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Bubble
Director: Steven Soderbergh
Country/Year: U.S., 2005
Opening: January 27; January 31
Where: Limited; DVD
Is there another contemporary filmmaker whose work swings as unpredictably between the seductive and the alienating as does Steven Soderbergh's? Much is made, as it should be, of his switches between big studio movies and frugal experimental indies. But it's the emotionally and aesthetically "bipolar" nature of his oeuvre that's more fascinating. Bubble is the first of a projected series of six quickies directed by Soderbergh and produced by Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner's HDNet Films. It was planned as the first test of Cuban and Wagner's well-hyped scheme to revolutionize film distribution and exhibition by collapsing the windows between theatrical, DVD, and pay-cable release so that movies open simultaneously in all markets. One imagines that HDNet hoped to launch their day-and-date concept with a film as irresistible as Soderbergh's 1989 debut, sex, lies, and videotape, which effectively put American independent film on the cultural map. Instead, the director, who has...