#Watch big business how to
#Watch big business movie

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.

#Watch big business how to

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.

#Watch big business movie

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. 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.