The Bubble

Maybe Judd Apatow and cast are too comfortably ensconced in Hollywood — the real bubble — to more brutally portray celebrity hubris.

Netflix movie from Judd Apatow sinks under the weight of its own farcical execution.

The moviemaking scenes feature the actors flailing about and complaining about the script in front of green screens, while two hapless Brits portray the flying beasts that will be added in post via CGI.We get an idea of how truly awful “Cliff Beasts 6” will be when Krystal Kris faces a baby beast and connects with it when they mirror each other’s dance moves to the sounds of “Started” by Iggy Azalea. This is but one of three dance numbers in “The Bubble,” as we later see the cast bopping to a virtual Beck as he covers “Ladies’ Night,” and everyone does a cocaine-fueled dance routine in the hotel to “Sea Talk” by Zola Jesus. These superfluous numbers are mildly entertaining but ultimately just pad the two-hour-plus running time, which features a number of sitcom-type subplots, e.g., Carol hooking up with a soccer star whose team is staying at the same hotel, a couple of cast members plotting their escape from the bubble and a mole who spies on the production.“The Bubble” is ultimately a mediocre movie about the making of an even worse movie. Sometimes they’ll rip your b---s off.”Fred Armisen is Darren Eigan, the artsy-pompous director who shot a Sundance favorite on his iPhone and has been brought in to class up the franchise, or some such thing.Karen Gillan, who gives the best and most empathetic performance in the film, is Carol Cobb, who ditched the “Cliff Beasts” franchise to take the lead in “Jerusalem Rising,” a bomb so bad it “managed to offend both Palestinians and Jews,” as one critic put it, but has returned for the sixth chapter and is trying to win back the trust of her fellow cast members.Leslie Mann is Lauren Van Chance and David Duchovny is Dustin Mulray, two of the primary faces of “Cliff Beasts.” This on-and-off-again couple reunites on the set, much to the horror of their recently adopted teenage son, who sees them together on a video chat and says, “Mom! I thought you were dating that guy who used to be on ‘Friends’!”Keegan-Michael Key is Sean Knox, who loves doing his own stunts (not very well) and has created a lifestyle brand called “Harmony Ignite.”Iris Apatow (daughter of Judd Apatow and Leslie Mann) is Krystal Kris, a teenage TikTok star who has been cast by the studio in a desperate bid to reach the kids out there. (When asked if she’s a “Cliff Beasts” fan, the cheerfully clueless Krystal says, “No, but I saw the trailer for the second one, it was so cool!”)Kate McKinnon is Paula, the studio head, who appears on video chat from ski chalet “in the only country that was open … thank God I got my shot.” When Gavin the producer says, “I thought [shots won’t be] available for six months,” Paula responds, “Oh they’re not, for normal people. As much as I hate to burst “The Bubble,” the Netflix movie sinks under the weight of its own overwrought and farcical and only intermittently funny execution, despite a clever premise, one of my favorite comedy writer-directors behind the camera and an all-star cast that throws itself gamely into the material — even when the material is landing with all the subtlety of a CGI dinosaur clomping through the wilderness. (Netflix even released an entertaining trailer for the movie that made it look like a real movie.) Especially when you check out this roster of comedic/dramatic actors. All right, so that’s kind of a fun setup, yes?

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.

Apart from a game performance from Karen Gillan, there's not much to recommend Judd Apatow's unfunny lockdown comedy The Bubble, writes Alistair Harkness, ...

The prodigious filmmaker inside Judd Apatow has made a humorous storyline based on the situation of the pandemic in The Bubble.

Moreover, it must’ve been half-baked but actually, it might not look like that if you get a chance to see it. All the satirical jokes about movie-making in “The Bubble” by Apatow shouldn’t be taken soberly since it is made to insist on the humor in the audience. The film is muffled in the grotto where no one could ever hear out the voice of the person who had bogged down inside it, but zany from the beginning and embraces meandering and endearing in the same plot.

At the height of the pandemic, the cast and crew of dinosaur sequel epic 'Cliff Beasts 6', led by returning star Carol Cobb (Karen Gillan), are forced to ...

In a Brit-heavy line-up, it’s the home team who most consistently bring the goods: Karen Gillan, as the nominal lead of both the real and fake movie, lends flashes of Amy Pond to her Carol Cobb; Guz Khan, of BBC Three’s Man Like Mobeen fame, steals the show with his infectious, wild-eyed energy (choice line: “Suck your mother!”); while comedy duo Ben Ashenden and Alexander Owen — whose Zoom-based comedy made them social-media heroes during the height of the pandemic — make winning cameos as endlessly emasculated mo-cap dinosaur doubles.Like a lot of Apatow films, it has a scattershot quality that might have benefited from a tighter edit; no comedy movie needs to be longer than two hours. While it’s not quite a direct spoof, the sixth Jurassic film gets a fair few nods, via The Bubble’s movie-within-a-movie, ‘Cliff Beasts 6’. (Leslie Mann even shares Bryce Dallas Howard’s ginger bob.)For writer-director Judd Apatow, it marks something of an unexpected departure: after years swimming in the comedy-drama pool — making funny films with emotional, serious stakes such as The 40-Year-Old Virgin or The King Of Staten Island — he’s gone for something straightforwardly sillier here, a tone and plot akin to Tropic Thunder. Establishing an eccentric ensemble of egomaniacs, Apatow imagines an Apocalypse Now-scale disastrous production, where everything that could possibly go wrong does indeed go wrong — with the added element of swabs being shoved up noses.The Bubble plays almost like a series of comic vignettes, and like any sketch show, it can be hit-and-miss.With only a loose narrative, The Bubble plays almost like a series of comic vignettes, and like any sketch show, it can be hit-and-miss. At the height of the pandemic, the cast and crew of dinosaur sequel epic ‘Cliff Beasts 6’, led by returning star Carol Cobb (Karen Gillan), are forced to quarantine in an English country hotel before filming.

This review of the Netflix film The Bubble (2022) does not contain spoilers. Judd Apatow tried something different in his first-ever Netflix comedy. The.

The problem here is that the film does not fully commit to that type of dark comedy that would have made it work. And that is besides being able to cast an astonishing amount of high-profile cameos. Her name is Krystal (Iris Apatow), and she thinks Carol is old because she saw a picture of her at a Nirvana concert. Even if the humor aims at the characters’ inflated importance of their work, the script still pokes fun at working-class people, like waitresses, for their reputation in serving food to people during a pandemic. The Bubble tells the story of some brave actors bringing entertainment to a world stuck in their homes. Carol skipped the fifth installment, and her fellow castmates include Lauren (Leslie Mann), Dieter (Pedro Pascal), Dustin (David Duchovny), and the action star of the film, Sean (Keegan-Michael Key). To make matters worse, Carol’s best lines are given away to a new rising TikTok star.

With his new Netflix comedy 'The Bubble,' director Judd Apatow reflects our pandemic life on screen, from uncomfortable masks to TikTok dance moves.

“The hard part was we had to train all the actors,” Judd Apatow says. TikTok blew up during the COVID era and its popularity is reflected in Krystal Kris (played by Apatow’s daughter Iris), a social-media phenomenon added to the “Cliff Beasts 6” cast who rounds up her fellow actors for an epic dance video in their hotel. The actors in the film have to endure various quarantine and lockdown periods, with most of them going a little stir crazy. So all of the face-covering takes away one of the elements that allows everyone to be in a good mood.” “The part of it that I thought we could talk about was isolation, lockdowns, trying to continue to work and be a normal person when the circumstances, everything, have so completely changed.” So my main intention was to try to create the movie I wish was out there," says Apatow, who for the movie-within-the-movie was able to work with green screens and computer-generated dinosaurs after a career mostly avoiding such things.

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.

Great idea. Incredible cast. Terrible execution. That's the logline for Judd Apatow's new pandemic piss-take on Netflix, 'The Bubble'

There are a few highlights (Iris’s celebrity TikTok dances, one hilarious drug trip cameo, Pascal being a letch and Gillan’s spiral of madness) but most of the film bombs hard enough to seem slightly embarrassing. Throw in a handful of big-name surprise cameos and you have a comedy brimming with talent and great ideas that seems all the more frustrating when hardly any of it actually works. Inspired by the slightly ridiculous production of Jurassic World: Dominion – a film that forced its entire cast and crew into a “bubble” in an English country hotel so they could carry on shooting in lockdown – Apatow has assembled a fantastic cast of A-listers and friends for his take on the pandemic.

The Bubble is the newest movie to arrive on Netflix and the comedy is packed with music but just which songs feature in its soundtrack?

from flipping out and leaving,” he continued. Directed by Judd Apatow (Anchorman, Bridesmaids), The Bubble tells the story of a group of actors who are locked together in a pandemic bubble as they attempt to film the latest entry in the Cliff Beasts franchise. The music in a film or TV show can often be hugely important as the choice of songs can add just the right feeling to each scene.

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.

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.

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.

Judd Apatow brings together a star-studded cast for this pandemic comedy.

The idea is there, but the execution and the way a lot of the subject matter is handled just doesn’t cut it. When it comes to its place in Apatow’s oeuvre, however, I think The Bubble is best forgotten. But to this studio, getting the movie done seems to literally be a matter of life or death. The Gist: Somewhere in England, producer Gavin (Peter Serafinowicz) prepares his staff for the arrival of a group of actors to their “bubble”. They’re going to make the sixth movie in the Cliff Beasts action franchise, and they are dedicated to keeping their bubble secure and protecting the set from the still-raging coronavirus. While the cast and crew do their best to keep a safe set, chaos inevitably ensues. With long working hours, shut downs, and various illnesses going around, this 3-month project begins to stretch much longer, and the drama on set only gets more and more intense.