The Bubble

In his new film The Bubble, director Judd Apatow has chosen to combine a satire of today's blockbuster filmmaking with some current commentary on Covid ...

Is the point that Hollywood people are shallow? Iris Apatow and Galen Hopper—the daughters of Apatow and Dennis Hopper—play TikTok influencers cast in the film. The setup is that at some point in the pre-vaccine phase of the pandemic, a cast and crew have gathered under bubble conditions to produce a high-budget Hollywood blockbuster called Cliff Beasts 6. The film has nothing to say—about movies, the pandemic, TikTok, or how Hollywood handled Covid. COVID isn’t easy thing to joke about, and every bit of pandemic humor in The Bubble is as funny as death. It’s a waste—Gillan’s usually a joy, and Pascal is capable of great things. In his new film The Bubble, director Judd Apatow has chosen to combine a satire of today’s blockbuster filmmaking with some current commentary on Covid protocols, and the quarantine moment of 2020.

April 1 (UPI) -- John Legend, Silk Sonic and Carrie Underwood will perform at the Grammy Awards ceremony airing this weekend on CBS, and a new comedy film, ...

The Canadian apocalyptic sci-fi thriller film about a mother, who joins an underground band of vigilantes to try to rescue her daughter from a state-run institution, will drop on Hulu on Friday. The film is among the leading nominees for the upcoming Canadian Screen Awards. Stars include Karen Gillan, David Duchovny and Keegan Michael-Key. In addition, a new British comedy thriller series, The Outlaws, will premiere on Prime Video, the complete Season 1 of the drama series, Love Me, will drop on Hulu, and a two-night event, Wrestlemania, will stream live on Peacock.

The Bubble, the latest film from Judd Apatow, is a shaggy and toothless look at celebrity egos and pandemic-era filmmaking.

Apatow has always been a fan of improvisation, but with The Bubble, that reliance on letting the actors go free hits its breaking point. But with The Bubble, Apatow is at his least interesting as a comedy writer, with pandemic jokes that already feel exhausted, and parodies of showbiz that are fairly obvious. On that note, some of The Bubble’s best moments are when Apatow does let these actors play off each other, but puts a structure in place. That, however, is not the case with The Bubble, Apatow’s latest comedy, in which he indulges his worst impulses in a film that becomes little more than a collection of bits and ideas that don’t tie together in a worthwhile way. As the COVID-19 pandemic looms over film productions, The Bubble has the stars of the 23rd biggest action franchise of all time—Cliff Beasts—reuniting for the sixth installment. Each member of The Bubble’s cast is a fairly one-note joke, each a shallow caricature of fairly broad celebrity type.

Apatow's deadly dull, self-pitying movie about film stars shooting a Jurassic Park-style franchise thriller stars Pedro Pascal, Karen Gillan, Keegan-Michael ...

There might well be humor to be mined from the self-absorbed foibles of the rich and famous during a deadly pandemic. But it says a lot that the only clear-eyed counterpoint to the Cliff Beasts 6 cast’s apparently life-threatening cabin fever comes from “the help.” Pascal’s character in The Bubble is a serial seducer and a committed psychonaut. Ironically, the only bits in The Bubble that are somewhat amusing come from the Cliff Beasts 6 script, which multiple characters describe as absolutely terrible. The sex is of the bra-on, herky-jerky variety. Iris Apatow’s character brings some perspective to the story as well. (According to The Bubble, the problem was of course the critics, not the casting.) And so Cobb’s agent pressures her to return to the Jurassic Park-esque Cliff Beasts franchise, which she abandoned in part five. It’s like watching a comedy whose humor depends on the nuances of an unfamiliar culture, except the language being spoken here is Hollywood navel-gazing. The Bubble is composed mainly of long, excruciating sequences where everyone is trying very hard and producing zero laughs, like people trying to start a fire by rubbing two wet sticks together. The Bubble was reportedly inspired by the production of Jurassic World: Dominion, which filmed last year in the UK under strict COVID protocols. Judd Apatow’s Netflix action-comedy The Bubble is the film no one wanted about the COVID-19 pandemic: It’s instantly dated, frustratingly oblivious, and painfully unfunny. Some of these characters have real-world parallels, particularly Van Chance and Mulray, who are clearly modeled after Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum. Others represent more generic blockbuster types: the tough-talking soldier, the vaguely foreign scientist, the comic relief.

Also a movie that bombed, a dour comic book, a boy's Broadway dreams and the race to the vaccine.

They're vampire bats, he turns into a vampire, the police can't solve a series of bloody murders in the streets and his lab assistant (Adria Arjona) is an almost-love interest and almost incidental in the story. But when he sings On Broadway in a crowd out of the street, a smart phone video goes viral on Tik Tok, and you can see where this is going. In New York there's a casting call for a musical version of the film Lilo & Stitch and he (Rueby Wood) and best friend Libby (Aria Brooks) hop on a bus to go there. And he needs the help of an aunt (Lisa Kudrow) who knows the Broadway scene but never made it big herself and now works as a caterer. (Netflix) 4 out of 5MOONFALL: This is almost a must-see and for all the wrong reasons. The actors are in England, holed up in a hotel (hence the Bubble) and forced to put up with each other with no chance of escape. One is also a former astronaut (Wilson); the other is a conspiracy theorist played by John Bradley, who I read was in Game of Thrones. He goes on about “megastructures” and asks “What would Elon do?” What indeed. He was enamored by the idea of space travel and living in Houston, site of one of the NASA centers, was super excited by the Apollo 11 mission to the moon. She, as a former NASA astronaut frantically tries to tell the world that the moon is hollow, it was constructed by aliens and a swarm of flying things comes out like a giant tentacle now and then. All that while her milquetoast of a husband (Ke Huy Quan) is trying to talk divorce and her daughter (Stephanie Hsu) is falling in love with a girlfriend. He knows the subject well enough to know where to look.He centers on the rush to develop a vaccine, documents the pressures on the companies and celebrates when the results come. Apatow's friends probably, and a couple of relatives.Like the tales of making the next Jurassic Park movie, he imagines a film shoot during the pandemic.

The "bubble" is the hotel and movie set that everyone working on Cliff Beasts 6 is confined to, though the meta-comedy aspects at work here, in which Hollywood ...

Larger story elements aside, it is enjoyable to see Pascal inhabit the soul of an eccentric narcissist, Duchovny and Mann bicker about as an on-and-off couple, and Gillan serve as the goofy centerpiece, amongst other delightful performances. These characters all convince themselves that they're humanitarians because Cliff Beasts 6 is what the world needs to feel good, while The Bubble, in its own right, thinks what the world needs is the movie business taking a hyper-specific swipe at itself. Apatow is flighty and formidable here as a quasi-outsider, who's risen to fame in a newfangled showbiz way the others don't understand. As the cast of this in-movie knock on Jurassic Park -- which is not just due to the dinosaur premise but also Jurassic Park: Dominion's unprecedented 18-month production -- find themselves trapped in a seemingly endless loop of lockdowns, rewrites, and other sanity-testing hiccups, the story wears thin. The "bubble" is the hotel and movie set that everyone working on Cliff Beasts 6 is confined to, though the meta-comedy aspects at work here, in which Hollywood attempts to take the piss out of Hollywood, also constitutes an ideological bubble in its own right. It's as if the messaging is "most actors, directors, and producers are awful -- but not us!

Judd Apatow's impact on modern comedy is immeasurable. He began writing, directing and producing several cult TV comedy classics such as “The Ben Stiller ...

With that, Apatow became one of the most in-demand names behind the camera in Hollywood, directing eight more features and producing scores more. Yet Apatow’s directorial efforts seemed to be his most pure expressions, a little less goofy and more heartfelt than his other wackier fare. Judd Apatow’s impact on modern comedy is immeasurable.

Here's how you can watch Judd Apatow's new comedy The Bubble about the trials and tribulations of shooting a movie during a pandemic.

In a bizarre turn of events, it turns out that real extraterrestrials have been watching the show and have interpreted it as fact, kidnapping the actors to get them to help in a space war. In the words of one of the green-screened cliff beasts, “should we be concerned about, you know, this level of vomit?” Hail, Caesar!: This 2016 Coen Brothers film takes place during the filming of a swords and sandals epic similar to Ben-Hur. Exhausted studio boss and “fixer” Eddie Mannix (who really did work for MGM in the 1920s through early 1960s), balances multiple projects and must locate his missing leading man who has been kidnapped by communist screenwriters. Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy: If you’ve somehow missed out on seeing this 2004 laughfest, don’t despair, it’s streaming on Paramount+. Directed by Adam McKay, and produced by Judd Apatow, Anchorman tells the story of Ron Burgundy, played by Will Farrell. Burgundy is a top news anchor in San Diego in the 1970s, but his boy’s club of a newsroom is upended when a female anchor played by Christina Applegate is hired. The mix of fame-hungry stars, a studio desperate to make a movie, and a director who is convinced that his summer popcorn flick is in fact high art that the world needs to see, could be funny even without the backdrop of pandemic-enforced isolation. Netflix released a trailer for The Bubble on March 4, 2022. Judd Apatow directs and is one of the cowriters. The trailer quickly establishes the movie’s premise as the cast and crew are informed of the required precautions for filming during a pandemic and we see them submit to the now ubiquitous nasal swabs that were still a rather novel concept in the fall of 2020. Set in 2020, the movie is centered around the production of a blockbuster franchise movie called Cliff Beasts 6 and looks at the way COVID-19 impacts the project, with hilarious consequences. It is the latest in the (fictional) blockbuster Cliff Beasts series and despite the pandemic, filming must go on. Of course, the pandemic massively impacts how the movie can be made, so to decrease the risk of Covid, producers opt to create a “bubble” with all the cast and crew in a posh European hotel with no physical contact with the outside world. Jurassic World: Dominion, the film whose production inspired The Bubble, was originally scheduled to be released in theaters in the summer of 2021 but was delayed to June 2022 due to the pandemic.

Judd Apatow's Netflix comedy The Bubble doesn't live up to standards set by his previous films and is an unfunny satire, according to critics.

The early reviews for The Bubble are a far departure from the much more favorable ones for Apatow’s previous film The King of Staten Island, with most critics complaining that the comedy didn’t land for them and the film’s attempt at biting satire is never fully actualized in the film’s two-hour-plus runtime. Not every film featuring the pandemic has been a flop, with Steven Soderbergh’s 2022 thriller Kimi becoming a surprise hit, but audiences and critics alike are making it known that "pandemic humor" has overstayed its welcome when it comes to on-screen depictions. It’s not meant to be a compliment when I say that “The Bubble” is depressing in a way that modern comedies rarely are — that it’s depressing in as novel a way as the coronavirus that inspired it. While Judd Apatow’s “The Bubble” isn’t as grating or grandiose as Adam McKay’s apocalyptic “Don’t Look Up,” this star-studded Hollywood caricature is even more unexpectedly depressing. None of it amounts to more than half-baked sketch ideas in a film that’s staggeringly inept considering the resources involved. Early reviews for Judd Apatow’s meta-comedy The Bubble are trickling in for the film’s April Fool’s Day release on Netflix and it seems like the joke is on Apatow. The film is written and directed by Apatow and has made a name for itself through a variety of stunt marketing campaigns to get The Bubble on audiences' radars.

The film is best in its embrace of the random, its moments when the talented and funny cast goof off with each other, responding to one another's ...

The film is best in its embrace of the random, its moments when the talented and funny cast goof off with each other, responding to one another's eccentricities. There's a lot of stuff about the murderous security team hired to keep the actors on site, and those sections don't really work. When all of these characters are onscreen at the same time, it is legitimate chaos, and a lot of fun. Cast and crew gather together in England to shoot the sixth installment of the "Cliff Beasts" franchise, a worldwide phenomenon about a group of scientists and researchers going toe to toe with flying dinosaurs dislodged from a polar ice cap or something like that. Was it right to be putting actors and crew in this kind of danger just for a movie? There was a lot of talk at the time about all of this.

The Bubble movie review: Judd Apatow has assembled a talented pool of actors--including Vir Das--for his pandemic-set showbiz satire, but the comedy never ...

Pascal’s character in the movie-within-the-movie, a pile of rubbish called Cliff Beasts 6, has an Italian accent not unlike the one Jared Leto did in House of Gucci. The big difference is that Cliff Beasts is a fake parody, while House of Gucci was a very real Oscar contender. The rest of the ensemble, including the ostensible lead Gillan, are simply going through the motions. If only this self-awareness had rubbed off on the people behind The Bubble as well, because there are few examples of Hollywood entitlement as egregious as this. If only this self-awareness had rubbed off on the people behind The Bubble as well, because there are few examples of Hollywood entitlement as egregious as this. To emphasise the point I was trying to make earlier, it takes a certain level of obliviousness on both the filmmakers and the studio’s part to make a comedy movie about their own industry, in the middle of a pandemic, while pretending that it is pointing fingers at this very thing. I’d like to give a genius like Apatow the benefit of the doubt and assume that ‘the bubble’ is a giant metaphor for how isolated famous people are in their ivory towers, but wow, the satire doesn’t land.

The Bubble movie review: Judd Apatow's satire on making movies during a pandemic starts off strong but loses aim quickly. | Hollywood.

The Bubble certainly doesn't do much to help us process the insanity of the last two years, which is fine. Most of the inspired laughs and enjoyable gags bookend the film, with everything in between - the lion's share of its two-hour run time (and you really feel the length) - feeling lifeless and offering little to keep you engaged. Here to manage the tantrums and insecurities of the deluded is the movie’s producer (a delightfully heartless Peter Serafinowicz). “Actors are animals. “It's going to make the world forget all their problems,” says the director of the fictional film at the centre of Judd Apatow’s latest comedy, The Bubble (his first movie for Netflix). It’s an introduction that tells us that this one’s constructed solely to entertain and make us laugh. There’s starlet Carol Cobb (Karen Gillan who continues to prove you can slot her in any genre). Carol desperately needs a win after the unanimous panning of her last film Jerusalem Rising, an alien invasion movie in which she played a half Israeli half Palestinian character. The fictional movie in question is Cliff Beasts 6, the latest iteration of a tired monster-fighting franchise that a movie studio has placed all its bets on to keep it afloat.

Starring Karen Gillan, Pedro Pascal, Keegan-Michael Key and more, "The Bubble" follows the cast and crew of a film shooting during the pandemic.

The Bubble pulls its punches and throws any chance of incisive satire out the window. Unfortunately, that's nearly impossible when the film deals with the very serious subject of the COVID-19 pandemic with all the grace of a Cliff Beast lumbering through a forest. Do you know how hard it is to make Armisen and the rest of this cast not seem funny? No one seems to be having fun in this movie, and only Armisen's performance as the film's put-upon director managed to squeeze a laugh out of me. However, this story all but gets lost in a number of mind-numbing subplots: exes Lauren (Mann) and Dustin (Duchovny) argue about how to co-parent their adopted teenager; Sean (Key) is maybe a cult leader; Dieter (Pascal) falls for hotel staffer Anika (Bakalova); Krystal (Apatow) is a TikTok star on the set of her first movie trying to make new friends. The Bubble is not a good time, nor is it an even mildly enjoyable one.