In her Venice Film Festival review of Steven Soderbergh’s Bubble (which will soon play at the Toronto Film Festival), Variety‘s Deborah Young says that Ocean’s Eleven and Ocean’s Twelve “must have lit a fire under Soderbergh to direct a film that is, in spirit, far from Hollywood” and so rife with social commentary and “sly humor.” For his story about the lives of three doll factory workers in financially-depressed Ohio, Soderbergh “uses a non-pro cast to deftly sketch the dullness of a mid-American burg, whose sheer normality could set the scene for a Stephen King horror extravaganza [in which] an unmotivated murder, instead of stirring emotions, unveils a frightening moral vacuum. The final shots of smiling, empty-faced dolls — another classic horror image — conjure up nothing so much as a gaping void, a ‘bubble’ far from the real world.” Call me presumptuous or over-eager, but this sounds edgily penetrating in a kind of Shizopolis-meets-sex, lies vein.