Bubble.

Manohla Dargis in the New York Times: "Easier to admire than love, Bubble is a fascinating exercise that seems calculated to repel most audiences, which probably suits [Steven] Soderbergh just fine." Also, Mark Olsen: "More than a few will be fascinated to see that Robert Pollard, former leader of the disbanded indie-rock stalwart Guided by Voices, has done his first film music for this quirky drama about the doings in an Ohio doll factory."

Steve Erickson for Gay City News: "Instead of making a film 'about' America's class and culture gaps, [Soderbergh's] willing to place his own difficulty understanding and bridging them at center stage."

Is that a good thing, wonders Michael Atkinson in the Voice: "Soderbergh's movie ambitiously focuses on movie-rare Americans... but never wonders what makes them tick."

Dennis Harvey disagrees in the San Francisco Bay Guardian: "Bubble isn't perfect. But it does underline how seldom movies really pay attention to the rhythms of truly average American lives. While that might sound like a prescription for pure boredom, Soderbergh's own striking cinematography is one major reason why these terse 73 minutes are anything but."

But from Andrew O'Hehir at Salon, it the film "no better than a C-plus for artistic achievement and a D-minus for audience appeal."

"[T]he director stares at his protagonists with such austere, Bressonian intensity it starts to feel impolite after a while," writes Carina Chicano in the Los Angeles Times. "It is, however, strangely absorbing — and its unadorned naturalism and metronomic editing style go a long way to create a feeling of floaty isolation and disconnect."

Desson Thomson in the Washington Post: "Soderbergh and screenwriter Coleman Hough aren't interested in creating a coy whodunit so much as evoking the deeper, less romantic mysteries of people - and it's riveting."

Writing in the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert agrees: "The characters are so closely observed and played with such exacting accuracy and conviction that Bubble becomes quietly, inexorably, hypnotic."

Ruthe Stein in the San Francisco Chronicle: "It's so low-scale, it makes his breakthrough Sundance hit sex, lies and videotape look like a Cecil B DeMille production."

Stephen Metcalf in Slate: "So brutal a negation of the popcorn aesthetic is liable to be mistaken for artistic courage."

Jürgen Fauth for World / Independent Film: "Bubble is astonishingly economical and effective melodrama - down to the devastating last line."

Cinematical's Karina Longworth: "Like Steven Soderbergh's best work, Bubble feels like a genre film that can't find its genre."

All in all, for Matt Zoller Seitz, writing in the New York Press, "it's more interesting to talk about than to sit through."

Dylan Hicks in the City Pages: "[T]he film's veneer of elliptical artfulness could be scraped off with felt."

Andy Klein in the LA CityBeat: "[I]t's odd to see Soderbergh, a tremendously funny guy, so totally suppressing his sense of humor (unless there's a level of deep irony here that I'm missing)."

"And yet the movie is interesting, almost in spite of itself," find the AV Club's Noel Murray.

And, as Monica Mehta reminds us at Alternet, "it might mean big changes in the way Hollywood does business over the next decade - much the way downloaded music has changed the way the music industry operates." Oh, let's not get carried away, cautions Anthony Kaufman in the Voice: "'Collapsing the Distribution Window' - one of The New York Times' 'Year in Ideas' highlights - is not going to live or die on Bubble's success or failure. A micro-budget feature with a nonprofessional cast going out in 25 cities, Bubble has little to do with the future of Hollywood."

The film's sparked a lively conversation at Twitch about the future of distribution; as for the film, there's Canfield's review: "Bubble isn't half baked - it's almost nonexistent. But here's the rub. I lived in a place just like the town in Soderbergh's film. And the non-actors in it are like carbon copies of people I grew up around and hung out with as a young adult."

More on all this from Scott Kirsner at CinemaTech: "While simultaneous release may seem like it endangers the revenues of studios and theater owners, the opposite may be true."

For Cinematical, Ryan Stewart talks to Mark Cuban about those collapsing windows.

Owen Gibson profiles Soderbergh for the Guardian. Soderbergh also talks about the film on Fresh Air.

Posted by dwhudson at January 29, 2006 4:48 PM