3+1 Short Paragraphs: The Bubble

2022, Judd Apatow (This Is 40) -- Netflix

Still writing posts during rewatches of Dune and The Batman, and getting nowhere with my latest Spider-Man movie post, which probably means a rewatch is warranted as well*. Its weird that I feel I should rewatch the movies before I write about them, because I want to give them what is due (but really, do I ever?) and yet here I am filling in the gap with a movie I watched pretty much before all of these (Dune is the exception) and I am just going with it. I guess that says something about how much I care about it.

* I used to think that having a (usually strong) beer late in the evening was lending itself to forgetting everything about a movie three days after watching it, but of late, I think its just stress-brain.

This movie was all about the teasers that came out EVERYWHERE long before the movie was released on Netflix. These teasers were for the movie that is being made in The Bubble which is about a group of actors and supporting crew cloistered in a country estate hotel in Britain during a pandemic, desperate to make a movie despite all the challenges. Said movie is the latest in a popular monster adventure franchise called Cliff Beasts. These are terrible, Asylum level movies but based on the energy the cast, crew and producers are putting into making the movie, I would hazard it is more akin to Jurassic Park in this world. Nobody wants this latest sequel but the producers are desperate to make money during a pandemic, even while they vacation off-camera in locales utterly unaffected by any pandemic restrictions, more likely because money.

I am now pretty sure that movies from and about the pandemic are going to have a very very short shelf-life in our movie watching legacy. This came out at the (fingers crossed) tail end of our own very real pandemic but already it seems so out of touch. It wanted to poke fun at the protocols and lazy restrictions put in place, and all the hoops actors and crew were forced to jump through just so the money grubbing production companies (the studios) could continue to make money, not giving a rat's ass about humans getting sick. But all the trappings around it just fell flat for the most part, reminding me why I don't watch more Apatow flicks. 

That said, there were some pretty good performances by pretty great people. Iris Apatow, Judd and Leslie's daughter, is great as a vapid social media star cast in the movie purely for the youth demographic -- she does a Tik Tok style dance with a dinosaur, which we also get to see depicted by a couple of wry guys in terrible green mocap suits. Pedro Pascal is Dieter, a method actor who spends most of the movie under the influence of one thing or another, desperate to get into anybody's pants. David Duchovny, Peter Serafinowicz, and Leslie Mann also put in some fine performances, i.e. I had nothing to complain about their characters, but they did nothing more than what they were paid to do. And Karen Gillan is Carol, the closest thing the movie has to a main character, not really interested in doing the movie since she left the franchise, but needs the money and exposure after some disastrous choices. Gillan is Hollywood, and ... well, she left me feeling flat, much like the movie did.