Movie Nation

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

Weird, twisted stuff coming our way in December. Kathryn Erbe’s in it, and Tonya Pinkins (who wrote and directed it) and Ruben Blades.

My two cents, this is a much better bang for the buck route for Netflix to travel.

I understand that they won’t have access to a lot of Big Action content as Disney and others point their product to proprietary streaming services. But most Netflix actioners suck.

Their best films have been the awards contending dramas. Go for prestige, limit your expenditures on Big Ticket action pics. If you want Big Action, put it out in series form.

This Jane Campion (“The Piano,” “Bright Star”) adaptation of a Thomas Savage novel comes out Nov. 17 and looks like a contender.

The latest from Mike Mills, who directed “Thumbsucker” and “Beginners” and “20th Century Women” is also about family, and is this time a New York tale told in black and white.

Phoenix is back to doing interesting work. Good to see Gabby Hoffman finding her way back in the door this past year or two.

This one drops Nov. 19.

A little patriotism, a little science, a righteous mission — giving families closure.

Abramarama is missing the boat, not releasing this in time for Veteran’s Day, or more appropriately, Memorial Day.

“To What Remains” is due out in December.

I’ve seen some mega-yachts in my time, in Marina Del Rey and Fort Lauderdale and Barcelona, etc.

This strikes me as a villain’s yacht tender waiting to be cast.

It’s what the super rich heavy steps onto after 007 has shot down his helicopter.

“Look after Mr. Bond,” the baddie always says. “See that some harm comes to him.”

Generational ennui and existential angst is pretty much universal. But today’s Around the World with Netflix offering puts it in a uniquely Japanese context.

“We Couldn’t Become Adults” is based on a popular novel published in the island country, whose boom years are decades past and whose population is shrinking as marriage is delayed, suicide it up, immigration limited and calamities economic, cultural, seismic and nuclear buffet it. Japan, social observers tell us, is struggling with an existential crisis.

Yoshihiro Mori’s film of Moegara’s novel isn’t about narcissistic infantilism and economic stagnation, two glib labels flung at the phenomenon. It’s about one man’s journey from his teens to almost 50, a post-“salaryman” worker bee and his depression at becoming as “ordinary” as everybody else, when that was the country’s middle class goal for half a century.

In an opening scene, Sato (Mirai Miriam) trips and tumbles into a trash pile with a homeless man. The other man’s drunken fury suggests they have history, especially when the guy (Shinohara Atsushi) cries “I’ve got nothing! You’ve all left me behind!” (in dubbed English, or Japanese with subtitles).

Sato’s downcast look lets us know that this fellow isn’t far from the mark. He just doesn’t realize how little life has to offer a still-employed/not-homeless 45 year-old who never thought he’d end up this “ordinary.”

Sato’s a graphic designer who can afford one nice item of clothing — a trench coat — keep a decent apartment and buy all the cigarettes he dramatically smokes between glances at his latest cell phone.

But he has a question most everyone who hits 45 asks. Is this all there is? Is this as good as it gets?

The film takes us on a meandering journey through Sato’s past — 2015 to 1995, a tale told in chapters dated and titled, i.e. 1995, “Reach Out of the Dark.” That was the year he jumped from packing cakes for shipment to landing a job, with no skills or experience, working with Photoshop and the other tools of a modern computerized graphic designer’s trade.

New Millennium Eve in 1999 might have been the most pivotal of all. That’s when “she” (Ito Sairi) ditched him, with just a “I’ll bring the CDs next time!” as her parting words. Kaori was the One Who Got Away.

Mori’s film boils Sato’s life down into the workaholism that is the Japanese brand, revisiting the early days when his Great Love, met when they were teen pen pals, could yank him out of work for a day of rental car driving and sight-seeing.

The many points in time our hero revisits ensure that the story isn’t simplistic enough to suggest an abrupt day when it all went wrong. And Charles Dickens and Rod Serling covered that “job became more important than living life” ground long before this.

What we see instead are the waypoints to ennui, that “ordinary” and lonely life that Sato figured he wasn’t destined to lead. He wanted to be a novelist, but overwork and its steady soul-sucking impact on the psyche, after-hours karaoke and a vain effort to “settle down” with a woman (Yuko Oshima) who was never going to be The One Who Got Away defeated him.

The episodic structure shows the people Sato left behind at the dead end cake shipping job, and the devolution of a fellow idealist and boss (Higashide Masahiro) who once punched-out a bullying, cheapskate TV news director (Japanese TV news is big on animated graphic recreations of items in the day’s news) for barking, one time too many, to “take 30% off the bill!” By the end of his storyline, which is close to the film’s beginning, that boss has sold out, “started over” and become as ordinary as everybody else.

“I can’t laugh at other people’s misfortune any more,” another character says, capturing the resignation of middle age in a single sentence.

That episodic structure — bopping from 2011 to 1998, 2007 to 1995 and so on — makes the film hard to follow, although the sad drift from hope to shrugging, solitary despair is clear, first scene to last.

And if you miss the connections, Mori summarizes them all in the final sequences, another way “We Couldn’t Become Adults” tests the viewer’s patience.

The film’s depiction of tech hints at its role in crushing the life out of people. Love letters replaced by beepers replaced by the constant distraction of a cell phone. Progress.

I’ve seen the source novel’s title translated as “Not Everybody Gets to Grow Up,” which seems a fairer way to look at Sato’s journey. He attends corporate celebrations and retirement parties for firms because his company is doing the graphics that decorate these extravaganzas. A drunken mid-level manager bellows “Live each day like it’s your last!” and you get the feeling that Japan cuts loose and celebrates in a way that defies the practical low-risk savers (another reason people put off marriage) that is the national identity.

His live-in lover leans on Sato to marry in 2011, which he dismisses with a blend of fatalism and commitment phobia, wrapped up in his personal ethos.

“A lot of people are getting married after the (Tōhoku) earthquake,” tsunami and Fukushima nuclear disaster. “So ordinary.“

The film takes so much in — gay bars and a workmate crush, first-time sex in a “Love Hotel” — that it tends to wander. The women in it are perpetually in the background, forever waiting for men to grow up, make things easier, make up their damned minds or move on. Sexist and patriarchal? Yes it is.

Even without that, “Adults” isn’t the easiest watch on Netflix.

But I’ll bet a lot of people can connect with the weary disappointment with life that Moriyama (“Love Strikes”) conveys with every head-shaking drag off a cigarette. We feel you, man.

Rating: TV-MA, sex, nudity, smoking, some violence

Cast: Mirai Moriyama, Ito Sairi, Higashide Masahiro, Yuko Oshima, Shinohara Atsushi

Credits: Directed by Yoshihiro Mori, scripted by Ryo Takada, based on a novel by Moegara. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:04

An historical epic about a daughter of Muhammed, “the Prophet,” sort of the Virgin Mary of Islam, according to Wikipedia, at least.

Modern day Middle Eastern turmoil sets up this “Did I ever tell you the story” tale of a seventh century woman of influence in a religion whose extremist segments put the poisonous “P” in “patriarchy.”

Could be informative, if supernaturalish. Could be propaganda.

This one opens in select cinemas Dec. 10.