Review: Pom Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold

Reviews

Bubble

Rating: 2 stars

By PETER KEOUGH | January 28, 2006

2.0 Stars

BURST: Steven Soderbergh’s Bubble is an exercise in banality.

At its best, Steven Soderbergh’s Bubble is an exercise in banality. Like a less puckish Jim Jarmusch, the director at first simply records the quotidian absurdities of humdrum lives in a nowhere West Virginia town without judgment or condescension. Chubby Martha (Debbie Doebereiner) picks up young Kyle (Dustin James Ashley), her “best friend,” to drive him to their workplace at the doll factory. Soderbergh indulges in the Grand Guignol appearance of the molds for rubber baby heads and limbs, but he shows his characters respect and compassion, filling out their lives and homes with details that are commonplace, pathetic, and unique. Then Rose (Misty Dawn Wilkins), a cute single mom with a messy life, enters the picture and the dynamics turn generic and cliché’d. The “mystery” that follows betrays the world constructed up to that point. In a distribution experiment, Soderbergh is releasing Bubble in theaters, on DVD, and on cable at the same time. Maybe for that reason he wanted to make his “product” readily disposable.

Related: The future of an illusion, Review: Che, Review: The Girlfriend Experience, More

Topics: Reviews , Jim Jarmusch, Steven Soderbergh, BUBBLE

| More

More Information

Watch the trailer for Bubble (QuickTime)

ARTICLES BY PETER KEOUGH

REVIEW: FOLLOW ME: THE YONI NETANYAHU STORY | May 29, 2012
Whatever your opinion of the policies of Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel, you can't deny that his brother Yoni was a hero, a courageous man whose conflicts and triumphs mirror those of his homeland.

REVIEW: MOONRISE KINGDOM | June 01, 2012
Wes Anderson should always make movies featuring characters who are pubescent or younger — like Rushmore , which until this film was his best.

REVIEW: WHERE DO WE GO NOW? | May 22, 2012
Lebanese director Nadine Labaki's whimsical film about internecine slaughter has a tone problem from the very start: a group of widows engage in a goofy line dance while the voiceover narrator bewails the death toll of religious warfare.

REVIEW: MEN IN BLACK 3 | May 24, 2012
Griffin (Michael Stuhlbarg), a fifth dimensional alien, can see the infinite possibilities each moment possesses and the infinite contingencies that caused it to happen.