The Bubble

 Comedy is notoriously hard to review.  A lot depends on context -- an audience half-crocked on cocktails and laughing uproariously at a stand-up comic's gags will induce a sensation of mirth, even hilarity in those participating in the experience that may not be replicable in other settings. (Hence, the use of laugh-tracks on TV sit-coms.)  If you attend a comedy show in a sour mood or anxious about something or, even, angry, you may have difficulty in seeing the humor in the jokes on offer.   At the 2022 Oscars, Chris Rock made a joke that wasn't particularly funny and got himself punched as a result -- but the video clearly shows most of the audience laughing enthusiastically at the gag, including Will Smith, the man who threw the punch.  Humor is a matter of whim, context, and an indefinable mood or aura linking the performer making the joke and the audience.  Movies are even harder to analyze -- a picture that seems inert and unfunny to someone watching the show alone in his living room, might be a laugh-riot in a crowded theater.  It's impossible to reliably measure the effectiveness of a joke without having a roomful of spectators..  This is why comedy on film (or TV) is so impossibly difficult to assess.  Yesterday, I watched what appeared to be a pilot for Seinfeld -- the show was very different from its iconic form.  Jerry seemed querulous and, in his scenes with George Costanza, was clearly imagined to be subordinate to the more dominant and aggressive Jason Alexander.  (Jerry is rail-thin, shockingly young and much more an ethnic New York Jew than in later episodes -- he sometimes sounds like Woody Allen; Jason Alexander has most of his hair.  Kramer is called "Kessler".)  Line by line, the show is startlingly intelligent and Seinfeld's observational comedy is spectacularly witty and profound -- but the show isn't really funny in the sense that one doesn't laugh-out loud at its humor; you admire the cleverness and ingenuity of the jokes and dialogue but they don't register as funny.  But, of course, this could just be my own idiosyncratic reaction.

I make these comments prefatory to my note on The Bubble, a big-budget NETFLIX comedy about a film cast and crew in enforced isolation making a special effects laden horror movie.  The picture is way too long and much too diffuse to be any good -- although comedies, in general, tend to "throw in the kitchen sink" to produce their effects; in other words, comedies generally fire in all directions -- this has been the case since Aristophanes, who is notably scatter-shot, to Monty Python.  The Bubble, directed by a comedy specialist, Judd Apatow, has about twenty minutes of very cleverly written satire; it's full of broad farce which is not to my taste.  (There's a long sequence involving cocaine use that's convincingly weird -- the faces of the actors are distorted into caricatures of themselves and keep flip-flopping genders -- followed by a chase and, then, hysterical and brutal attempts to revive someone that has overdosed.  I didn't think any of this was funny and, further, it was confusing:  the actors were supposedly inhaling "key bumps" (to use Madison Cawthorne's formulation) of cocaine, not opioids and, therefore, the climactic use of a Narcan injection to the heart doesn't make any sense.  However, for all I know, some people may have thought that this chaotic sequence was hilarious -- and, so, who am I too judge?  I don't think there's any objective standard that can be applied.

Like most comedies, the script and director will go to any lengths to get a laugh and the film is greasy with flop-sweat, although there were maybe four laugh-out-loud moments in the 126 minutes movie.  David Duchovny is fairly funny playing a parody of his suave seducer persona -- Duchovny, objectively looks like a homeless bum down on his luck although he still has a thrilling amorous whisper; I suppose part of his appeal is his grungy appearance and big swollen nose too large for his features -- he certainly doesn't look like a ladies' man.  The female actresses who are in their thirties and gorgeous are the subject of dozens of jokes implying that they are "old" and "out of shape" and sexually needy.  (They are ruthlessly compared with a doll-like 18 year old girl who is beautiful and a Tik-Tok celebrity.) Fred Armisen, who is strange-looking enough in real life, plays a creepy director -- there's a scene in which he wades around in a pool with one of the leading ladies that is disturbing, but not funny and plays no part in the movie other than to allow the actress to shudder melodramatically at his embrace.  There are some some sex scenes.  Sex itself can't be made funny -- it's too grotesque and poses too many emotional challenges for viewers to laugh at the sex act itself.  It's the preparations for seduction, the pretensions of those involved, and the aftermath of sex in which the potential for comedy exists -- this doesn't seem to be apparent to the scriptwriters and producers of The Bubble.  The aspects of the movie relating to film making, particularly idiotic genre movies, are the best parts of this picture.  I thought the parody of horror films presented by the movie was pretty funny -- although even this (relatively successful) aspect of the movie was over-done and repetitive, exploiting the appearance of the special effects scenes as they are supposed to look on screen with the tacky mechanics of producing those images in front of green screens with actors clad in ridiculous green costumes.  There's some vomiting jokes, a bit of diarrhea and an elaborate brutal cat fight that wasn't even staged as comedy -- it's knock-down drag-out brawl.  One of the beautiful actresses gets her hand shot off, an effect featuring Peckinpah-style gore -- I think it would be hard to construe this as funny; the wound was too realistic and falls into the uncanny valley (close enough to be real to be disturbing) -- when Monty Python used effects of this sort, they went over-the-top with geysers of blood (the deadly rabbit in The Search for the Holy Grail as well as the combative knight who is reduced to a torso threatening to "bite" he enemy to death) or volcanic explosions of vomit and shit (Mr. Creosote in The Meaning of Life). The picture ends with an Abbott and Costello routine, familiar to me from the low-grade comedies made in the fifties and shown on TV -- the characters are in a helicopter which no one knows how to fly.  The scene is botched and doesn't work -- this is vulgar, buffoonery but, at least, Abbott and Costello knew how to wring out for the viewer whatever humor existed in this kind of material; Apatow doesn't have a clue how to stage this sequence and, at  least, one of his shots is so spectacularly mismatched as to call into question his fundamental competency -- if the helicopter is supposed to be hovering over a vast country estate, why do some of the shots show it posed over what looks like a light industrial complex, presumably a film studio in England or Hollywood.

From the previous text, I suppose the reader would conclude that I disliked The Bubble.  But this would be wrong.  The film is trivial and poorly made.  But I thought it was reasonably diverting.  Most critics revile this movie.  I thought it was okay for what it is.  Reviews that I have read give the film a hard "F" for failure.  I'd rate it as a C+.