Reviews - Bubble

Oops! Forgot to put my review of Bubble up with the others yesterday. Silly me. Well, here it is.

Bubble (Soderbergh, 2006)
A new girl stirs things up between factory-worker friends in a small, mid-western town, and shortly thereafter, new girl winds up dead. Who dunnit? And more importantly, who cares?
What a disappointment! Stirs things up is really a strong term. This movie was so devoid of any emotion on the part of the "actors" that there wasn't so much stirring up of anything. But I was so anxious to see some emotion, that I think I inserted some in my brain to try to make the movie seem more exciting. Soderbergh was so eager to cast non-actors and to make the story fit the town rather than the town fit the story, that he forgot to make the movie any good! He was also eager to make a digital movie, which apparently to him is synonymous with ugliness. He shot it with some fantastic HD cameras, not that you'd ever know. I have seen some of the beauty that HD is capable of. It is enough to make this diehard film lover think that digital is not all that bad. But if Soderbergh's movie was all I had to go on, I would say, "See? This digital video thing just looks nasty! Here's the proof. Big, Hollywood director uses it, and even he can't get it to look good." I love the spirit that this movie was made in. I love that it was a big experiment. But as experimental filmmakers know, not all experiments come out good. And some should not be shown to audiences. This is one of those experiments. Let's hope that the rest are better in Soderbergh's six digital-film experiment venture, or that at the very least, each improves upon the previous one.

PS - if you want to see a digital movie that has some nice shots, check out 10mph (a movie I happened to have worked on), which is showing this weekend at the Vail Film Festival. No! No self-promotion here at all. Are you kidding? Me? Never!


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