With This Ring (2015)

"With This Ring" is essentially a modern-day equivalent of a "race" movie from the 1930's and 1940's in that the character leads are all Black and they seem to move in a hermetically sealed world where they're able to socialize exclusively with other Black people and almost never encounter anyone white. Lifetime promoted this one heavily on the basis of the gimmick that the three female leads — talent agent Trista (Regina Hall), gossip columnist Viviane (Jill Scott — the great soul singer, probably the best "belter" between Aretha Franklin and Jennifer Hudson, is used in a role that doesn't allow her to sing!) and aspiring actress Amaya (played by someone billed on IMDb.com only as "Eve") — make a pact on the New Year's Eve their friend Elise (Brooklyn Sudano) is being married and decide that within the year all three of them will tie the knot, either to someone they've met during that time or, if they can't find a suitable man, to the not particularly exciting but good-enough men they're dating. At the start of the film Trista is having a sexual quickie with Damon (Brian White), whom she's broken up with but still gets together with for hot times even though she doesn't consider him marriage material. Viviane has a troubled relationship with Sean (Jason George) — they're not a couple anymore but they're stuck with each other because they have a son and are at least trying to be responsible parents and both take an interest in the boy's life — and Amaya is dating a married man named Keith and trying to get him to leave his wife for her.

Alas, writer-director Nzingha Stewart (bearing one of those oddball first names that's either genuinely African or a jumble of letters either she or her parents concocted to sound African) doesn't do as much with this story as she could have, veering between light-hearted romantic comedy and drama and not doing either particularly well. It's a film of moments rather than a totality, and most of the best moments involve Amaya: she makes an appearance dressed as a catfish for a commercial advertising a Black-oriented fast-food outlet; the shoot required her to do 10 takes in which she bit into a foul-tasting catfish sandwich and had to pretend this was the best-tasting fare in the world. "With This Ring" seems in part to be a propaganda piece aimed at encouraging upper-middle-class Black women to look for upper-middle-class Black men instead of dating white guys — they do exist, Stewart seems to be telling her sisters — and it's also one of those how-far-we've-come films in that it shows that African-American actors definitely have equal access to the same screenwriters' cliché bank as white ones, but it's not a great movie and it's hardly the good clean dirty fun it could have been!