This movie's tagline is "Another Steven Soderbergh Experience". After watching Solaris that slogan makes me think "More Boiling Hot Tabasco Sauce Injected Into Your Eyeballs".
People watch movies for a lot of different reasons. Some like an action-packed tale of two-fisted manliness replete with car chases, fiery explosions, and nasty deaths for the bad-guys. Some prefer a meticulously crafted plot with intricate and endearing characters trying to cope with realistic situations. Still others enjoy amateur actors poorly improvising a dreary and overly simplistic storyline that seems to come off the screen and punch you in the kidneys for 73 minutes. Bubble is a film for the latter.
The movie revolves around a young boy named Kyle whose voice box was apparently ravaged by a flesh-eating virus. As a result of this, he can only speak in low, monotonous, tones. It's unwaveringly hypnotic, and as I struggled to find interest in the plot I was continually hoping that Kyle would put me under and get me to stop smoking cigarettes.
So, Kyle lives an incredibly dull life in an incredibly dull town where he has an incredibly dull job working at a dull factory. I'm sorry. Doll factory. His best friend at work is a middle-aged woman named Martha who is, coincidentally, incredibly dull. In fact, Martha's life is so completely lacking any kind of excitement that she develops an attraction to this young man whose own charisma is akin to a lobotomy patient after a debilitating stroke. But life in the small-town of Dullington takes a turn for the worse when an attractive young woman named Rose begins working at the factory. It doesn't take long before our comatose hero is falling for her feminine guiles and Martha is left to wonder what to do with her creepy infatuation. Did I mention Rose is dull? Did I need to?
What happens next is that one of these characters gets murdered. But don't be mistaken - this is not a murder mystery. The killer and the motive are both painfully obvious once it's revealed who has been murdered. The Riddler was more discreet in his evil machinations, and he sent Batman clues with his signature on them. But the movie brings in a Detective (Dulltective?) to spend the next half-hour asking everybody questions about what happened in the film 10-minutes ago while trying to solve a crime that Encyclopedia Brown could have nailed after reading the back of the DVD case. It's all a painfully cruel exercise in masochism that I can only relate to a water slide made of rusty cheese-graters.
This movie bears the unique distinction of being the first film released on both DVD and into theaters at the same time. I completed a hereto unheard of trifecta by releasing it into my garbage can simultaneously.
