La burbuja

Well let me be the guy that found The Bubble to be funny. After reading the first page of reviews on here and looking at the poor ratings it gets I'm glad I had a different experience with this comedy. There are a lot of funny scenes, absurd sometimes but does everything has to be that serious all the time? They clearly made more than once fun of the pandemic and that was also nice to see there are still people that are not completely paranoid or just don't give a toss about the whole brainwashing we got. Plus the cast was very well chosen for this movie. I liked almost everybody if not everybody. They all did a good job, added something different to the story, and were all funny. I don't know if I have better weed than anybody else but I had a good time, and so did my wife who never has weed.

Seeing the stars in this and the writer/director it came from, I'm honestly stunned at how bad this was. The Bubble is an extremely tedious watch that has almost no genuine comedy in it. About an hour in, I realized the film must be close to over, but nope. There was over an hour more of the same jokes and same setting left to suffer through. It tries to be self-aware, however the ultimate irony is Judd Apatow casting his wife and daughter in this film while simultaneously trying to lambast how ridiculous Hollywood is.

A mixed-bag Hollywood comedy, suffering from the usual complaint which is that all the best scenes are in the trailer. This one offers a broad satire of filmmaking in the COVID era, with a lot of lockdowns, bubbles and hygiene-following. A sprawling ensemble cast are efficient in their roles, some funnier than others, but sadly the wit tends to be bypassed in favour of dumber sex or vomit gags. I did enjoy the dancing scenes and the CGI jokes, however.

Alright, let me break your bubble here.. I usually enjoy Judd Apatow's low-brow comedies, but this one reminds us of everything we hated about the early stages of the pandemic with added celebrity commentary. The humor didn't land for me most of the time, and even with a spectacular cast, the film never hits the highs you expect. It just gets by with a meandering screenplay that neither engages nor makes us root for any of its whiny, privileged characters. Well, Apatow's trying otherwise - he wants us to laugh at (and not with) everyone in the film industry dominated by corporate giants and larger-than-life characters. The pandemic was a bad phase, and no films needed to be made around that subject. Some fleeting flourishes aside (mostly from Pedro Pascal and a few cameos), The Bubble is honestly a letdown!

Don't get me wrong, I love a good joke. I just don't love the same joke being repeated over and over for two hours. There's plenty to mock over the past couple of years and I applaud this movie for having a go but it would've been much better if someone who actually understood comedy had written this, like Ricky Gervais or the Monty python crowd. But no. In typical Netflix fashion we get a corporate confection of mediocrity.