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" It used to be so simple. Since Edison, the release of a new movie inspired a single binary equation: To see or not to see? With the advent of home video in the 1980s, a priority-based fissure developed in the former category. Suddenly, there were movies you had to rush out and catch immediately, and movies that could wait four to six months. Now comes Steven Soderbergh&amp;#039;s Bubble, inspiring an opening-night question previously applicable only to The Rocky Horror Picture Show: Should I watch it in my underwear?  As the first notable movie to be released simultaneously in theaters, on cable, and on DVD, Bubble is an instant historical landmark. Time isn&amp;#039;t always kind to these, frankly; I don&amp;#039;t imagine that Netflix is doing brisk business with The Robe (1953, first CinemaScope production) or Henry &amp;amp;amp; June (1990, first movie to be rated NC-17). And it&amp;#039;s entirely possible that in a decade or two, when all movies debut on the Internet and only a select few with deafening word of mouth get the luxury of a theatrical release, Bubble will be remembered merely as ripple number one in that sea change. But while it&amp;#039;s still fresh, I&amp;#039;d like to observe for the record that it is also, hands down, the weirdest goddamn movie ever made by a major American filmmaker. As it happens, Soderbergh has wrested that title from himself. The first hint that an avant-garde provocateur lurked beneath his indie-populist facade came in 1996, when he unexpectedly disgorged a manic, free-associative disquisition on his failed marriage and faltering career, inspired in equal parts by Richard Lester and Monty Python. Made in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, for pocket change, Schizopolis (now available on DVD from Criterion) is as singular an act of self-immolation as any award-winning director has ever produced. Soderbergh himself plays the lead role, acting opposite his ex-wife and their young daughter, communicating with the former entirely in bizarro-world dialogue that is the foreground for the cutting subtext of every mundane marital exchange. &amp;quot;Generic greeting!&amp;quot; he dutifully chirps upon arriving home from work. Later, after his wife receives a suspiciously brief phone call, apparently a wrong number: &amp;quot;Semi-innocent query?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Convincingly confused,&amp;quot; she replies, and he nods, mollified. But she&amp;#039;s soon embroiled in a passionate affair with a jovial dentist, also played by Soderbergh. And then the husband and the dentist apparently swap bodies. And what I&amp;#039;m describing to you here is the tiny portion of Schizopolis that almost sort of kind of makes sense. Having gotten that out of his system, Soderbergh moved on to Out of Sight, his first genuinely mainstream effort. It did mediocre business but made him a player nonetheless. A couple of years later, he was nominated for two Oscars, shingled up with George Clooney, and firmly ensconced on the A-list. And yet the more power he&amp;#039;s amassed, the more determined he&amp;#039;s become to push himself in new and potentially audience-alienating directions. The glossy, star-studded trifle Ocean&amp;#039;s Eleven was immediately followed by Full Frontal, a semi-improvised, no-budget meditation on cinematic solipsism best known for its Dogme 95--style strictures: no drivers, no trailers, no craft service, no wardrobe meetings--and that includes you, Julia. Everyone hated it, though personally I find its frantic self-indulgence far less noxious than that of Ocean&amp;#039;s Twelve. His next big project? A remake of a forbidding, densely allegorical Russian art film. Studio execs who saw Solaris must have blanched: We give this dude one damn statuette and all of a sudden he thinks he&amp;#039;s Tarkovsky.  Thing is, I don&amp;#039;t know that Tarkovsky himself ever made a film as disconcerting and inexplicably mysterious as Bubble. Whether you see it at an art house or in your living room, any expectations you bring with you will assuredly go unfulfilled. What makes it so surpassingly strange is the fact that it&amp;#039;s so resolutely ordinary. Shot in small-town Ohio with an entirely nonprofessional cast and written by Full Frontal&amp;#039;s Coleman Hough, it&amp;#039;s the creepily ascetic tale of three workers in a doll factory, each of them roughly as animated and autonomous as the unblinking, fetuslike product they assemble each day. The plot, thrown into motion with the arrival of an attractive, comparatively vivacious newcomer, encompasses sexual jealousy, emotional manipulation, and ultimately even murder, yet the tone is pitched throughout at the prosaic, enervated level of an industrial training video. No doubt that makes the film sound dull, and in truth I&amp;#039;d recommend it only to the very adventurous--and with reservations even then. But no mere description can convey the sheer alien oddity of a drama that&amp;#039;s been leached of every dramatic convention known to man. With its deliberately flat performances, its transparent narrative, and its mule-headed refusal to sensationalize the banal, Bubble acts as a rebuke to various dark-heart-of-America fever dreams, notably Eraserhead and Blue Velvet. But it&amp;#039;s most exciting simply as further evidence of its director&amp;#039;s unwavering desire to reinvent himself, even after he&amp;#039;s hit the big time. Studio or indie, conventional or outr\u00E9, all of Soderbergh&amp;#039;s previous films are unmistakably the product of a sensibility steeped in cinema. Bubble, by contrast, feels like the work of an idiot savant, someone who&amp;#039;s seen only a handful of movies and understood them imperfectly. For all its self-imposed limitations, it&amp;#039;s the ideal film with which to inaugurate a brave new world of increasingly fragmented entertainment options. Watch it, should you wish to, from the bubble of your choice. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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