Covid Becomes a Movie Star
One of the most promising and “it’s about time”’ movie concepts will be released by Netflix sometime in April. It’s called The Bubble, and it’s the first major film to tackle the elephant in the room, the Covid-10 pandemic, comedically.
The film is the brainchild of filmmaker Judd Apatow, who seems to have a particular gift at taking sometimes awkward and painful situations and finding humor in them.
The plot has a cast of stars and crew being put up together in an English country castle that constitutes their segregated Covid ‘bubble’. They’ll be staying in their bubble throughout the filming of Cliff Beast 6, a successful dinosaur-themed movie franchise.
Needless to say, the film explores issues that everyone has become all too familiar with during the pandemic. Watching the trailer, I picked up on the awkward problems of dealing with bulky PPE gear and the inevitable stir-craziness of being locked down in one place.
It’s a movie that many people have been waiting for. The pandemic has been a subject that filmmakers have seemed to tiptoe around instead of confronting it in a story. But Mr. Apatow seems to have no problem wringing all the laughs he can out of the subject.
The film’s humor is not just one-sided. It also aims at the overabundant use of green screen CGI in today’s films. It explores the funny side of asking trained actors to react realistically to crew dressed in badly-put together dinosaur costumes while they’re hanging from wires. The marketing of the film was clever as well. It involved the release of a fake trailer of the fake movie Cliff Beast 6. Netflix has been saying that the film will be available for viewing as of April 1st, but Thailand’s version of Netflix generally lags a bit. Still, this is a film I’ll definitely watch. I can use a good laugh after the past couple of years.