the shootouts surprisingly dull, if expensive looking.

The universe — ok Sony — had the bad luck to put this movie in theaters in a summer overrun with desultory sequels. You know the dishonor roll — “Godzilla,” “Dark Phoenix” and let’s be brutally blunt, a $billion at the box office doesn’t transform “Avengers: Endgame” into a movie anybody will remember by the time it hits streaming.

Why gamble on a new action picture, period piece, rom-com or true life adventure when you own the rights to “Spider-Man” into infinity and beyond?

Until audiences stop showing up, this is our fate and these will be our choices. And they’re turning out to be no choice at all.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for sci-fi action, some language and suggestive material.

Cast: Tessa Thompson, Chris Hemsworth, Emma Thompson, Liam Neeson

Credits: Directed by F. Gary Gray, script by Matt Holloway and Art Marcum, based on the Lowell Cunningham comics. Sony/Columbia release.

Running time: 1:54

You might have heard the name, if you subscribe to Billboard. Maybe you caught him on “Soul Train,” just once.

The last name he shared with Obama’s pick to be U.S. Ambassador to the Bahamas, his daughter.

He got a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. He’s best friends with Quincy Jones.

And then a montage of the famous folks he’s linked to, revered by, people he helped — from Hank Aaron and Bill Withers to Bill Clinton, Andrew Young and Barack Obama, Jimmy Jam AND Terry Lewis, tells you who Clarence Avant –it’s pronounced “A-vant” — knows.

“The Black Godfather” they call him. They laugh; Jamie Foxx, Clinton, Lionel Ritchie, almost all of them with stories of some time “Clarence cussed me out.”

The man is a veritable Samuel L. when it comes to his generous use of the phrase that first references your mother and then what you do to her.

“The Black Godfather” is filmmaker Reginald Hudlin’s love letter to Avant, a major figure in music, politics, concert promotion, the star making machinery of Hollywood and the friendly ear and — when needed — megaphone with connections who can “get you paid.”

It’s a film of warm remembrances and salty anecdotes, deals made with just a phone call, “power” wielded almost always behind the scenes.

Greensboro born, raised in tiny Climax, N.C., Avant’s life is only shortchanged in Hudlin’s film — he did “Marshall” and “Boomerang” and a LOT of TV — in those early years. We get a hint of how he got out of rural N.C. during segregation, and no idea of how he landed his first showbiz gig or three.

But Avant went from running a club in South Jersey to handling much of the black talent for powerful, mob-connected agent Joseph Glazer’s portfolio at a time when black agents were as rare as black presidents.

Composer Lalo Schifrin is the first to give us a hint of Avant’s catholic tastes. If he’s an equal opportunity offender, sweetly and profanely insulting the high and mighty, from early on he made no distinction about talent. Being shipped to Hollywood to help jazz man Schifrin get his foot in the door composing for movies and TV (“Mission: Impossible,” scores upon scores of scores), he didn’t mind rattling cages as a short, well dressed black man representing a white jazz man.

When he started his own record label years later, he got in trouble with black radio stations for making guitarist Dennis Coffey an instrumental soul hits star. Coffey’s white, something that only became obvious when he hit “Soul Train.”

Avant dabbled in sports when he was asked to mediate getting Jim Brown to agree to do a documentary with TV producer David L. Wolper.

“He said, ‘You want to do movies?'” Brown remembers. “The Dirty Dozen” and a long screen career, after football, followed.

When Andrew Young decided to run for Congress in Georgia in the 1970s, Avant calls him up and offers to mount a benefit concert. Isaac Hayes and Rare Earth packed 30,000 in Young’s kick-off event.

When Hank Aaron was near to breaking the all time home run record, Avant offered to go to Atlanta’s most famous company and get the man a decent endorsement deal.

He marched into the president of Coca-Cola’s office in 1975, Aaron remembers, and says, sans introductions or any niceties — “N—–s drink a LOT of Coke!”

The man was Samuel L. Jackson before Samuel L. Jackson came along.

“I don’t have problems. I have friends.”

He signed 30something aircraft toilet builder Bill Withers to his start-up record label and made him a star. He signed Sixto Rodriguez, too. “Took 40 years” for the rest of the world to catch on to the voice, the poetry and the man who became “Sugar Man,” subject of a classic documentary and all-time great comeback story.

And on and on it goes, testimonial after testimonial, a man who often didn’t get paid for these “favors,” but who’d produce Michael Jackson’s “Bad” tour — even though he knew nothing about concert promotion, who strong-armed ABC, where he had a consultancy, into backing off letting Dick Clark run “Soul Train” out of business by launching the competing “Soul Unlimited” dance and music show.

“Godfather” they still called him, “Kingmaker.”

His status as a political fundraiser and voice in the ear of big time Democrats is verified by sit-down interviews with Clinton and Obama, Kamala Harris and Andrew Young.

Story after story backs up Bill Withers’ chuckling assessment of this man who has “never seen…with a tool…His tools are his ability to manipulate people. I don’t mean that in a bad way, necessarily. He puts people together.”

Avant laughs at all this, curses a little. Constantly. “Say Clarence Avant’s name and doors opened and the seas parted!” offends his modesty. “A celebrity’s celebrity” seems more than his due.

It’s a shame nobody thought to use the Yiddish word “chutzpah,” or the other one, “mensch,” because both fit the man to a T.

Here’s Quincy, Jones, rolling his eyes at every Avant pronouncement (they’re interviewed together), but offering, “He was fearless, man…He was in there calling Lew Wasserman (chairman of MCA) a mo-fo. And got away with it!”

There’s Snoop Dogg, getting choked up, Jamie Foxx attempting an impersonation, Hank Aaron the most bemused and relaxed we’ve ever seen him in an interview, David Geffen, Cicely Tyson, that daughter Nicole, who ruffled Dad’s feathers a little when she chose to campaign for this little known Senator from Illinois, rather than Dad’s friend Mrs. Clinton in 2008.

Of course, we’ve heard the story about the call Avant made that got Obama’s famous 2004 Democratic National Convention speech moved to prime time. So he can’t have been too upset.

“You either join the country club or you remain a GD caddie,” Avant growls. “I’m not a f—–g caddie!”

“Life is about numbers…” he preaches, talking money. Always money.

For a man who’s self-made, come up from nothing to the very highest corridors of power, largely based on favors, advice and legs up he’s given others (as the film has it), he sure obsesses about money. Then we hear about the time he went broke.

A two hour film seems his due, although “The Black Godfather” is quite repetitive and lacks anything resembling a discouraging word. Even people he’s feuded with have nothing but sweet things to say about him.

He’s no “Supermensch,” to compare this to another “rare Hollywood man of integrity.” But Avant, like Shep Gordon, the always-helping/unfailingly kind agent of that documentary profile, reminds you that whatever you’ve done to get to that Oscar, Grammy, Emmy or Tony podium, or that Washington office, the person who encouraged you, helped you and kicked your behind when you needed it at whatever stage of your career you had it coming to you is worth remembering, too.

Seminal figures behind the scenes should get their due, too.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA

Cast: Clarence Avant, Quincy Jones, Hank Aaron, Kamala Harris, Bill Clinton, Snoop Dogg, Bill Withers, Lionel Ritchie, Jackie Avante, Jamie Foxx, Barack Obama, David Geffen

Credits: Directed by Reginald Hudlin.  A Netflix Original.

Running time: 1:58

Tessa Thompson, Chris Hemsworth, Emma Thompson and Liam Neeson take over the franchise.

New blood new life? We’ll see.

The review embargo is 9am Wed.

Which has now passed. HERE is my review.

It begins by decrying “the largest science experiment in history,” our 250 years of burning coal and oil in such quantities that we’ve warmed the atmosphere and the oceans, altering the climate of our fragile planet — perhaps, fatally.

But don’t let that, the grim opening chapters of the grimly-titled documentary “Ice on Fire” scare you off. This HBO documentary, narrated by actor/environmentalist Leonardo DeCaprio, ends with a long summary of assorted other science experiments.

A Croatian scientist working in America is has been testing seeding the oceans with tiny iron particles to help duplicate a natural process, “marine snow,” a de-tox for the seas that makes the ocean less acidic by being a magnet for carbon, microbial life and everything associated with it.

There’s the Harvard researcher who helped invent “the artificial leaf,” for use in CO2 sequestration, a form of artificial photosynthesis for taking carbon out of the atmosphere.

A kelp farmer in the Thimble Islands of Connecticut swells with pride that he’s moved from simple fishing to growing and harvesting a replacement lifestock feed, kelp, that heals the ocean as it grows and is now “part of the army that’s going to save the planet.”

A forester with a non-profit that’s bought 2000 acres to manage young redwoods into old, carbon-sucking redwoods in California has a role. Iceland, which is losing glaciers and warming faster than the rest of us (the closer to the North Pole, the more pronounced Climate Change is), show off carbon capture machines (powered by Iceland’s natural thermal vents) that filter carbon out and bury it in the ground as others look at ways to use captured carbon to stimulate growth in greenhouses.

It’s not that Leila Conners’ film isn’t filled with dire warnings, and more than a few shots at environmental villains, from Ronald Reagan (Who only set back America’s solar energy revolution when he removed solar panels from the White House. The world ignored him.) to disgraced EPA fraud Scott Pruitt, who relaxed regulation on the already lax natural gas industry, adding to the world’s methane woes with leaky wells.

“Ice on Fire” is a globe-trotting state-of-climate-change update that starts with a history of when this research began — the 1950s — to the 2015 Paris Accords, which are on hold in the U.S., thanks to Trumpism. The film circles the globe with quick visits to air monitors in Colorado, “biomimicry” experts in Costa Rica, Norway and Britain, Africa and California, showing us some of the consequences of climate change and the diligent scientists documenting it thoroughly and raising the alarm.

Scores of such scientists are given a voice here, in between newspaper and magazine headlines, a rising chorus that is finally drowning out the denials of those “people who are literally profiting off the death of life on Earth,” as one expert declares.

“Some climate denial…rises to the level of a crime against humanity that probably should be prosecuted in The Hague.”

But “Ice on Fire” isn’t about reprisals and punishment for the Koch Brothers and their hirelings. It’s about a race to get the planet on a course to “return the climate to what it was 200 years ago,” just before the Industrial Revolution.

As narrator DiCaprio reminds us, speaking over scenes of the rapidly disappearing Arctic ice sheet, our bad decisions and climate destiny “need not be set in stone.”

Although the film has little that one could call exciting — the emphasis is on sober presentations of research and those doing it, because as DiCaprio narrates, “It’s their time to be heard — there’s an inherent call to arms in this engrossing HBO doc.

If we do turn our eyes away from Twitter and focus on doing this, what the world accomplishes will top the moon landings as “an unprecedented achievement in human history.”

As grim as seeing wildlife dying of thirst, starving polar bears and mass die-offs of whales and the like, the third act of “Ice on Fire” is bluntly can-do and upbeat.

More than one scientist unknowingly echoes the intro to TV’s “The Six Million Dollar Man.” “We have the technology” to fix this. “We don’t need to invent anything” to make it happen.

We just have to tune out and vote out liars who deliver whoppers about “Clean coal” and “Clean natural gas” and “Clean diesel.”

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Narrated by Leonardo DiCaprio

Credits: Directed by Leila Conners. An HBO Films release.

Running time: 1:28

He’s in “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.” The butt of a pretty sharp put down, judging from the trailers. And a butt-kicking.

His daughter isn’t going to be happy about that.

No heads up, no money changing hands, that’s not going to mollify her, if the family “Green Book” stink is any indication.

Not sure she has any rights at all in this scenario. Bruce Lee’s image and name are used–ill-used possibly– but the legal boundaries there seem just muddy enough to allow her to make a stink, if she likes. Nothing more.

https://www.lamag.com/culturefiles/bruce-lee-tarantino/

First full trailer to the latest Disney confection in sequel form.

This kid — and yes, he was a grown man when he tragically died, killed by a defective Jeep –was a sweetheart.

Ask anybody who knew him or interviewed him. Which is why this trailer to the new doc about his too short life might make you cry.

Sometimes you wonder if Netflix even bothers watching all of the movies they write the checks for.

I mean, there are thousands of titles, so I get it.

But “Oh, Ramona!” makes you really…wonder.

It’s sexist, vulgar and retrograde, a candy-colored teen sex comedy in English from Romania.

It’s filled with nubile young women in eroticized school girl uniforms, callous, coarse pre-#MeToo boys who aren’t in their league with the two best looking young women in the cast both falling for the nebbish played by Bogdan Iancu.

It’s lazily smothered in insipid, cloying voice-over narration about all the things Andrei (Iancu), wants out of life with a girl, all delivered in his cutesiest 16 year-old Romanian-accented voice.

“We totally were NOT doing drugs…There could be cops in the audience!”

“Wait a minute, I can’t show you this part! There are children in the audience, for God’s sake!”

We’re treated to male wish-fulfillment fantasy sexual come-ons, visual euphemisms of cucumbers, “USB drive and rear-entry VGA” ports, squishy cake and champagne corks popping, little old ladies licking lollipops, bodily fluid and over-full toilet gags, animated smoke coming out of bananas (substituting for doobies).

And fat girl jokes. Did I forget those?

Nerdy-horny Andrei narrates even the things we can see for ourselves.

Andrei has lusted after short-haired teen pixie Ramona (Aggy K. Adams), who gets a little wound-up at a party and grabs him.

“I know you’re in love with me. I think it’s…cute.”

But wait. Andrei’s a talker, and not just in voice-over. Talk talk talk.

“I’m not like all the other guys…” And then, “I just can’t have sex with a girl if we’re not in a relationship.”

But. But. But. “I’m the hottest girl in school…and you’re….YOU. Stop being silly.”

Thus things turn to a series of disastrously public failures with Ramona. She takes up with a boy who hits her, and she’s mean enough to tell everybody Andrei did it.

Very, um, Eastern European? Hitting girls? WTF?

His foul-mouthed single-mom (Andromeda Godfrey) coaches him on the phone while asking girls out, and when she decides that they need a vacation, Andrei meets the other supermodel-to-be who takes an interest in him.

Front desk clerk Anemoma (Holly Horne) is putty in his hands, thanks to his “gold medal pick-up line…’Hey, pretty…do you believe in love at…first sight?'”

And his attempt to serenade her, beachside with a little Elvis, seals the deal.

The boys here are insanely banal and drab characters, and yet every young woman — stunning to Mama June-ish — longs to sex them up. More visual euphemisms, more lollipop licking.

“Ooooo, ‘Fifty Shades of Andrei!'”

Yeah. It’s like that, only worse.

Mom gets the best line — “Between now and your 50s, you’re going to have so many women to disappoint.”

Andrei? He’s so naive that he can’t decipher college girl Anemona’s tattoo.

“Je ne regrette rien? Who to f— is RYAN?”

Romania looks lovely and perfectly visitable — if not for the creepy boys who no doubt grow up into creepy cave men.

Perhaps it’s comforting to some that there are selfish, oafish frat-boy types on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

Perhaps someday the young women depicted here will figure out they’re way too good for sexist garbage, and young actresses, too, will realize they’re better than movies lol oke “Oh, Ramona!”

MPAA Rating: TV-MA

Cast: Aggy K. Adams, Bogdan Iancu, Holly Horne, Adina Stetcu, Andromeda Godfrey

Credits: Directed by Cristina Jacob, script by Andrei Ciobanu, Alex Cotet and Cristina Jacob. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:49