I wanted to but couldn't!

Fresh and Exciting

Blistering performances.

The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

I know I've seen a movie, but I do not know what he wanted to tell me. The only thing that is clear to me is that it is directed by someone who does not want to make movies anymore and I say it because it seems to be made with so much reluctance that it is not only cold, but it does not understand anything.Spoiler:I think Steven Soderbergh, at the time of making this film was in a phase of his life, that he did not want to make movies, if not, not explain a movie like this and I explain. He does not have any kind of enthusiasm or feeling. You also do not know what genre it is, it starts out as a social movie, for almost an hour and then we go on to intrigue, thriller, to finish with a resolution of the movie that did not matter and shabby. He does not know how to finish it and finishes it with a loose plane of the two women that does not come to story. I do not know if the actors are wrong by misdirected, or if Steven wanted them like this, without any feeling. The proof is when they tell Marta that she is dead Rose: Rose is dead. For real? If the police told us. Are not you kidding? They have not come to tell us. It's okay. I have a gift for you. Thank you.The downside is that I do not think it's a black humor movie, which I might square, but that's not the case.Then we see the photograph, all made in post-production. In the coldest moments we see a photograph of the most warm, saturated, what do you want to have this picture?We know that Soderbergh is not characterized by being a great planner, his plans are between normal and bad, but is that in this case, do not reach that. In many cases, the planes are so general that you do not know who speaks, or who is on screen, especially because when we take an hour many new appear. And if not then we make plans cutting heads. The only good thing is makeup and hairdressing as well as art. But this is not complicated, just tell the actors to come normal.I do not really know what I've seen, it seemed that I was watching the typical social film, extremely slow, that repeats itself and repeats and suddenly we pass to a death that does not come to mind and you lose altogether. At that moment as he does not know how to follow and this would be a new film, because not clear, we have to finish soon, we settled in two sequences

It's interesting to go inside a doll factory and see how some dolls are made, but we get that all the time on TV shows. We also get far too many "reality" shows in which people sit around talking about nothing. This film starts off with both. People sitting around (being non-actors they're mostly unintelligible like real people are)talking and eating. Lots of eating. Once Rose enters the picture we begin to hope something will happen and eventually it does, but there's little mystery involved, and without revealing too much of a spoiler, I can't believe any of the suspects (as we saw them)could have been callous enough to walk off and leave a 2-year old child in the house with her dead mother. The musical score was extremely annoying and did nothing to enliven this depressing picture of a dying town. Worse, from a story telling point of view, nobody gets more than a glimpse of Rose. We barely begin to see the real Rose when she abruptly leaves us. For all that,considering these actors are for the most part first-timers, I thought they did remarkably well with what they had to work with. I was personally taken in by the (false) advertising that this dealt with an entire town that joined forces to play detective and solve a murder. Obviously a lot of viewers like this sort of thing, but if it had been done as a Christopher Guest mockumentary, it might have been worth watching.

In 2005, widely prolific director Steven Soderbergh announced that he would be taking a drastic change in direction after directing several mainstream films, two of which were the Ocean's Eleven remake and its sequel, respectively. Soderbergh dropped everything to make Bubble, a deeply enigmatic independent piece setting its sights on a quiet, crippling Ohio town with characters who seem to be functioning in a meaningless life.The Ohio town is located along the Ohio River, and the three characters in the film are kept fed and vaguely satisfied by working at a doll factory. Two of them are Martha (Debbie Doebereiner), a pudgy, middle-aged woman taking care of her elderly father and Kyle (Dustin James Ashley), a dead-eyed, uninvolved man of younger years who rides with Martha every day to work. Their friendship is kept alive by the mutual understanding of each others' hell and torment. They both work at the same job, and for that reason, they know what it's like to work at some place that is so mundane, meaningless, and void of purpose that it almost compliments their own lives.One day, a new worker named Rose (Misty Dawn Wilkins) joins the doll-force, and is currently manning the fort with her two-year-old daughter and her distant, immature boyfriend. Rose connects with Martha and Kyle, but more so Kyle, being that he is closer to her age. They go out for a date and Rose gives Martha the job of watching her daughter. From there on out, it's a twisty, windy road that ends with a loud and deafening bang.The actors in the film are all unknown and, to my knowledge, live around the Ohio River area. Doebereiner was discovered and recruited at a KFC drive-through in Parkersburg, West Virgina and had no acting roles prior to this film. This, along with Coleman Hough's screenplay, give the film a very naturalistic presence, one of sheer realism and depth. It isn't quite impressionistic, although it does bare a resemblance to Gus Van Sant's electric Elephant with its serene, natural filmmaking, because it lets us know a bit too much for the genre. I would say it falls more along the lines of creative expressionism, with a marginal hint of impressionism.Bubble can also be lauded for being a possible breakthrough for independent cinema as well. The film was released in theaters in January of 2006, and was aired on the Television network HDNet for a brief time, before being released four days later on DVD. This is Soderbergh's subtle nudge to the audience that this film can't wait "x" amount of months to be seen. It is such a modest work, one that would surely get lost in all the camaraderie of the film world if not reminded about periodically. The idea to release a film to small art house theaters, a network, and a DVD release just days later is, in my eyes, a very smart tactic, and would prove to be successful since we live in a world where attention spans are shorter than a commercial lineup. And thankfully, we have video on demand services to cater to our indie desires.Going back to the naturalistic filmmaking, the actors do a great job at squeezing into their roles. Their performances are much more enticing than what many mainstream actors choose for roles today. Soderbergh does so much with his cast and makes their characters raw and believable so as to provide them with comfort for their first outing. He also knows how to craft a warm style of texture to his shots, and creatively add a muted color pallet to his works. Bubble is a work of indie delight, showcasing a variety of new talents, an underused medium of expressionism (let's keep it that way), and art in its screenplay.NOTE: There is an alternate ending to the film on the DVD, which I believe should've been the real ending. Without it, the conclusion of the film feels like we, as audience members, were deprived of information, which possibly would've led to a more surprising and satisfying finale. The ending we're left with is acceptable, but not entirely great or fulfilling. It does end with surprise, I'll give it that.Starring: Debbie Doebereiner, Dustin James Ashley, and Misty Dawn Wilkins. Directed by: Steven Soderbergh.

To call Bubble odd would be an understatement. To call Bubble a bad film would be a false statement. To call Bubble an offbeat yet enthralling experience would be a perfectly accurate statement. Bubble is set in a poor run-down town in Ohio. The town's economy thrives only off of a doll factory where we meet three people who work there. Martha and Kyle have been friends for a long time, both barely making ends meat, yet still getting along. Their relationship is shaken when Rose, a young pretty woman, gets a job at the factory. Questions get seriously raised when Rose is murdered in her apartment. An investigation then begins to find Rose's killer and strange and disturbing things are revealed about the people within this secluded ramshackle town.Bubble is directed by the always interesting Steven Soderbergh. By 2005, when this film was released, Soderbergh had already been an Oscar winner for five years after being nominated twice in the same year for Traffic and Erin Brokovich. The reason I bring this up is because it makes Bubble all the more peculiar. Bubble is the ultimate indie film. The entire cast was composed of unprofessional actors, a lot of the dialouge was improvised, and many of the sets were the actual homes of the actors in the film. I would love to know why Soderbergh decided to go backwards in filmmaking like he did, but the result of this choice was a fascinating film.It is the feel of calm mundaneness that makes Bubble so different and yet so head scratchingly good. The dialouge is all very natural speech and the conversations in the first half of the film are all just about normal things and it feels more like real people than movies that try so hard to pull this effect off. It is almost frightening how real some of the conversations and interactions are in this film. There are those simple moments where you realize the speech sounds just like you if you were in that scenario. At times I found myself questioning whether this was fiction or if Soderbergh had set up a tri-pod in these peoples houses and let them go about their business. I can't imagine how boring this film sounds when I describe it like this, but I swear it is not a boring film. The first half of the film has a sort of offbeat tension that carries throughout all of the little conversations and what is so exciting is how you can feel, deep down, that something is going to go wrong soon, and your curiosity takes over and you just can't wait to see where this film will go.When it does start to pick up, it doesn't let up. It keeps with the same type of monotone quietness, but suspense and tension unfolds beautifully after Rose is murdered. I don't know that the second half of this film would have been nearly as enthralling if not for the mundane first half that introduced us into a world that feels so real that the events that fuel the meat of this story are all the more gripping. Bubble boasts an incredible uniqueness in its storytelling and it is in a style that has been lost to the flash and grandeur of Hollywood. We have seen this basic type of story before, there is no denying that. But the incredible thing about it is that you believe this story more than any over suspenseful and over dramatic form of this plot. You buy into these characters in such a bizarre way. You aren't entirely sure why you are so gripped by this film, but you can't help but deny just how much you care about what is going on.Bubble is such a strange and perplexing film. It can only really be taken at face value, but its face value has a lot to offer. It tells an enthralling story in an incredibly unique and believable way. The way the pieces of this film come together in their quiet, dull, yet not anticlimactic, way is indescribable. This film could not have been made differently or it would have just been another unbelievable and boring plot line, but with Soderbergh's talent for capturing a story in such a unique light, he makes Bubble an incredible film.