Friday, January 27, 2006

Bubble (***)


Steven Soderbergh’s 72-minute film is a quiet-but-not-depressing quasi-mystery involving three doll-factory workers in rural Ohio.

Director Steven Soderbergh has gone back and forth between big-budget Hollywood films like Erin Brokovich, Traffic, and Ocean’s Eleven and lower-profile, experimental efforts like Full Frontal. The shot-on-digital-video Bubble has earned some attention by being the first film simultaneously released on DVD, in theaters, and cable TV. (It aired on HDNet, a network not carried by Comcast.) Stylistically, it’s also unusual. Virtually all of the actors are residents of the Ohio town where the movie was filmed. With its realistically undramatic dialogue (much of it improvised), drab rural setting, and sparse score, you could be forgiven for mistaking this as a documentary at first. The main characters—a young guy, his older female friend, and their new coworker, a young single mom—work at a doll factory. It was scripted by Coleman Hough, who wrote Full Frontal, but the working-class folks in this film are as far removed from the Hollywood types of that movie as Soderbergh’s calm camera work is from the frenetic Full Frontal. There is one surprising thing that happens halfway through the 72-minute film, but twists and turns aren’t the reason to watch. It’s more like a little look into the lives of people who aren’t usually the subjects of those big-budget spectaculars.


posted 9/17/13

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