Theater owners love Steven Soderbergh when he's in blockbuster mode, providing them with massive hits like "Ocean's Eleven" and the inevitable "Ocean's Twelve." Those two pictures together sold a total of more than 300 million dollars' worth of tickets. But they're less fond of the 43-year-old director when he goes "experimental" on them, as he has with his new movie, "Bubble." In fact, they hate "Bubble." Or they hate what it represents. And what it represents, as National Association of Theatre Owners president John Fithian recently told USA Today, is "the biggest threat to the viability of the cinema industry today."

One understands how the owners feel. Attendance at movie theatres has been sinking for the last three years. Between 2002 and 2005, the movie-going audience shrank by 30 million people, with a consequent dip in ticket sales of more than 12 per cent. Maybe it's the high cost of attending. (In New York City, a movie ticket costs $10.75, and at the concession stand inside even a dinky bottle of water costs $3.50.) Or maybe it's the ancillary annoyances, like chattering patrons, chirruping cell phones and the maddening procession of commercials that now precedes the feature. Another factor may be movie length: "King Kong" is a brilliant picture, but it's more than three hours long; and "Munich," which isn't a brilliant picture, shortens your life by two hours and 44 minutes.

A lot of people think the problem with movies is that there are too many lousy ones. Anybody who's sat through such awful flicks as "Alone in the Dark" or "The Libertine" over the past year will find that theory too obvious to require comment. On the other hand, studio executives themselves think there are just too many movies, period. According to Variety, the movie trade mag, the major studios will be putting a significantly smaller number of films into production over the next two years in hopes of clearing the market of the dreck they've already clogged it with.

All of these problems are exacerbated, of course, by the increasingly sophisticated home-entertainment environment. In a time of Netflix and movies-on-demand and elaborate home theater systems, the idea of leaving the house to go see a movie has lost a lot of its allure. This is where Steven Soderbergh comes in. Soderbergh's 1989 debut feature, "Sex, Lies, and Videotape," pretty much launched the low-budget independent-film movement of the 1990s. He went on to bigger things, like the multi-Oscar-winning "Traffic," but an indie heart still beats somewhere within him, apparently. And "Bubble," his latest, is about as indie as a movie can get.

The picture was shot on high-definition digital video over the course of 20 days in the glamour-starved environs of the Ohio-West Virginia border. It cost less than $2 million to make (lunch money, in Hollywood budget terms) and it runs just 72 minutes. There are no professional actors in its cast, only local folks. Of the leads, one is a hair stylist, one is a computer-tech student and one is the general manager of a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet. The fourth main cast member, who plays a police detective, is in fact a police detective in Parkersburg, West Virginia. The movie's soundtrack consists largely of bare-bones acoustic guitar strumming by Robert Pollard, of Guided by Voices.

"Bubble" was produced by HDNet Films, a company that specializes in high-def pictures. (Its first release was last year's "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room.") The movie is being distributed by Magnolia Pictures and will premiere today in Landmark Theatres (an independent movie chain) in 20 markets across the country. But it will also air on cable and satellite TV at 9 and 11 p.m. tonight, January 27, on the HDNet Movies network. And next Tuesday, it will go on sale on DVD for $29.98. (For a New Yorker, that's the cost of two theater tickets, two bottles of water and a subway ride — and you don't have to leave the house.) Magnolia, Landmark and HDNet are all run by billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban and his partner, Todd Wagner, and "Bubble" is the first of six high-def films that Soderbergh will direct for them, all to be released in this multi-platform pattern — "day-and-date," as it's called.

So is the movie any good? That depends on what you're looking for. "Bubble" is an "art movie" in that it values a certain kind of content and execution that may not be of great interest to a mass audience. There are many such small films made every year, but not many people get to see them because big-budget Hollywood pictures hog so many screens. With "day-and-date" releasing, these little films might finally find their audience, either in theaters or on TV or DVD. Theatre owners — already vexed by the ever-shrinking window of time between a movie's theatrical release and its appearance on DVD (now about four months) — are appalled by "day-and-date" distribution, because it eliminates that window altogether.

As for "Bubble," it's a character study in the form of a noir-type murder mystery. It's about a lonely, overweight, middle-aged woman named Martha (Debbie Doebereiner) and her only friend, a 20-something pot-head slacker named Kyle (Dustin James Ashley). Martha and Kyle work together in a dismal doll factory in a dismal, unnamed town. He runs the machine that pops out the dolls' molded-rubber body parts and she glues on wigs and sews the dolls' clothes. One day, a new employee arrives, a glum young woman named Rose (Misty Dawn Wilkins). Unlike Martha and Kyle, Rose can actually imagine moving on to someplace else, someplace better. "You can't make money in this area," she says. "Everything's poor."

Rose is pretty and more or less unattached; she does have a hot-headed ex-boyfriend, who is also the father of her two-year-old daughter, but she says that relationship is over. She inveigles Kyle into taking her out on a date, and asks Martha to come to her apartment and baby sit, without telling her who her date is. When Kyle arrives to pick Rose up, Martha is startled and hurt. (Her interest in Kyle is ambiguous; romance would seem to be out of the question, but Kyle is such a malleable schlub, anything might be possible.) Kyle and Rose go to a bar and drink some beer. Later, her hot-headed boyfriend puts in an appearance, and a shouting match takes place. Later yet, someone is murdered, and a detective (Decker Moody) arrives to investigate.

Anyone who grew up in a place that he or she couldn't wait to escape will feel a pang of wretched familiarity in watching this movie. The town where the characters pass their days is gray and wet and deeply uneventful. Their dwellings are cramped and bland. (Kyle lives at home with his mother in a double-wide trailer; Martha lives with her senescent father, and they spend their evenings together hunched over TV dinners in front of the tube.) It's a place of no hope and no future. Digital video, with its flat, sheenless imagery, is the perfect medium for depicting an environment like this, and the untrained actors, residents of the area themselves, effortlessly embody its tedium. Doebereiner is surprisingly good as Martha, a woman whose loneliness compels her to fill every silence with the sort of mindless chatter that, in a less parched social context, would drive people away. And Wilkins, as Rose, is effective in revealing small, successive increments of her character's duplicity. Dustin James Ashley should not be encouraged to pursue an acting career, but he manages Kyle's semi-comatose aimlessness with no strain, and that's all the role really calls for.

The reason these performances work to the extent they do is because of Mary Ann Bernard's editing — she no doubt deleted a ton of dead takes, and brought tempo and structure to the acceptable stuff that remained — and of course Soderbergh's direction. He has an unhurried eye for physical and behavioral detail (particularly in two scenes shot in a bakery and a pawn shop), but he never lingers too long, and the film moves ahead with crisp economy.

"Bubble" is a small movie that tells a small story. (The screenplay is by Coleman Hough, who also scripted Soderbergh's first high-def picture, the 2002 "Full Frontal.") It's not a revolutionary film, and it certainly doesn't herald the end of big-budget, star-driven Hollywood pictures. Most of its interest derives from the limits within which it was made, and people uninterested in that sort of thing would probably find it dull. But the way the movie is being marketed does suggest revolutionary new possibilities in film distribution — possibilities that bode well for independent pictures, which tend to get lost in the blockbuster crush. If they pan out, indie filmmakers can give at least partial thanks to the blockbuster guy who made "Ocean's Eleven."

—Kurt Loder

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