THE MAGIC BUBBLE (1992) * I have to apologize in advance for this review-to anyone who got anything near the power out of it that they tried to put into it. Please stop reading this review immediately, and continue loving the film without…my interference. Its heart is so in the right place, it means so well, it has something important that it's trying so hard to say. It's a terrible film. It has one great scene. There was some expectation among people coming of age in what's now called "the sixties" (1965-1979) that we would inherit (and leave/but we never thought about that) a better world, because we were going to make it that way. Then personal realities set in-families and deadlines and commitments-that gave way to cultural realities, millions harvested from the counterculture to the sterilized yuppie offices of every city in the western world, widespread addiction and divorce, etc…and it didn't look quite like we thought it would, and we weren't spending as much time doing exactly what we wished we were doing and…and there was something terribly disappointing about it all. This brought forth an entire genre of explanatory works like this one, and The Big Chill and the unbearable tv series "thirtysomething." Of course what this film is trying to say is very true and important: the choices that we make remain our own. Your life is to the greatest extent what you make of it, and to an absolute extent what you make out of what you've got. And really, if we'd been offered 2011 in 1958 most everyone would have thought "What a wonderfully free, prosperous, incredibly technological society." I guess social scientists would have wondered why more people can't afford to own their own home (at least without quadruple mortgages) in the midst of such prosperity, but a lot of things have gone right. Far too many to obsess on the ones that haven't done so. So, the movie's right: we have stardust in our veins, there is magic all around us…all we have to do is recognize it and engage… It's a great statement-if hardly original or particularly well delivered-and despite the (however artless) repetition of a great statement that I emphatically agree with, the film annoys me more than anything else. The rest of the problem that I have with the film is that it feels like bullshit: I think that's because it ultimately offers fairytales rather than perspective or solutions.
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