Jimmy gets jealous and hits the road on a mission to stop the wedding - encased in a bubble of his own design but otherwise ill-prepared for coping with the real world his mommy never told him about. In his teens, Jimmy becomes smitten with Chloe (angelic Marley Shelton), who a few year later announces her engagement to a neighborhood slimeball sporting an ear cuff and a mullet. When she reads him fairytales as a child, they end with a Jimmy-specific twist: ".and Rapunzel left her plastic bubble and died!" ![]() Gyllenhaal's talent may not be fully appreciated in the course of the movie however, because "Bubble Boy" is 84 minutes of mirthfully unfettered lunacy that leaves no joke unturned and therefore no time to admire the nuances of an ingenious comic performance.īorn with a busted immune system, Jimmy Livingston (Gyllenhaal) has lived his whole life inside a hermetically-sealed playpen of a bedroom, watched over incessantly by his paranoid, overprotective, arch-conservative mother (the fantastic Swoosie Kurtz) who is determined to keep him "safe from that evil, filthy world" outside his window. He makes the character three-dimensional and 100-percent lovable, but in an ever-so-slightly ironic way that requires a ton of talent to maintain. His hyperactive enthusiasm at taking his first steps into the world ("Dog poo! Aweeeesome!") is so real that you don't just laugh, you smile. ![]() His exaggerated wide-eyed naivete has just enough pepper to make you laugh with him, not at him. Put somebody like Adam Sandler, David Spade or Seth Green in the title role, and this childlike weirdo with matted hair and a whiney voice would lose all his sweet qualities and quickly become intolerably abrasive.īut Jake Gyllenhaal, who made such a lasting impression as future NASA scientist Homer Hickman in the little-seen coming of age picture "October Sky" - is absolutely brilliant in the role. "Jon Hayman is none of those things." Hayman has only six acting credits to his name, but he reprised the role of Donald on two more occasions: Season 4, Episode 23 ("The Pilot") and Season 9, Episode 22 ("The Finale").Great casting is absolutely vital to a puckishly impudent comedy like "Bubble Boy" - the story of a happy-go-lucky, immune-deficient geek who zip-locks himself into a homemade portable orb to travel cross-country and stop the wedding of the girl he loves. "When someone says it's a bubble boy, you think about, you know, John Travolta being helpless and soft and sweet," guest star Heidi Swedberg said during the interview. Seinfeld himself said the episode was never about making fun of the boy's condition, and the writers went out of their way to make Donald an unlikeable character, so the audience wouldn't sympathize with his bad behavior. ![]() "Jon Hayman was a comedian who was working on the show that year, who was a very sarcastic fellow," Larry David explained during the same interview. Hayman is never seen on-screen, except for his arms, but it's hard to deny the impact of his unforgettable, raspy voice when he verbally spars with George over the historical significance of the Moors versus the Moops.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |