Being a sensitive guy in deep touch with my inner feminist I suggested to my bride the other day that I’d go with her to see “Crazy Rich Asians” the glitzy rom-com now cleaning up at the box office. This was an alternative to staying home with the lights off and curtains drawn watching Ingmar Bergman’s “Cries and Whispers” for the umpteenth time.

As a general rule I avoid rom-coms like an injection of hoof and mouth disease. Not so much that I’m opposed to either romance or comedy, but because every one is the same damned movie just re-set in different locations with different actors. Which means I sit in the theater checking off all the absolutely obligatory turns of plot and counting down to when I can unlock the wrist cuffs and go home.

But I was interested in “Crazy Rich Asians” because I had read so many reviews and “thinky” pieces — usually by writers with Asian names — celebrating the movie as not just a big breakthrough for Hollywood, namely an all-Asian cast up on thousands of screens across the country at the same moment, but a movie with a rich feel for unique nuances of Asian culture.

Really?

Not so much, say I, as a very white guy from rural Minnesota who does however have an appetite for well-stuffed dumplings. (You get hungry watching the movie.)

I grant you that the nuances of Asian culture may have been far too nuanced, too subtle or too fleeting for me to grasp. And that likewise, being clueless about mahjong I had no idea what kind of symbolism was at play when the strong and resourceful female lead sat down to confront her nemesis, the willful and powerful Tiger Mother of the impossibly flawless leading man. The male lead, son of the Tiger Mother, is played by a guy — actor/model Henry Golding — with a precise Oxford British accent and, it seemed to me, only the barest minimum of Asian physical characteristics.

As I’ve read, within the movie’s female characters — the American girl friend, the Tiger Mother and Tiger Mom’s imposing Empress Mother — is a valuable look at the unique Asian maternal culture too little understood by Western movie audiences.

So I’m dim. But the “commoner girlfriend” being denied full respect by the domineering mother of the leading man just didn’t strike me as anything close to “uniquely Asian”, much less any kind of nuanced. I mean, I’ve seen this exact story in dozens of movies featuring Jewish mothers, Hispanic mothers, British mothers, Lutheran Protestant mothers and hyper Catholic Italian mothers. I mean, it’s practically Basic Storyline #12.

“Crazy Rich Asians” is a formulaic rom-com, this time in Singapore. The two strong-willed women butt heads before — huge spoiler alert here — recognizing the strength and resolve of the other and patching things up to make way for the big heart-warming finale, which as usual involves lots of glamorous close-ups, hugging and kissing.

What “Crazy Rich Asians” seemed most like is a re-orientation of your standard Bollywood flick, where, as I say, impossibly flawless heroes and heroines, meet, separate and inevitably smooch for the grand finale, sending everyone home pleased to have forgotten about their root canal appointment (or Donald Trump) on Monday for a whole 90 minutes.

If there was something uniquely Asian about anything else going on — besides that mahjong game — that was way over my head, too.

I strongly suspect that if the movie had been titled just, “Crazy Asians”, it would only be playing on the second half of a double bill at the Film Society and wouldn’t already be teed up for two sequels. Why? Because the luxury-porn factor of that “Rich” thing strikes me as the true, singular driver of its appeal.

With the exception of the #MeToo era-smart and strong heroine everyone else is ridiculously, over-the-top, jade-and-pearl dripping rich. Scene after scene has the cast — all of whom look good in bikinis and swim trunks — racing around in Ferraris, personal helicopters, partying on private ocean-going cargo ships and waggling bags from every Coach and Chanel shop in high-end Singapore.

So if anyone was saying anything about either traditional or modern Asian culture other than they are as glitzed-out and consumer-crazed as any other culture given a few million renminbi of daddy’s money to play with, I missed that, too.

I get the desire of any Asian here in the West to promote the movie and encourage non-Asian Americans to get out and get a taste of something other than Aryan super heroes (with an occasional black guy) mopping the floor with cartoon villains. We should all check out how the other three billion live.

But, as a movie fan, and before I shut out the light and resume my private Bergman festival, I gotta tell you, if Jennifer Aniston and Ryan Reynolds had replaced the perfect, pimple-free stars of “Crazy Rich Asians” my and your understanding of Asian culture would not have changed one iota.

You want a feel for the lingering traditional mores of modern Asians? Check out anything by the great Wong Kar-wai .

And start with “In the Mood for Love.”*

*Spoiler alert #2. There are no Ferraris, private choppers or Chanel bags.