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Bubble

Rating: 2 stars
By PETER KEOUGH  |  January 28, 2006
2.0 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.
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  Topics: Reviews , Jim Jarmusch, Steven Soderbergh
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