Movie Nation

Maybe your first thought when People Magazine named Paul Rudd its “Sexiest Man Alive,” was “Say what?” OK. Maybe it was your second thought, after “People’s still around? And doing the ‘sexiest man’ thing?”

The reason, thanks to “recency bias,” is almost certainly the darkly humorous Apple series “The Shrink Next Door,” which premieres this week.

Over eight episodes, this series — based on the 2019 podcast of the same name — makes Rudd one of the great villainous charmers ever, a smiling, glib and glad-handing psychotherapist who takes on a pushover of a patient (Will Ferrell) and makes him over. OK, helps him — possibly — as he steadily milks the sap for all that he’s worth.

It’s light and infuriating, a show that episode-by-episode shows the manipulation, predatory billing and “normalizing” of a most “unconventional” doctor-patient relationship, one where the boundaries so vital to such arrangements are wiped away — and not by the patient, but by the shrink.

Rudd — funny, smiling, quick with a quip and “teachable moment” aphorism — is so adorable that it’s easy to lose track of the red flags we see and alarm bells we hear with every new entanglement of that doctor-patient dynamic.

We’ve heard of such things in the news and in the culture — Beach Boy Brian Wilson might be the most famous example. The true story podcast this is based on — which could easily be labeled “true crime” — could join it. I remember hearing it sampled on NPR and shouting at the car radio over the manipulations and predations mixed up with the “help”  Dr. Isaac Herschkopf, ask “Dr. Ike” (Rudd) was dispensing to sad, lonely and anxious Marty Markowitz (Ferrell).

“Shrink,” created and adapted by Georgia Pritchett (“Veep”) is deadpan funny and sometimes quite sad as we see first the “help,” then the cunning destruction, the wedges the healer/hustler employs over the course of the decades — from the ’80s, when much of it is set — to the 2010s, when it call came to a boil.

It’s also very Jewish, and not in that grating “Goldbergs” way. The series depicts an insular world of interconnections — rabbis, show folk, Dr. Ike’s “connections” and Marty’s long-established family fabric business. Rudd’s Dr. Ike is both observant, and practically a “pushy” stereotype. Marty, who has run from confrontation and let people walk all over him his entire privileged life, is putty in this knows-everybody/has-all-the-answers blowhard’s hands.

The dynamic is laid out in the premiere, “The Consulation.” Marty is reduced to near tears by a long-time customer who figures the son of the previous owner can play the insulting, threatening brinkmanship game that is haggling.

His “guard dog” is the only one who can save him, something sister Phyllis (the wondrous Kathryn Hahn) has been doing all her life, we realize. She’s the one who talks her unhappy, single and pushing-40 sibling to “see somebody.” She even picks the “somebody” out. We just know she’s going to regret it.

But his questions, suggestions and promises to Marty, drawing him out, getting him to say what’s underneath the surface, bucking him up as he tries to complete a break-up with a woman who wants a Mexican vacation for her trouble, is kind of thrilling and a little bit chilling.

The “time is almost up” and “let’s continue this on a walk” turns into a pick-up basketball game and a breezy stop at one of the many neighborhood businesses where they know “Dr. Ike” — the framing shop where his framed New York Times letter to the editor and photo of we gather a former client, Sly Stallone’s mom, can be shown off.

The advice is humane and rock solid. “The goal of life is to LIVE…You just lost your Dad, Marty. It’s fully within your rights to NOT feel ‘fine’…I think I could help you…I’m not going to let anyone USE you.”

But from the first hint we get that Dr. Ike isn’t off the clock on “let’s take a walk,” with every “F-word (fine) fine jar” violation (Marty has to fork over cash), with each offbeat suggestion — “Why don’t you have a second bar mitzvah?” — we see the hooks sinking in.

Rudd and Ferrell have a lot of experience in “buddy” pictures, and settle into this dynamic with ease — Ferrell playing the naif relieved to find someone who “really SEES me,” Rudd playing a guy whose sessions, and home life with his wife (Casey Wilson) drops hint after hint of his professional transgressions and the good doctor’s own “issues.”

Ferrell’s timid, clipped, kvetching voice and tentative body language is some of his most subtle work.

Hahn, just seen in “WandaVision,” brings the heart here playing the protective sister with a temper, somebody used to bowling over Marty but his Prime Protector up until now. We can’t see which status she misses most when the wedge is driven in and both are lost.

As the series opens with a 2010 weekend house in the Hamptons party where Dr. Ike’s excesses have him where gotten him where he most wants to be, we know this won’t end well. But even knowing that, “The Shrink Next Door” keeps us coming to see just how badly “won’t end well” turns out to be.

And if it’s not as cruel and cynical as the podcast it is based on, “The Shrink Next Door” can blame its intensely likeable cad cast in the title role. Even at his worst, Rudd could charm whiskers off Will Ferrell, or any co-star anyone cares to pair him with.

Rating: TV-MA, some violence, profanity

Cast: Paul Rudd, Will Ferrell and Kathryn Hahn

Credits: Created by Georgia Pritchett, directed by Michael Showalter and Jesse Peretz, based on the podcast of the same name. An Apple TV+ series.

Running time: 8 episodes @ :35-50 minutes each

The title — “Love Hard” — is a mashup of “Die Hard” and “Love Actually,” clashing visions visions of “the Best Christmas Movie Ever.” And truthfully, this piffle doesn’t get much deeper or funnier than that.

It’s a Hallmark Channel holiday movie on a Netflix budget. The characters are bland, the performances not much better and the writing almost instantly awful — tin-eared, clumsy ESL grammar and usage, the works.

If you can’t hear what’s teeth-grindingly wrong with the redundancy of “It’s been said, according to the ancient Greeks,” you’re not going to roll your eyes at “But yet” this and Thoreau bashing.

And the message? “Catfishing” isn’t a cardinal relationship sin? Come ON.

But hey, hold on. Take a breath and give it a chance. That First Law of Movie Reviewing, “That which starts badly doth not get better later” doesn’t necessarily wipe out this “swipe right” rom-com.

It’s about an online “Disaster Dates” columnist, played by Nina Dobrev, aka “Courtney Cox: The Next Generation.” She’s an Angelino (Angelina) who keeps looking for “The One,” and writing about her write-offs in “Always a Bridesmaid” for some film fantasy version of a webzine — a multi-floor enterprise with offices, cubicles, editors and enough online-only readership to sustain that real estate.

Her dates run the gamut of “LA ass—-s,” would-be actors, poseurs, Tinder busts and Flirt Alert (made up for the movie) frauds. Whatever their “profile” says, this could be “a guy who was featured on ‘Hoarders,’ that fellow is so much older than his profile pic “he could be a waiter for the Last Supper!”

Her cynical, bottom-line boss (Matty Finochio) loves her failures — “A disaster for you is a hit for me.” But cubicle-mate Kerry (Heather McMahan) shares her “perfect match” wish fulfillment fantasy, and she’s the one who suggests widening her “search” — to nationwide.

That’s how Natalie stumbles in the profile of stubble-bearded, sporty, soulful Adonis Josh, way up in Lake Placid, New York. Many “getting to know you” texts and a bubble bath chat or two later, he lets drop that “I wish you could be here for Christmas.”

That’s her column! She’ll fly in, surprise her dream guy, and maybe get a “Happily ever after” out of it.

Everything about the plan goes wrong, climaxing with…Amer-Asian Josh lives in his parents’ basement and looks like second-banana/comic relief actor Jimmy O. Yang. Girlfriend’s been “catfished!”

“I’m really good at Photoshop,” as the catfishers all say.

But that’s not where this script stops. No, Natalie stumbles into the “photo” Josh (Darren Barnet) at the local pub. And failing to make a good first impression there, wakes up one Epi Pen later in a veterinarian’s operating room with real Josh, where they stumble into a “deal.”

He’ll coach her, Cyrano style, on wooing his former classmate, the Prom King/Xtreme Sports town hunk. All she has to do is pretend to be his girlfriend through the holidays, impressing a family sure he’d never find anyone.

Hallmark Channel and now Netflix have made movies like this a mass-production, cut-and-paste product. The family is a collection of “colorful types”– complete with a raunchy-thirsty granny (Althea Kay), obnoxious, over-achieving and attention-hogging big brother (Harry Shum Jr.), his ditzy bombshell wife (Mikaela Hoover) and go-getter Dad (James Saito).

There’s a stoner Uber (and Lyft) driver, an auto-tuned and overboard family Christmas caroling venture and some “Love Actually” imitation.

City people, Nat included, are cynical, sarcastic and shallow, rural folk more “real” and real-world capable.

Throw in a little local color — Natalie gets a crash course in rock-climbing and fortifies herself with pot to take a run down the Olympic bobsled course. Pepper the dialogue with “Die Hard” vs. “Love Actually” Christmas movie debates, Henry David Thoreau and “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” as “rape-y,” Invisalign and Accutane plugs for the pursuit of physical perfection, and have the city gal slowly soften and “trust” the guy who connected with her under false pretenses.

The film made me sit up on that first meeting with the real Josh. Maybe this will be edgier than I thought, I thought. Maybe Natalie will face some sort of reckoning with her racism in addition to her superficiality.

Heaven knows, Hollywood is pandering and kowtowing to “The Asian Market” every way it can think of.

But that wasn’t to be. A couple of laughs and leads who aren’t particularly funny, charming or cute together and “Love Hard” goes bust. “With a Vengeance.”

Rating: TV-MA, pot use, adult situations, profanity

Cast: Nina Dobrev, Jimmy O. Yang, Darren Barnet, Harry Shum Jr., Rebecca Staab, Althea Kay, Heather McMahan, James Saito, Matty Finochio and Mikaela Hoover

Credits: Directed by Hernán Jiménez, scripted by Daniel Mackey and Rebecca Ewing. Netflix release.

Running time: 1:44

A film of consequence and warning, Kenneth Branagh’s “Belfast” takes us back to the beginning of “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland and lets us see them through the eyes of a little boy. A very personal story equal parts pathos and warmth, it sentimentalizes the region’s “Bad Old Days” even as it reminds us and “them” that nobody wants to go back there.

In cinematic terms, it’s starkly beautiful and achingly-dramatic, a showcase for Oscar-worthy performances by Caitriona Balfe and the great Irish character actor Ciarán Hinds and a victory lap turn by Dame Judi Dench. For director Branagh and his movie’s co-star Jamie Dornan, it’s a reminder of their gifts and robust, redemptive return to form.

The thesis is set up in a simple, symbolic opening — a tourism commercial drift through the colorful, vibrant Belfast of working shipyards full of cruise ships, high rises, memorials and museums for tourists. And the color drains from the screen and we return to the stark and white of August 15, 1969.

The streets are teeming with kids playing, parents shouting “Come home for tea,” and other adults and kids passing on the messages to children beyond earshot in Grove Hill.

Everybody knows everybody else, “It takes a village” is in the DNA, and Protestant and Catholic doesn’t matter.

Ma (Balfe, of TV’s “Outlander”) summons her sons, the tween Will (Lewis McAskie) and pre-tween Buddy (Jude Hill). Buddy is the one who tarries. He’s the one transfixed and then terrified by the sudden intrusion of masked men, hurling rocks and abuse, throwing Molotov cocktails and smashing select businesses and targeting people, houses and cars.

It was Northern Ireland’s Kristallnacht, only it happened in broad daylight.

The terror goes on after Ma plucks Buddy from the mayhem, the children cowering under the dinner table as Ma and her in-laws (Dench and Hinds) stare in disbelief. As news reports flicker on the TV and a journalist gives an Edward R. Murrow-styled account of what he saw on the radio, the locals — Protestant and Catholic — scramble to clean up and build barricades against the next, because “the police won’t protect us.”

It’s bad enough that Da (Dornan, putting “50 Shades” 50 years behind him), who does joinery in the London construction industry, rushes home to see to his family.

“I think you’ve got a few big decisions to make, son,” his Pop (Hinds) counsels, seated on the outdoor toilet in their backyard.

Little Buddy overhears this, asks Granny the who and the why of it all — “They’re friends, family, just like us” she says of both Catholic victims and Protestant perpetrators. This “nonsense’ll stop soon enough.”

“Was that our side?” Buddy wants to know.

“There is no ‘our side’ and ‘their side,'” his father corrects him. “Didn’t use to be, anyway.”

The family dynamic is established. The pull of family and community is strongest in Ma and the kids, who resist uprooting. Da and Ma argue about their crushing debts and circumscribed future and he pushes for “a new start” — in London, Sydney or Vancouver.

Buddy consults with whimsical Pop about “maths” and a girl he has a crush on in school, with Granny interjecting just as whimsically.

Da is threatened by the local Protestant ringleader (Colin Morgan) with a “You’re either with us or against us,” promising to involve even their children in this “cleanse the neighborhood” violence.

“It’s a mad world.” “Get used to it.”

And Buddy, picking up on real-life trauma and archetypal themes from Westerns like “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” and “High Noon” on the telly, struggles to make childish sense of it all as Van Morrison songs of the day waft out of radios and well up on the soundtrack.

A fire-and-brimstone preacher blazes away veiled references to the damnation of Catholics from the pulpit, a veritable call to arms that scares the kid and confuses him further.

Perhaps the cousin (Nessa Eriksson) who walks him to school can help. There’s comical misunderstanding and over-simplification of Catholicism everywhere. You can tell “us” vs. “them” by “their names,” Cousin Vanessa assures him. But as he swats down “But this” or that person in their own family has that name, she’s shut up and he’s dismayed.

“How the hell y’supposed to know them?”

And older folks, from aunts and uncles to Pop, rhapsodize away the trauma Ma sees in the very idea of “going over the water,” uprooting themselves from their community, their history and their lives at this bad situation that they all sense and history showed was just going to get worse.

“The Irish were born for leavin’.”

Young Hill brings the wide-eyed innocence you’d expect to his role as basically the audience’s surrogate, the innocent who has to have everything — love and women, geography and genealogy — explained to him. Balfe brings a mercurial fire to Ma, a woman truly torn even though they’re “drowning” here and living with her in-laws.

Dornan’s Da is both bluff and frightened at any turn of events he can’t protect his family from, brushing away his “do the horses” (gambling) and absentee parenting, flinty with this the guy everyone knew as a neighborhood goon and alarmed at the power the punk now has over them all.

Dench’s misty-eyed Granny is another grand, heartbreaking turn on her resume, a stoic woman whose ex-coal miner husband is sick with her son struggling to get his family out. And Hinds adds a glorious twinkle and sentimental spark to every scene he’s in. It’s a grand and warm showcase for an actor with a career (“Munich,” “In Bruges,” “Persuasion”) of hissable villains, conflicted heroes, tentative lovers and sturdy heroes.

Sometimes Branagh gets carried away with the sentiment, a little too on-the-nose with Van Morrison hear, a musical wake that seems more like a scene from “The Commitments.” But the personal nature of the story and the child’s point-of-view wash over that because this is the way memory works and childhood — even one as traumatic as living through “The Troubles” — becomes idealized.

“Belfast” is a moving, tense and yet often lightly comical experience. And as one of the best pictures of 2021 ends, you remember how good a filmmaker Branagh can be, and marvel at how he was able to pack all this warmth, wit and trauma into just 100 minutes.

Rating: PG-13 for some violence and strong language

Cast: Caitriona Balfe, Jamie Dornan, Ciarán Hinds, Jude Hill, Nessa Eriksson, Lewis McAskie, Colin Morgan and Judi Dench.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Kenneth Branagh. A Focus Features release.

Running time: 1:38

“Blonde. Purple” is a heist tale/hostage thriller with vague pretenses of Tarantino or Guy Ritchie and little of the style, panache, wit or adrenalin of either of them at their worst.

The odd moment of acting heat dissipates in a sea of words, too much of it set in a bank where a failed robber holds a teen singer hostage and they talk and talk and talk, never going for pithy, punchy brevity when 175 extraneous words are somebody’s notion of the minimum required for a “soliloquy.”

Writer-director Marcus Flemmings (“Palindrome”) lets it drone on for over two hours, at least 90 minutes of which feel wasted.

A sweaty, panicked young man (Julian Moore-Cook) with a battered pistol gets in shouting matches with “Aaron, your crisis negotiator,” who admits to a “temper” problem” with “toxic masculinity” issues. His partner was shot as they attempted their get-away, a dozen hostages in their hands and he’s flipping out.

Madison (Ellie Bindman) may be the most unrealistically relaxed, coy and confident hostage-held-at-gunpoint in screen history. Sure, she’s a “singer, kinda famous” or so she claims. Nothing but pretty white teen girl privilege could explain her temperament, and that’s not enough.

Through flashbacks, we get a taste of the heist as it was set up — the parole officer (Jennifer Lee Moon) leading the young man his “friendly hostage negotiator” calls “Mr. You” who plays a role in the planning, the verbose partner he’s set up with — Nath (Adam J. Bernard) — and his mouthy, cynical girlfriend (Jessica Murrain).

Scenes mimic Tarantino/Ritchie gangster banter, debating the relative merits of Nic Cage and Johnny Depp, “Scarface” and “Shawshank Redemption,” Julius Caesar and this one diner most everybody ends up in, repeatedly, screaming “Some SERVICE here” because there never is any.

“You seen ‘Wages of Fear? You see that film, ‘Straight Time?'”

Did I mention it’s British? The people inside the bank and the hostage negotiator lack accents, but most of the other characters do, and everybody’s English usages — “That last job went Hitchcockian (‘pear-shaped,’ as the Brits say)”give them away.

Ex-con Nath may counsel first-time-robber “Mr. You” that “It’s not about the job, it’s about the getaway.” But the long-winded clown brings a 1976 MGB convertible as their getaway car.

At several points, you snap to attention at the realization that this is so wordy it turns disorganized. The writer-director loses the thread. Scenes exist to just give extra actors a role in the larger, run-on conversation. The guys discuss “the job” with people who don’t have a damned thing to do “the job,” it turns out.

Hey, if you think a tiny, classic 50+ year old convertible is the ideal “inconspicuous” get away vehicle, maybe you don’t want to get away.

Or the writer-director had access to one cool looking car and made the best of it. The movie is a collection of indulgences, directing, screenwriting or acting.

All this abuse aside, there are some nice acting moments — rants and breakdowns, with Bernard, Moore-Cook and even a vampy, over-the-top Moon making impressions.

But even that’s a stretch. At some point, “Blonde. Purple” became all indulgences and nothing else.

Rating: TV-14, violence, near nudity, profanity

Cast: Julian Moore-Cook, Ellie Bindman, Adam J. Bernard, Jennifer Lee Moon, Jessica Murrain and the voice of Nicholas Gray.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Marcus Flemmings. A 1091 release.

Running time: 2:09

They all go Hugh Jackman, eventually. And @vancityreynolds never sees it coming.

The Season of Scott Adkins continues as “Seized,” another generic C-movie thriller, makes its way to Netflix.

It’s a shoot-em-up, punch-em-up, kick-em-down picture without much plot, without any pace but with Mario Van Peebles as its villain.

That’s almost a saving grace in a low-energy thriller whose screenplay hits the “stupid” button entirely too hard.

Adkins plays a widowed single dad raising his troubled, spoiled, misses-his-mom tween son (Matthew Garbacz) on the Pacific Coast of Mexico.

After five minutes of sent-home-from-school-for-fighting and “Violence never solved anything, son” and OY! Don’t you WALK out on me!” barking, a tranquilizer dart punches through a window, Taylor is kidnapped and Dad wakes up to this creepy phone call.

“I need you for a job…Nero,” tells us Brit Dad used to do things of a deadly nature, and that his code name was “Nero,” as in “burn it all down.”

His kid is “imprisoned in a gas chamber.” But here’s a bullet proof Suburban, a goody-bag filled with guns, a bullet proof vest with a chest camera on it and GPS addresses of these stops Nero will need to make.

Our villain, shortly revealed as Van Peebles in a black cowboy hat and speaking Hollywood Drug Dealer Spanish — “VAMANOS! MATALO! PENDEJO!” — has invited friends and gangsters for a mass-murder watching party.

Nero is sent hither and then yon — a restaurant, a strip club and so on, with just directive.

“Kill everyone in there!”

The shootouts are passable, the fights a little better. Adkins is always good in action.

But the script has nothing inventive to add to the long history of such slaughter scenes, and neither does Adkins.

There’s no invention to Nero’s efforts to find out who has his kid and what he can do about, or the kid’s recognition of his plight and efforts to save himself.

Van Peebles may have softened our heavy’s “motive,” launching into speeches about getting into tech and green energy, cracks about “Making the Cartels Great Again” and having the guy soft-sell his murderous nature.

“Unlike me,” he says of one rival Nero must wipe out, “the world will be a better place without him in it.”

You watch enough Adkins movies and you pick up on why he’s not getting over as an A-list action star. There’s no charisma. He gives you nothing in scenes between fights that capture his worry for his child, his fear for his safety or his hatred of the dude doing this to Nero.

Isaac Florentine, the director, might have watched “Speed” (villain monitoring his crimes via camera) or “Crank” or “John Wick” or “Hardcore Henry” as homework, figured out that he needed to use a LOT more footage from the chest-cam, and make a lot more quick cuts because speed and urgency are of the essence.

This thriller dawdles, loses the thread as intrigues within the villain’s lair are unnecessarily developed, and never has the feeling of life-or-death stakes.

For those reasons — every one of them — “Seized” never grabs you.

Rating: R for violence throughout, sexual material/nudity, and language

Cast: Scott Adkins, Matthew Garbacz, Karlee Perez and Mario Van Peebles.

Credits: Directed by Isaac Florentine, scripted by Richard Lowry. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:26

The funniest thing about “The Rumperbutts” is its initial, opening act concept. A musical couple, Wiggles-popular children’s entertainers, have to dress up in plush hedgehog (ish) costumes, tour and do their TV show and meet their contract obligations long after they’ve grown fed up with the gig and each other.

Their love has died. They’re cheating on one another, and can barely hide their mutual loathing on stage together. But like The Everly Brothers, they soldier on.

That hook is abandoned all-too-quickly in Marc Brener’s stillborn 2015 comedy, just now making its way to streaming. A “supernatural aid” in the form of a sitcom-pervy guardian angel type (Josh Brener) gives them the means to ditch that career, get back to making music and get back together as a couple.

“I thought you would hate each other more,” Richie complains to Bonnie (Kori Gardner) and Jack (Jason Edward Hummel). So did we. I mean, that’s “conflict,” the stuff of drama and comedy. And there’s precious little of it once Richie’s shown up, sabotaged their careers with a vulgar, drunken kid-bashing video (in costume) that goes viral.

Jack’s ongoing affair with the “princess” (Vanessa Ray) in their stage show is abandoned and forgotten. They’re back to getting along, getting in the studio, and getting down to the business of writing the instantly-forgettable synth pop they used to make (songs here are by Mates of State).

The plot thins, rather than thickens, as musical interludes — recording sessions, etc. — take over.

Dull? You don’t know the half of it. At least the stars can sing and play instruments (with a little post-production help).

Nothing remotely funny happens after their opening act fantasized performance where they sing their true feelings and get (in their minds) their audience of children to sing along to the chorus, “I saw ‘Go to Hell!'” After that, “The Rumperbutts” goes to hell.

Rating: unrated, pot use, profanity

Cast: Kori Gardner, Jason Edward Hummel, Vanessa Ray, Josh Brener

Credits: Scripted and directed by Marc Brener. A Global Digital release.

Running time: 1:31

This Apple TV+ premiere gets into the story of one of those “I just LOVE Christmas” over-decorating, traffic-drawing, electricity-wasting, neighbor-infuriating cranks whose “calculated” antics got his neighborhood up in arms.

Nov. 26, we see the brawl break out.

The first time Julia Child appeared on TV, it was on “Educational Television” in Boston in the 1960s. She was to plug her culture-shifting new cookbook, “Mastering the Art of French Cooking.” But what she was most concerned about was having something plugged in for her. She needed a hot plate, and the malnourished TV operation at WGBH wasn’t sure they could provide one.

It was for a book talk program, after all. But she insisted, in that bizarre, fluty/fruity, patrician-accented voice, that it was simply a must.

And when she showed up, a lifelong member of the production crew there recalls, she made an omelet, live on the show. She brought the ingredients, her own pan and walked the program host and the viewing audience through the mesmerizing, mouth-watering process of how to make one perfectly.

“No one had an omelet pan in greater Boston,” that crew member marvels. And if Boston, of all places, didn’t, how many could there have been in all of America?

That’s the country and culinary sophistication that Julia Child, ex-OSS agent-handler and office clerk, rare female graduate of Paris’s famed Le Cordon Bleu cooking academy and new New Englander walked into on that set. A nation of tinfoil-covered TV dinners, SPAM hors d’oeuvres and “convenience” eaters was about to have its taste buds and its mind blown.

That culture shock is the great take-away from the fun and fascinating new documentary, “Julia.” Here’s a film, opening in a nation overrun with cooking shows and entire TV networks devoted to food and a whole section of society labeling itself “foodies.” And bless her big, butter-basted heart, here’s the woman changed it.

Interviewing friends and relatives, chefs from America and France and the World’s Chef, Spanish-born José Andrés, professional acquaintances and TV cooks who followed her, “Julia” digs deeper into Child than the delightful, fictionalized “Julie & Julia” of a few years back, and captures a true pioneer in her element.

Yes, we see that first omelet on the primitive TV of the Kennedy “Camelot” era. We see the accidents, the improvising, the unflappable chattering on that made her “inimitable,” until, well everyone from comedians to cooks to anybody you met on the street could offer a fair imitation of PBS’s first superstar.

“Save the liver!”

Yes, she stumbled into the Dan Aykroyd “Saturday Night Live” sketch in the ’70s, laughed, and proceeded to show it to dinner guests on video for years afterward, a bit of gory, affectionate mockery she wholly embraced.

The film starts with a bracing montage of Julia cooking-on-TV moments and quotes — “I find that if people are not very interested in food, I’m not very interested in them.” — set to Jimi Hendrix’s “Let Me Stand Next to Your Fire.” It takes in her upper class upbringing in Pasadena, her Smith College education and the start of World War II.

That’s where she jumped into government clerical work, and eventually made her way to the OSS, which would morph into the CIA. That’s where she met and fell in love with her greatest influence, the dashing epicurean Paul Child — her tour guide to the finer things, her champion, her TV cue card writer and biggest fan.

Co-directors Betsy West and Julie Cohen are covering a lot of familiar ground in this Sony Classics/CNN Films production, so they make quick work of it. There was already a definitive PBS documentary, and “Julie & Julia” skipped through her life with no less than Meryl Streep putting everyone else’s Julia Child impersonation to shame.

The co-directors of “RBG” come closest to breaking new ground in recalling Child’s old fashioned, ignorant homophobia, something she (like Fred Rogers, as we saw in his documentary) abandoned the moment she learned better. But even Child’s twilight years — bristling at the “farm to table” fuss of those who followed her, refusing to slow down or give up her various TV gigs, her battles with PBS, which took her for granted in ways they never did her fellow Founding Icon, Mister Rogers — have a triumphant air as showcased here.

Here was a “broad” with moxie, staying power and charisma. There would be no dimming of the light, just an ABC’s “Good Morning, America” gig, endless chat show appearances and one last PBS series with Jacques Pepin as a victory lap for the Woman Who Changed Eating in America when no one thought that could be done.

Rating: PG-13 for brief strong language/sexual reference, and some thematic elements

Cast: Julia Child, José Andrés, Ina Garten, Danièle Mazet-Delpeuch, Jacques Pepin, Charles Gibson, Ruth Reichl

Credits: Directed by Julie Cohen and Betsy West. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Running time: 1:35