Bubble (2006)
Directed by Steven Soderbergh
Set against the backdrop of a decaying Midwestern town, a murder becomes the focal point of three people who work in a doll factory.
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What critics compared Bubble to
The Girlfriend Experience, like Soderberghâs 2005 film, Bubble, was made for Mark Cuban and Todd Wagnerâs 2929 Entertainment, as part of a six-picture deal to produce low-budget, digital films that would premiere simultaneously in multiple platforms.
Soderbergh can be a bit of a cold and superior fish, but surely even he knows that critics helped make "sex, lies and videotape" and continue to defend his most offbeat films ("The Limey," "Bubble") even when the "Ocean's" crowd stays away.
With the noirish Bubble (2005), director Steven Soderbergh initiated what he hopes will be a series of six microbudget features using nonactors, improvisation, and high-definition video, to be released on a variety of platforms.
The Girlfriend Experience harkens back to his fascinating micro-budget Bubble and to his offbeat British crime film The Limey , with its twitchy, time-jumping structure.
When Steven Soderbergh strays from his glossy, star-studded extravaganzas and makes the experimental films that are smaller, weirder and seemingly truer to his heart, they can work beautifully ("Solaris," "Bubble") or they're self-indulgent bores ("Full Frontal," "Che").
Sure, he’s crafted such commercial hits as Erin Brockovich, Traffic, and the Oceans franchise, but he always goes back to a more “personal” style of filmmaking, branching off and exploring the medium in efforts like Bubble, Full Frontal, and his most recent turn, The Girlfriend Experience.
I couldn’t help but feel like it was a cross between Steven Soderbergh’s Bubble and The Informant, with its almost dim-witted charm blending perfectly with the more serious notions being addressed.
He was never much moved by outcomes anyway — throughout his filmography, from the heists of the Ocean’s movies to the revolutions of Che to the doll assemblage of Bubble, he’s had a singular interest in process, in how things are done, mirrored by his transparency and demystification of his own efforts behind the camera.
Soderbergh has directed more than two dozen movies in as many years (and almost as many genres), from Sex, Lies and Videotape to the Ocean's movies, from Bubble and The Girlfriend Experience to Erin Brockovich and Traffic, from Che to Solaris to (my own favorite) Out of Sight.
A man of many, varied interests, he had just made "Bubble" (the super-low-budget murder mystery shot partly in Ohio), was in between "Ocean's Twelve" and "Ocean's Thirteen" and was about to embark on the massive Che Guevara two-part biopic with Benicio Del Toro.
I don’t think I’d rank it as one of the best movies in a career that frequently has balanced entertainment with social significance (Erin Brockovich and The Informant) and that has seen the director employ a dazzling variety of approaches in movies such as Kafka (1991), King of the Hill (1993), Schizopolis (1996) and Bubble (2005).
But ever since he followed the big budget sequel "Ocean's Twelve" with the intriguing micro-indie "Bubble," Soderbergh has been retreating more and more inside his own head, and his work -- while remaining intellectually engaged and technically precise -- has become colder and more alienating.
It’s him in the jazzier, muffled, experimental mode of Bubble and The Girlfriend Experience and Haywire.
Some of them are good (like “Bubble” and “Side Effects”), some are meh (like “Haywire”), and one is great (“The Girlfriend Experience”); none of them make much of an impact in the marketplace.
Soderbergh has been revelling in the power of digital imaging at least since making “Bubble,” his high-definition feature from 2005, in which the camera’s inherently analytical power to pack the screen with a profusion of legible details turned a modest and practical drama into something eerie and hallucinatory.
This isn't new territory for Soderbergh, whose interest in alternative distribution strategies dates back to his film Bubble (2006), which was released in theaters the same day it was broadcast on HDTV.
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Soderbergh can speak with authority on the subject: over nearly three decades, his films have ranged from eclectic indie projects (Schizopolis, Full Frontal, Bubble) to box office hits (Ocean's Eleven, Magic Mike).
It has a heist at its center, which relates it to his quite successful trio of Oceans films, but its setting is Appalachia—Boone County, West Virginia, and western North Carolina, specifically—and, in its interest in the details of lives lived paycheck to paycheck in regions of the country little-depicted in popular cinema, it is closer to something like Bubble (2005), shot in the Ohio River towns of Parkersburg, West Virginia, and Belpre, Ohio, or Magic Mike (2012), with its early scenes of men at work laying Spanish tile in West Central Florida.
But Mr. Soderbergh’s class consciousness — something that has popped up often in his career, in “Erin Brockovich” and “The Girlfriend Experience,” in “Bubble” and, of course, in “Magic Mike” — is atmospheric rather than programmatic.
Soderbergh, who directed the Oceans 11 remakes, was in this area for his 2005 film, Bubble—one of the first shot-on-digital features.
During the past two decades, the director has swung wildly from populist fare (the "Ocean's" series) to award-winners ("Traffic," "Erin Brockovich") to obscure indie pictures ("Bubble," "The Girlfriend Experience") to everywhere in between and back again.
So movies such as “The Girlfriend Experience,” “Che” and “Bubble” were definitely for him, while others such as his planned “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.” picture are for them.
Over the past ten years, the director has experimented at virtually every point on the cinematic spectrum, from inconspicuous indie ( The Girlfriend Experience , Bubble ) to half-hearted mass-market ( Oceans Eleven sequels), and it's nice to see him again undertaking a project of such scope and ambition.