![]() If City Bette was who I wanted to be like, then Country Bette was who I was growing up, though I have never yodeled with a cow or steel drum band. ![]() As sharp as her shoulder pads, she has a fully embodied self-confidence and a camp ferociousness that is infectious. City Bette is a proto-Miranda Priestly figure, one of the early templates for the corporate bitch we love to watch and hate. I learned how to be strong watching Bette. In studying her movies, I learned how to carry myself, how to camp myself, how to be bawdy, and how to tell a whole bunch of sex jokes I was too young to understand. I was obsessed and it really started with this movie. I enrolled myself in the Bette Midler School of Life early. Mistaken identities occur and it all builds up to the moment worlds collide in the women’s bathroom of the Plaza Hotel. But other than that, the movie is fully focused on showcasing the amazing talents of its leading ladies. There are romantic interests for each woman, of course, a tweenage Seth Green plays City Bette’s rascal son, Sly, and the film does earnestly expects you to fall in love with a down-home professional putt-putt player. (But for the purposes of this piece, we’ll call them City Bette, Country Bette, City Lily and Country Lily.) When the treacherous City Bette decides to liquidate the factory in Jupiter Hollow her company owns, Country Lily and Country Bette come to New York to confront her at the stockholders meeting, not knowing they were about to encounter their identical twins. One set (the Sheltons) lives in New York, while the other set (the Ratliffs) remains in the small town of Jupiter Hollow, West Virginia. Jim Abrahams‘ film features Midler and Tomlin as two pairs of twins, Sadie and Rose, who were mixed up by a confused country nurse. But for young audiences, it may percolate some revolutionary questions. The subversive elements in this film are safe and don’t really threaten the capitalist world order with any sort of bite because this movie isn’t terribly concerned about having a message. Is 1988’s Bette Midler/ Lily Tomlin comedy Big Business (1988) going to be a text taught in the revolutionary underground? Absolutely not. For Thanksgiving, we’re going off the beaten path this month and asking contributors to write about the movie they’re most thankful for experiencing. I have more recently been watching Tomlin in Grace & Frankie and find her just brilliant, being able to go through some of her back catalogue is something that I am looking forward to doing.Every month, we at The Spool select a filmmaker to explore in greater depth - their themes, their deeper concerns, how their works chart the history of cinema and the filmmaker’s own biography. If it had been any other matches it probably wouldn’t have been as good, I know that is quite a big statement but come on they are both just utterly amazing. The best thing about the film is Bette Midler x2 and Lily Tomlin x2, they are both utterly fantastic and it just helped grow my love for the pair. Seriously that was so amusing! Done in the perfect manner managing to capture the expressions of both actresses (twice) in the best possible manner. The film is fun enough and has a lot going on in the different scenes, but let’s face it the bathroom scene towards the end is really one of the best comedy moments I have watched in a very long time. ![]() It was quite impressive to be able to make them avoid each other for so long and with great reason for that in build up to the final scene. This is when we are about to get some rather confusing moments and slapstick events, especially when you throw in four different males as love interested and considering the identical nature of the opposite twins it would all get a little bit complicated. The Shelton sisters are co-chairwomen of Moramax in New York while the Ratliff sisters are wanting to stop the sale to sell Hollowmade which just happens to be by the Shelton’s. We then move to the 1980s when the mismatched twins are about to collide and find out about each other as a big business deal is looking to closedown the factory in Jupiter Hollow. In the small town of Jupiter Hollow two sets of identical twins are born at pretty much the same time and the nurse mixes them up, one set born to a poor local family and the other to a rich family ho are just passing through. Two sets of twins one from New York and the other a countryside town discover that something a little bit strange happened the day they were born and could quite frankly explain a lot.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |