deborah rush

Movie of the Month: A Night in Heaven (1983)

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Boomer: I first saw A Night in Heaven on my 31st birthday, at Weird Wednesday in May of 2018, with a couple of friends. Jazmyne Moreno, who had programmed the film for that week, looked out over the audience and said, and I paraphrase, that she was surprised to see so few women and so many “burly men” in the audience (“bears” is the term she was looking for). Normally, when I tell this story, I follow that part up with a joke that this was followed by chants of “Show us the twink! Give us the twink!” from those in attendance, but that part’s purely fiction. Or is it? 

A Night in Heaven is a romantic drama that isn’t really all that romantic, or maybe it’s an erotic thriller that’s not quite thrilling, but either way, it’s … unique. Directed by John G. Avidsen seven years after he helmed Rocky and one year before the release of his next hit, 1984’s The Karate Kid (and as unlike either of those movies as you can imagine), the film tells the story of Faye Hanlon (Lesley Ann Warren), a teacher at Titusville Community College in Florida, one hour from Orlando. Her husband Whitney (Robert Logan) is a NASA rocket scientist and amateur recumbent bicycle designer at a career crossroads, finding himself being tasked with ballistic missile design instead of the astronomic rocketry about which he is passionate. Forming the third leg—no pun intended—of the love triangle at the center of the film is Rick Monroe (Christopher Atkins), a student in Faye’s speech class whose flippant attitude toward his final presentation leads her to give him a failing grade for the semester. That night, Faye and Rick’s paths cross outside of the classroom when her vacationing sister Patsy (Deborah Rush) drags her out to a male strip revue called Heaven, where she discovers that her student is an exotic dancer under the name “Ricky Rocket,” and they experience an intimate moment when he gives her a personal dance. 

Faye returns home horned up, and attempts to initiate sex with her husband, who turns her down and tells her that he’s been fired, leading Faye to wonder if there is a future for their relationship. Her feelings are further complicated by Rick’s ongoing flirtations with her as he tries to convince her to let him retake his final exam, and since her sister is staying at the hotel where Rick’s mother and sister work, they keep running into each other. She tries to avoid admitting her attraction to the younger man, but when Patsy has to go home a day early because her daughter is ill, she convinces Faye to stay the night in the paid-for hotel room rather than try to drive back late. Faye spends most of the night trying to reach her husband at home but there’s no answer (we see him reconnecting with a recently-divorced old flame that he runs into), and she ultimately ends up spending the night with Rick. An unwise phone call from Patsy, now back home in Chicago, leads Whitney to realize that his jealousy isn’t baseless, and he travels to the hotel. Faye realizes that she’s been used when she catches Rick in the shower with his girlfriend Slick (Sandra Beall), and it all comes to a head when Rick and Whitney have a confrontation. 

I don’t always feel the need to provide such a thorough recapitulation of a plot when we discuss a movie for this feature, but I did this time, since the Wikipedia plot summary is confused, to say the least. It cites that “Faye is going through a slump in her marriage to Whitney Hanlon, a rocket scientist who has just been laid off,” and that this is the reason that Patsy takes her out to Heaven to cheer her up, but that’s not the case. For one thing, it skips a few plot points ahead, given that there’s no real indication that the Hanlons’ marriage is on rocky ground at the outset, other than that Whitney’s been working nights and he can’t convince Faye to play hooky with him when she has finals to perform. The first indication of strife happens when Whitney isn’t interested in intimacy because of his firing, which Faye only learns about after coming back from the club. I’m not sure it’s the fault of the editor of that wiki page, however, as the film does seem to be missing a few plot points of its own – a fairly common issue with low budget films of this era. This is one of those movies that I feel probably had a more thoughtful script, since there are the vague outlines of something more nuanced and deeper going on at the edges.  Patsy’s description of the failures in her own marriage read like they’re supposed to echo something that’s happening in Faye’s marriage, but Faye’s issues are so vague that they don’t track. It also feels like we’re supposed to track that Whitney’s experiencing something of a crisis because he fears replacement in his relationship with his wife by a younger, sexier man while also confronting failure in finding a new job, citing “they hired a 14-year-old instead,” but again, it’s lacking. It’s not that the movie is just playing coy and being subtle, it’s more that there are gaps in the story, and that would be frustrating, if you come to the movie for that. Most people aren’t though; they’re here for the flesh. 

As thin and threadbare as the movie may be in other areas, one thing that it really has going for it is a striking soundtrack, which far outshines the film itself and has remained in the public consciousness for far longer. There are three undeniable bangers that were written specifically for this film, two of which are still pop culture touchstones while the third is (unfairly, in my opinion) largely forgotten. The first is the title track, which happens to be “Heaven” by Canadian singer-songwriter Bryan Adams, which plays in its entirety while Whitney rides his recumbent bike home after a night shift, creating some unintentional bathos. The song hit #9 on the Billboard charts with that release, and it also ended up on Adams’s album Reckless later that year, putting it back on the Billboard as the third single from the album, reaching #1 in April of 1985, completely eclipsing A Night in Heaven as far as cultural cachet and longevity. Perhaps almost as notable was the track “Obsession,” which was written and performed by Michael Des Barres and Holly Knight, and which was covered the following year by LA-based synth-pop band Animotion, becoming the biggest single of that band’s career, ensuring a pop culture legacy that’s more fondly (and more often) remembered than the film from which it spawned. Finally, I have a real fondness for “Like What You See,” which was composed by the film’s music supervisor Jan Hammer, a Czech-American composer with a long history of collaboration with a variety of household names like Mick Jagger and Carlos Santana. The track, performed by Hammer and the band Next, is a real treat, a peculiar blend of sultry and yacht rock-adjacent synths, and it’s undeniably sexy, even when it’s not paired with erotic dancing. 

What did you think? Did you like the soundtrack or was there a dissonance caused by the presence of much more famous music? Would you call this a romantic drama, an erotic thriller, or something completely different? 

Brandon: If I was at all distracted by the pop tunes plugged into the soundtrack, it was only in the immense difference in quality between the aforementioned “Heaven” & “Obsession” – respectfully, one of the all-time worst and one of the all-time best pop songs of all time.  Personal taste aside, as a pair they do exemplify what is so jarring about the movie’s volatile sense of tone, which alternates wildly from scene to scene.  “Heaven” represents its penchant for soft romantic melodrama, in which a troubled couple negotiates a rough patch in their marriage through teary-eyed phone calls and kitchen table heart-to-hearts.  By contrast, “Obsession” amplifies the erotically thrilling hedonism of the wife’s trips to the strip bar and her cuckolded husband’s parallel trips to the shooting range, an explosive recipe for sex & violence that thankfully only pays off on the sex end.  The way the film alternates between those two opposing tones can be a little clumsy, but the tension between them is also what makes the story so compelling.  Here we have the rare mainstream picture that sincerely engages with and markets to female sexual desire, tempting its timid protagonist to step outside the tedious complications and relative safety of her suburban marriage to enter a more dangerous, thrilling world of hedonistic excess.  In some ways, it softens the danger of her transgressions by making the object of her desire such a boyish, twinky goofball that she has immediate power over as his college professor, but by indulging her urges she also turns her husband into a potential mass shooter so I guess it all evens out. 

In a way, it’s incredible that a major Hollywood studio distributed a Magic Mike prototype decades before Soderbergh cornered the market on male stripper cinema, and it’s somehow become an out-of-print curio instead of a regular rowdy-screening cult favorite.  However, considering that Disney now owns the 20th Century Fox repertory catalog and there are several shots of the hot twink’s exposed peen, maybe it’s less incredible than it is just shameful.  There’s nothing especially vulgar nor raunchy about A Night in Heaven outside those brief flashes of male nudity and the fact that the zipper to Ricky Rocket’s pants is centered in the back instead of the front.  Still, it’s shocking to see a retro movie sincerely marketed to stoke women’s libidos, since that’s such a rare mode for mainstream Hollywood filmmaking.  There’s a detectable relishment over the film’s financial & artistic missteps in its contemporary reviews (including a New York Times writer declaring it “Flashdunce”) that’s typical to most media that dares to market directly to women.  Hell, maybe even my aversion to Bryan Adams’s “Heaven” is a result of that extremely gendered form of cringe, which rejects feminine artistic aesthetics as automatically lesser-than.  It’s a tough habit to shake.  In hindsight, though, it’s wonderfully endearing to see that a sexy strip club with a softcore porno title was marketed to that eternally underserved audience, even if only as a fluke inspired by the fad popularity of Chippendales male stripper shows.  The early exchange “I just flunked that kid,” “You did WHAT?” between girlfriends would have still been a mainstream-media novelty when Sex and the City was a zeitgeist changer two decades later, so it probably shouldn’t be surprising that America wasn’t ready to spend a night in Heaven when Reagan was still president.

Britnee: I am so grateful for being introduced to A Night in Heaven. This confusing mess of a movie is extremely entertaining, and I’ve already put rare DVD copies on my eBay and Mercari watchlists. I need this in my collection to watch over and over again. First off, I adore Leslie Anne Warren. Her performances in two of my favorite films, Victor/Victoria and Clue, are iconic, and she killed it as Susan Mayer’s mother, Sophie, in the Desperate Housewives series. She was perfect in the role of Faye, the conservatively dressed academic with a suppressed wild side. 

The question Boomer asked is the same question I had when I finished watching the film: “What genre is this?” It’s not romantic enough to be a romance. It’s also not purposefully funny, and not really erotic either. It’s a slightly sexy wholesome drama? I really don’t know the answer. All I know is that it’s a mystery that makes for a damn good time. The extended, pointless Bryan Adams bike ride really set the tone for what was to come! I laughed so much while singing along to “Heaven”. Yes, I’m a Bryan Adams fan, so I really enjoyed the soundtrack, especially the early original version of “Obsession”. That song is on just about every 80s mixed CD I’ve ever made. The soundtrack itself is a mixed tape that encapsulates everything the film does or is trying to do, and I think that’s wonderful.

What I wanted so badly was for Faye and Ricky Rocket to have multiple trysts and a stronger sexual connection with each other. The initial Ricky Rocket dance scene was insanely hot (and I watched it multiple times), but that was as strong as the tension between the two got. I wanted this to be more of a genuine age-gap romance like White Palace rather than a douche bag trying to get a passing grade by flirting with his professor. Why couldn’t Faye unleash her inner cougar with a young stud who was legitimately attracted to her? And then leave her boring husband for her new lover? I wanted this to be trashier, dammit!

Alli: Wow, maybe it’s my recent interest in trashy romance novels, or maybe it’s just from identifying strongly as a woman for most of my life, but I had a lot of fun with this. There’s a kitsch quality to it that directly hits my brain’s pleasure center: the straight laced, tight bunned school marm who’s secretly a hotty if she would only let down her hair; the nerdy husband who will do anything for her; the temptation, some kind of snake (wink wink, nudge nudge). It’s a parade of archetypes that just work. I can’t believe that this movie has somehow slid into obscurity, regardless of its pop songs. It just highlights the lack of cultural hype around movies about women’s pleasure and desires. (From what I’ve experienced on romance-novel-internet, books are not suffering from the same treatment somehow despite being far more numerous.) I hope that this Swampflix feature at least partly helps rectify that obscurity.

Something that really hit me, in terms of kitsch and lush texture, was the art direction and lighting. Yes, the changes in costumes mark shifts in character. Okay, now she’s the hot teacher because she let her hair down and put on a “racy dress.” Okay, look at these stripper outfits and how they differ from regular day to day. The night-time versus the daytime. Yeah, these shifts are obvious, but I love it. It’s so rare to see such blatant shifts outside teen make-over comedies. And the lighting here is perfect for it, especially the contrast between the regular classroom, office, daytime, household lighting versus the lighting in Heaven, where Ricky Rocket at one point literally has a Byzantine halo made of the colored lights above as he’s giving a lap dance. I was absolutely living for it.

As far as whether or not this is a romantic thriller or drama, it feels much more like a drama to me. Yeah, eventually a gun is involved, but it feels so minor compared to the switches between boring wife-dom and the straight woman paradise of Heaven. It plays so much more like a fantasy than a drama. Faye gets to have her cake (sleeping with Ricky when her marriage feels stagnant) and eat it too (going back to her husband with better communication and knowledge of her needs). The fact that she’s not punished for desiring a younger man is so refreshing. 

Lagniappe

Britnee:  I was surprised to see so much exposed man pubes here. Truly, A Night in Heaven walked so Magic Mike could run.

Alli: In a world full of male fantasies about big men hoarding guns, setting off explosions, and saving the world, we need more counter programming like this. We need more soft fantasies about young (of legal age) men desiring school teachers. Or, you know, just generally about women getting to explore their sexuality without drastic consequences. There’s a reason this is such a HUGE genre of literary fiction.

Brandon: I would like to personally welcome Jerri Blank’s stepmother, Deborah Rush, back to the Movie of the Month family after such a long hiatus following her early appearances in the screwball comedy Big Business and the cosmic horror The Box.  As a Strangers with Candy obsessive, I am so used to Rush being an ice-cold suburban terminator who “drinks to kill the pain” that I was shocked & delighted to see her bubblier 80s side as the sassy, squeaky sidekick here.  If y’all ever want to pivot this feature into a Deborah Rush Movie of the Month ritual instead, I am totally down.

Boomer: I’m very pleased that this one went over so well. This movie is disjointed—there’s no denying it—and its tonal inconsistencies could be a turn off, but I knew this would be this gaggle of freaks and weirdos to appreciate it. 

-The Swampflix Crew

Movie of the Month: The Box (2009)

/ swampflix / 21 Comments

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Every month one of us makes the rest of the crew watch a movie they’ve never seen before & we discuss it afterwards. This month Brandon made Britnee, Alli, and Boomer  watch The Box (2009).

Brandon: “Your home is a box. Your car is a box on wheels. You drive to work in it. You sit in your home staring at a box. It erodes your soul while the box that is your body inevitably withers, then dies, whereupon it is placed in the ultimate box to slowly decompose.”

No, that’s not lyrics to a Bright Eyes song or a page ripped from your 15 old self’s poetry-filled diary (or both if you’re Conor Oberst). It’s an explanation from The Box’s mysterious villain Arlington Sterward when he’s asked the simple question, “Why a box?” Steward’s rambly, heavy-handed response (delivered expertly by character actor Frank Langella) is a typifying example of writer-director Richard Kelly’s filmmaking style in that it’s both far outside any semblance of normal human communication and it represents a nonstop torrent of ideas that Kelly can’t help but spill onto the page all at once. His debut film, Donnie Darko, was a weird 80s throwback sci-fi horror that’s just bonkers enough to serve as art film training wheels for disgruntled teens (it worked for me, anyway), but also stylistically restrained in a way Kelly hasn’t been since. His follow-up, the sprawling & delightfully incomprehensible Southland Tales, is a punishing assault of strange ideas that plays like a big budget adaptation of a crackpot conspiracy theorist’s 4,000 page manifesto on the state of the modern & supernatural world. The Box, Kelly’s most recent film to date, splits the difference.

As Kelly put it himself, The Box was an attempt “to make a film that’s incredibly suspenseful and broadly commercial, while still retaining [his] artistic sensibility.” I’d say it’s almost successful in that way, tempering Kelly’s bottomless wealth of bizarre ideas with a familiar realm of cinematic tones that lands somewhere between Hitchcock suspense and the Spielbergian throwback horror of titles like Super 8 & Stranger Things. I honestly believe The Box is his best work to date. However, if Kelly thinks that this overwhelming tale of deadly ultimatums, alien invasions, mind control, interdimensional gateways, and spiritual ascension has “broad commercial appeal” he’s gotta be out of his fucking mind (and I’m sure there’s more than a little truth to that). Audiences hated The Box. It’s one of the few films to ever receive an “F” Cinemascore, which is typically a very forgiving grading system. It flopped financially in 2009 & has since been largely forgotten by time. General audiences have been known to hate a lot of great art, though, and I think that there’s an argument to be made that this film deserves to be recognized as such.

The first half hour or so of The Box might actually be the work of “broad commercial appeal” Kelly believed he was delivering. The film opens as a retelling of the classic Twilight Zone episode “Button Button” in which a young couple receives a mysterious box that prominently displays a giant button and comes with an even more mysterious offer: if the couple pushes the button someone they do not know, somewhere in the world, will die & they will receive $1million cash. Long story short, the couple pushes the button, receives the cash, and are informed that the box will now be passed onto a new couple, someone they do not know. Like the best of The Twilight Zone, “Button Button” is a tight, efficient story of supernatural dread that reinforces the value of The Golden Rule: treat others as you would wish to be treated. Kelly faithfully delivers that tight, controlled life lesson and then, leaving broad commercial appeal behind, explodes it into a galaxy of strange ideas that explore the identity of the man who delivers the box (or “the button unit” as Steward puts it”), the question of whether or not humanity is an enterprise worth preserving, and theories on what could possibly exist beyond our basic understandings of reality & mortality. All of these heady topics are interjected with whatever weird ideas pop into Richard Kelly’s head from moment to moment – say, lightning as a means of alien-to-human communication, motel pools as gateways to other worlds, entire armies of It Follows-style demons (“employees” of Steward), etc. etc. etc. It’s all perfectly overwhelming and I enjoy every frame of it, but I can’t fathom a world where it could’ve been a runaway commercial success.

Richard Kelly seems very much interested in trying to convey the vague menace of the unknown here, an overreaching ambition that leaves a lot of character development by the wayside in favor of otherworldly ideas & never-ending suspense. As a result, a lot of the film’s dialogue & character motivations can fall just on the campy side of eerie. It can also be a little difficult to care about any particular character’s fate, including the film’s central family, since they remain near-strangers for the entire runtime as they try to piece together exactly what’s happening to them. As unnerving as The Box can be, its lack of compassion for its characters & its subversively campy humor can play just as thick as Cameron Diaz’s godawful Virginian accent (she really is laughably bad in her lead role as the matriarch).

Britnee, how do the corny acting & unclear character motivations play into the film’s nonstop assault of spooky ideas for you? Are they a distraction or do they add to the film’s strange, off-putting appeal?

Britnee: First of all, when I found out that The Box was going to be the September Movie of the Month selection, I got it confused with the 2015 film The Gift. Jason Bateman graced the cover of The Gift, so I kept waiting for him to make an appearance in The Box, which, of course, he never did. It turns out that movies about mysterious boxes are more popular than I thought.

The insanity that is The Box should come with a warning label. Those with severely high blood pressure or epilepsy should never watch this movie because they will end up in the emergency room before the film is over. The constant twists and turns are just too much to handle, but I loved them all. The acting of just about every character, especially Cameron Diaz and James Marsden, really contributes to the movie’s wacky charm. Diaz’s performance as one of the film’s main characters, Norma Lewis, really sticks out for me. It’s really as bad as it gets, but her horrible accent, unconvincing attitude, and missing toes all come together to make The Box a hell of a good time. As Brandon mentioned previously, it’s difficult to give a damn about the fate of any of the film’s characters because viewers aren’t given the opportunity to really connect with them, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I enjoyed not worrying about whether or not Norma and Arthur would survive the terrors brought on by the box because I was able to focus my attention on the all the confusing supernatural happenings.

There were many times in the film where I thought the movie was concluding, such as when Arthur goes through his chosen portal in the library and ends up in his bedroom with Norma, but then the film continues and the story develops even more. Alli, did you find the constant twists in the film to be irritating or did you enjoy them? Was there any point in the film where you thought it should’ve ended?

Alli: It’s hard to say when a movie this in-over-its-head in a bizarre concept should have ended. I think maybe somewhere on the writer’s desk someone should have come in and asked about some plot holes and maybe talked Kelly out of some of them. But as you guys are saying, they’re all a part of this movie’s goofy charm. After a certain point of being jerked around I kind of gave up and just let it take me along for this strange little ride and part of me even felt like it could have kept going, honestly. There were so many more questions than answers. Not that I think I could have stood Diaz’s accent for another hour, but I really wanted to know more about these employers of Mr. Steward. I want to know more about this film’s philosophy as well.

A thing this movie brushed over and possibly unintentionally made a argument about was free will. In the end, did the new family being offered the box have a choice at all? He clearly knew that everyone he offered these options to were going to choose the easy way out, if you can call it that, otherwise some sort of transmitter would actually have to be in the box for him to know. I know there’s an argument to be made for supernatural surveillance, but it seems like he and his employers knew all along what human nature would lead these people to do. I was a little disappointed that there wasn’t a heavy-handed monologue about that.

But then again, this is a movie that only left me half satisfied. We’re vaguely introduced to aliens but we don’t learn much more about them other than they want to prove humans are unworthy. We’re given some suspense but nothing too bad, except for like Brandon said the occasional It Follows moment of a stranger being outside the window. We’re given an ideal suburban family in an ideal suburban town that’s slightly claustrophobic but not quite. Everything seems to fall just barely short of hitting whatever target he was aiming for. Boomer, is there anything you really wish had been expanded or clarified that wasn’t?

Boomer: Honestly, I had the opposite feeling. Although I definitely like the spookiness of the Steward hive mind followers and the general impenetrability of concept that is a hallmark of Richard Kelly’s work (like Brandon, Donnie Darko served as a kind of Baby’s First Jacob’s Ladder for me as well), there’s a certain simplicity to the existential dread of the original Richard Matheson short story that is absent here. In the short “Button, Button,” the story ends with the enigmatic Steward retrieving the button in a box from the protagonists, departing as he “reassures” the couple that they should not worry, as the next recipients of the box won’t be anyone that they know, with all the implications thereof. Does that mean that there is a direct link between the immediate recipients of the button and the previous button-pushers, or just a chilling reminder that their karmic comeuppance will come someday, without warning? It’s classic Matheson that way, and I adore the story (it’s adaptation in the eighties Twilight Zone revival has a different, more obvious ending, and I, like Matheson, don’t care for it; he went so far as to have the story idea credited to a pseudonym). There’s a quietness and intrigue to the original story that this film, which uses the original story less as a template and more of a jumping-off point for spiraling but utterly watchable madness, doesn’t possess.

That having been said, there were some things that I would have been interested to see more of. I was particularly intrigued by the use of realistic grounding in the life of the family before the box arrives, like the discussion of Norma’s foot injury and Arthur’s spacey aspirations. While it’s true that much of what makes the film captivating is the unexpected paths that it takes, I would have preferred to see the story retain that level of grounding throughout rather than grow exponentially more wild. It’s as if there are two films here, and I would have liked to see a Kelly flick that had the alien test plot and a second, different film that followed the mundane lives of the Lewises after the button is pushed, as they navigate the quandary of the immoral actions taken as a result of Steward’s visit. As it is within the film, everything that follows Norma’s impulsive push that affects them is an external force, not an exploration of the fallout of committing such an act, which would have been a more interesting film to me.

As far as other elements that I would have liked to see more of, Deborah Rush is criminally underutilized here as she was in her previous MotM appearance in Big Business, and every time I see her in any role I wish she had more to do. I also would have liked to know more about what Steward was like before he became the host for the alien entity that is sitting in judgment of humanity; was he chosen because of a similarity between his pre-possession personality and the ideas of the Hive? Was he the opposite? It could have been interesting to see the dichotomy between his former self and his new one, especially as a mirror of the change in personality between some of the button-pushers we saw pre- and post-button mashing; an objective correlative metaphor is never a bad idea, and could have illustrated the difference in the self that occur as a result of chance (Steward) versus those that follow deliberate action (the Lewises). What do you think, Brandon? You mentioned that the campiness and spectacle of the movie are its big draws for you; would you feel that you would enjoy it more, or at least as much, if it had been more of a character piece than a moderately coherent, not-quite-on-target, effects-heavy scifi fable?

Brandon: I’m a little amused by that question because I assume Kelly believes he was delivering a character piece, or at least his version of it. I don’t think stripping the film of its excess of The Day the Earth Stood Still-modeled sci-fi ideas on testing humanity’s worthiness through complex alien puzzles would necessarily improve its narrative in terms of entertainment value, but I do agree that the film starts weaving some interesting threads about the Lewises that might’ve lead to some truly powerful character-based moments had they been given enough room to breathe & develop. For instance, the family’s early financial troubles, born solely of their apparent disinterest in living within their means, is played merely as motivation for their activation of the button unit, but could’ve instead lead to genuine dramatic tension were Kelly interested in building it. He also suggests an interesting spousal dynamic when the couple negotiates the button unit’s terms & conditions and Marsden’s scientist-dolt husband asks, “What is it to really know someone? Do you know me?” I wouldn’t trade those lines of inquiry for the ludicrous sci-fi spectacle we’re gifted with instead, but I do think they would’ve been better received if they had been more fully developed, ideally without sacrificing the sci-fi backdrop that contrasts them.

The problem with fitting the character study elements and Kelly’s immense idea flood into a single vehicle might be a question of form. In some ways a two hour feature film isn’t nearly expansive enough to encompass everything The Box wants to contain. The film takes the idiom “biting off more than you can chew” as a direct challenge & a mission statement, an approach that doesn’t always sit well with a movie-going audience. I feel like the property’s ideal self would be as a prestige television series on AMC or HBO, a medium that would fix several immediate problems like allowing more room for grounded character study, giving each out-there sci-fi idea time to breathe instead of running through them all at once, forgiving a little bit of the television-grade acting choices made by Diaz & Marsden, etc. I’m imagining it like a Twin Peaks or a Welcome to Nightvale, where monster-of-the-week alien threats (or in this case, alien puzzles) would all inexplicably occur in a single town & follow a small family unit as they struggle to make sense of the phenomenon. The first episode of The Box: The Television Series would be the same “Button, Button” remake the movie uses for a launching point, except that it would end with the couple pushing the button in a cliffhanger, waiting for the story to be picked up at the beginning of episode 2. As I’ve said, though, a large part of the fun of The Box for me is in being overwhelmed by its wealth of ideas in such a short amount of time & I think there’s a value to experiencing all of that otherworldly absurdity in a tightly paced, cinematic punch that is somewhat lost when you’re, to risk referencing something so of-the-moment twice in one conversation, binge-watching all 8 hours of Stranger Things over the course of a week.

Speaking of the sprawl of sci-fi ideas included here, one of my favorite concepts in The Box didn’t come from Richard Kelly himself, but is instead a quote from sci-fi writer Arthur C. Clarke, conveniently read aloud for the viewers following along at home: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Unable to resist piling even more literary quotes onto the film’s DNA, Kelly also makes several allusions to Jean-Paul Satre’s play “No Exit,” both mining its title for easy existential dread & expanding its infamous line, “Hell is other people” to “Hell is other people seeing you for who you truly are,” in an offhand stab at literary analysis. Kelly’s pulled off this trick before in Donnie Darko as well, which includes an extensive classroom analysis of the Graham Greene short story “The Destructors.” Britnee, do you think these two literary references, Clarke & Satre, as cool as they are, provide any legitimate sort of insight into what kind of story Kelly was trying to tell in The Box or were they just easy modes of injecting profundity into what’s at heart a very pulpy sci-fi premise? Was their inclusion earned in the film’s content or did it come across as a little try-hard?

Britnee: Kelly’s use of the Clarke and Satre references you mentioned, Brandon, caused me to give a big eye-roll as I was thinking back to when they occurred in the movie. It’s difficult for me to take anything in this film seriously, so I would definitely have to say that the presence of these literary references is a little ridiculous. Obviously, Kelly didn’t throw them into the film to add to the campiness, but ultimately, that’s exactly what happened. I get what he was attempting to accomplish, but this movie was just too silly for anything profound to exist within it. Then again, my knowledge of anything by Clarke and Satre doesn’t go beyond Brandon’s previous statement, so maybe I’m the crazy one and Kelly’s got the right idea.

I feel like I’m being a little harsh on The Box. There were a few moments where I caught myself thinking about monumental life choices I’ve made and what motivated me in my decisions. The Lewis family painted a picture of how ugly being selfish and greedy really is, which is why I didn’t have much sympathy for them. The fact that they decided to take the life away from another human being so they could keep up with their suburban lifestyle made me sick to my stomach. Alli, do you think the film’s “protagonists” would have been more likeable if they were worse off (e.g. Their kid was dying, and they needed money for a lifesaving transplant)?

Alli: You know, I actually do think they would be more likeable if they were in more dire circumstances, but I think making them shallow suburbanites is either some sort of misguided attempt in a post-2008 financial crisis world to say, “This is you!” to the audience or to do the high and mighty, “Yes, you as the audience gets it. Look at the normies struggling with their mixed up priorities.” And if it was the second I’m not sure if they were ever supposed to be likeable at all and it’s just about the schadenfreude. Given the smug literary references and all of Donnie Darko, pretty much I’m leaning towards that interpretation, but it seems like there’s a lot of ways to read this movie.

Even though I never liked them and never sympathized as the movie progressed, I managed to like them even less as it went on, until finally it reached a point where I actually despised them. That point was at the end when they have to choose between having a deaf and blind son or Arthur shooting Norma. I hope I’m not spoiling too much by saying this, but what the hell? The idea of a disabled son being worse than a dead wife is really upsetting to me, especially when you have a million dollars and can afford to find ways to make your life more accessible. Not only is it a cheapness of life thing but just some casual ableism thrown in. And I just shudder to think that someone watching this somewhere probably thought that that was a reasonable choice to make.

Boomer, was there any point more “upsetting” (I’m not quite sure that’s the word I’m looking for) than others to you or did nothing really stand out to all?

Boomer: The most upsetting thing to me was seeing poor little Britta passing through the long hotel hallway while being met with the stares of various Steward acolytes. I know that a lot of people find hotels to be inherently creepy automatically (I’m not one of them) and so they probably found this even more unsettling than I did, but there was something about her apparent innocence and the way that she was bandied about by forces outside of her control. I don’t recall that we ever really get much of an explanation as to who she is or what she was doing; was she, like the man from the previous box cycle from whom Arthur learns about the nature of Steward, an escapee from the “plan” who was trying to make sense of her upturned world? Was she merely an unwilling accomplice in the larger goals of the mysterious entities? It is perhaps my fondness for Gillian Jacobs alone that led me to be so thrown off by this sequence, but it was generally disturbing.

I disagree with your reading of the final scene, however. Not that there are no ableist connotations in the scene (that interpretation is certainly valid), but I don’t feel that Kelly’s intent was to make it seem that having a blind/deaf child was worse than a dead wife/mother, but was more of a demonstration of Steward’s willingness to give Norma a second chance to prove that she could make the “right” decision, since it was her impulsive pushing of the button (despite Arthur’s hesitation and apparent ultimate refusal) that doomed the family in the first place. In response to your question, what was perhaps most disturbing was the fact that Steward and his overseers were testing “free will” in a way that influenced the participants; in fact, given that none of us can come to an agreement as to whether there is free will in this situation (given the way that deaths of previous users of the box rely upon the next user making the wrong decision), it’s unclear what, if anything, could be gleaned from these experiments.

Although I hesitate to sympathize with the Lewises because of their vapid engagement in consumerism (it’s important to note that the original story did, in fact, feature a family in a much worse economic situation than the Lewises), they were living within their means until Steward manipulated events in their life, like causing Arthur to lose his candidacy for promotion and taking away the tuition reduction plan that the family relied upon in order to send their son to the best possible school In a way, the film could be seen as a modern(ish) retelling of the story of Job, substituting mild setbacks for utter familial destruction and replacing faith in God with the willingness to perform acts which enact the greatest good for the largest number of people. Viewed through this lens, Norma and Arthur have their faith tested and Norma fails, but is given the opportunity to correct this wrong through self-sacrifice. I don’t necessarily think that this is the reasonable choice, but I feel like this was more likely to be Kelly’s intent. Regardless, just as with Job, none of the characters that we see would be in the situations in which they find themselves without divine (or unholy) intervention. Maybe this means that The Box is really an exploration of the philosophical conceit that if (a) the divine is all knowing and pre-ordains all actions and (b) humans are thus unable to exercise free will despite the appearance that they can, then (c) punishing mankind for acting in accordance with preordination is unreasonable and perhaps evil. Probably not, though.

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Lagniappe

Britnee: While The Box left me with loads of unanswered questions, what I want to know more than anything else is the current whereabouts of the prosthetic silicon foot that Arthur made for Norma (using materials from his workplace!). Did Diaz take it home as a souvenir from one of her most desperate roles? Does Kelly keep it in a curio cabinet in his family room?

Alli: Coming back to the disabilities/deformities thing. I just really think it’s super messed up that someone like Norma, who lives with a limp has some sort of hierarchy of disabilities. Like, Mr. Sterling’s face makes her feel better about herself instead of her being able to identify with him. I know she’s worried about the teasing and ridicule when it comes to her son, but it’s still terrible.

Brandon: There’s so much to cover in The Box that I feel like I could never touch on all of it even if this conversation went on for two more rounds. There’s the curious case of its Arcade Fire-provided score that never reached physical media release, the weirdly wonderful feeling of seeing a babyfaced Gillian Jacobs in an early dramatic role, the peculiarly detailed prop of that Human Resource Exploitation Manual Arlington Steward supplies to his employees, and a whole lot more I could never get to with all the time in the world. Instead of trying to gather all these details like so many Pokémon, I’d just like to follow up on a couple things Alli & Boomer mentioned that interested me.

I totally agree with their assessment that the film’s musings on free will are muddled at best. This is never more apparent to me than at the film’s climax when two couples are given an ultimatum by Steward and they make their decisions simultaneously, one directly affecting the other. Whose free will is being exercised there? It’s a question (among many) that the movie is far from interested in answering. A heavy handed Steward monologue on the subject would’ve been nice. However, I do want to buck Alli’s assertion that not enough suspense is earned through interactions with the It Follows “employees”. They’re creepy as all hell and, unlike most of the film, tastefully employed in small doses. The three big moments I’m thinking of are the aforementioned zombified man in the kitchen window; the babysitter’s long, troubling walk down a motel hallway; and that incredible sequence in the library where the employees threaten to form into an angry mob. I know I’ve poked fun at how ludicrous The Box can be from minute to minute, but I do believe the suspense it generates is genuine and a lot of it comes from those creepy, dead-eyed employees of Steward’s.

Boomer: When I was working at the Urban Outfitters in the French Quarter in grad school, James Marsden came in to shop (I think he was working on the remake of Straw Dogs at the time). I rang him up and I cannot tell a lie: he really is that pretty in real life. I’m not going to say that I got lost in his eyes or anything, but I’m also not going to pretend that I didn’t. The most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in my life was the gradation of colors in the rings of Saturn through a refraction telescope at the top of the observatory in college; the viewer was the size of a dinner plate, and from ringtip to ringtip, the rings were six inches across, with nothing between me and this distant planet but glass and space. It was humbling, awe-inspiring, and absolutely stunning. The second most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen was James Marsden buying tank tops. Take from that what you will.

Upcoming Movies of the Month:
October: Britnee presents Funhouse (1981)
November: Boomer presents  The Paperhouse (1988)
December: Alli presents Last Night (1999)
January: The Top Films of 2016

-The Swampflix Crew

Movie of the Month: Big Business (1988)

/ swampflix / 14 Comments

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Every month one of us makes the rest of the crew watch a movie they’ve never seen before & we discuss it afterwards. This month Britnee made Boomer, Brandon, and Erin watch Big Business (1988).

Britnee: Many years ago, there was a local video rental shop in my hometown called Slick Sam’s (sounds more like a dirty sex shop), and that’s where I first came across one of my all-time favorite movies, Jim Abrahams’ 1988 comedy, Big Business. I can still see that sun-damaged, styrofoam-stuffed VHS cover sitting on the shelf just waiting for me to grab it. Needless to say, I was thrilled to find out that no one in the Swampflix crew had seen Big Business before, so I was able to make it my Movie of the Month selection for February. There’s not much love out there for this comic masterpiece, and it really does deserve some recognition.

In a small town called Jupiter Hollow, two women give birth to two sets of identical twin girls at the same time at a local hospital. One woman, Binky Shelton (Deborah Rush), is a big city snob that just so happened to go into labor while passing through Jupiter Hollow with her husband, but the other woman, Iona Ratliff (Patricia Gaul), is a local. The Sheltons and the Ratliffs coincidentally both name their twin daughters Rose and Sadie, and a kooky old nurse mixes up the sets of identical twins. About 40 years later, Sadie and Rose Shelton (Bette Midler and Lily Tomlin) are rich business women living in NYC while Sadie and Rose Ratliff (Bette Midler and Lily Tomlin) are country bumpkins living in Jupiter Hollow. Eventually, the two sets of twins end up in NYC at the same time, and all sorts of wacky things happen.

The performances by Midler and Tomlin are insanely impressive in this film. Midler plays a bitchy NYC snob (Sadie Shelton) and a kind small-town girl looking for adventure (Sadie Ratliff), and Tomlin plays a sweet, softspoken city girl (Rose Shelton) and a rough n’ tough country gal (Rose Ratliff). Portraying such different characters must’ve been such a difficult task for these comedy queens, but they both deliver.

Brandon, were you impressed by the versatile performances from Midler and Tomlin? Or were they just mediocre?

Brandon: I mean, Midler & Tomlin are both phenomenal personalities in general, so it’d be a total lie to say that anything they do or say is mediocre. However, it’s pretty clear that they both had a part they had more fun playing. It’s difficult to say which performance stands out most here between the two actresses, not because there isn’t a clear winner, but because the movie splits their performances into four quadrants: Rich Sadie & Poor Sadie (Midler) and Rich Rose & Poor Rose (Tomlin). There’s a definite, old fashioned nature>nurture mentality at work in Big Business, though, so the individual sisters who lucked into being raised in their “rightful” class environments are the more fun characters to watch, because their confidence is infectious. Poor Rose is certainly amusing in her bossy-but-small-minded local yokel skepticism. It’s Rich Sadie, however, who steals the show for me. As the Reaganomics-personified antagonist of the film, she’s allowed to be the most devious and, because Bette Midler is such a fabulous comedic performer, she strikes just the right tone of evil bitch that this film needed. Midler’s performance as Rich Sadie is just short of being a world-class drag routine. The way she saunters & pouts, insulting people’s outfits by saying “You look like a blood clot” while rocking the world’s largest shoulder pads is just begging for a drag-themed floor show revival. Poor Sadie has a couple of funny moments, mostly in a scene where she milks a cow to the beat of a country song & in her unholy fusion of Carribean-themed yodeling, but it feels like not nearly as much effort went into her character as the over-the-top vamping of her wealthy counterpart. The same could be said of Rich Rose. Tomlin & Midler are both fantastic in this film, but as far as versatility goes, it’s easy to see which characters got more attention.

Besides the easy likability of Midler & Tomlin in this film, something that really stood out to me is how old-fashioned everything feels. The swapped-twins plot of Big Business feels like it’s straight out of an Old Hollywood comedy, the kind that Fred & Ginger might’ve starred in if it had been released 50 years earlier. The nature-over-nurture value system of the movie is very much an antiquated line of thinking and (although there’s some confusion about who winds up with whom at the end) the film’s intense concern with finding each sister a potential mate is very much in line with the structure of a traditional comedy. Instead of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Big Business is more like A Million Beaus for Four Sisters. As the two sets of mismatched twins find themselves nearly-but-never-quite bumping into each other while all staying at the same hotel, I felt like I was watching a Marx Brothers movie. Hammering the point home, Midler even recreates the infamous Marx Brothers mirror gag from Duck Soup in the scene where her two characters finally meet for the first time. Fred Ward’s oblivious-to-homosexuality line reading of “You guys are alright” reads a lot like the classic “Nobody’s perfect!” zinger in Some Like It Hot. There’s even a gag where a homeless drunk rubs his eyes in disbelief when he sees both sets of twins walk by, immediately tossing away the bottle he’s clutching. I’m not sure that cinematic gags get much older than that.

What do you think of this film’s classic Hollywood callbacks, Boomer? Were they an intentional homage to the Old Hollywood era or just a strange coincidence for a comedy that happened to be old-fashioned by nature?

Boomer: I’m not much of a fan of comedies of error in which the humor relies too heavily on farcical near-misses, and there was a point in this movie where I lost heart as I realized that the film was saving the inevitable serendipitous union of the City and Country Mice for the end of the film. Once I had this epiphany and stopped waiting for the film to get to that point, I found myself enjoying the movie more straightforwardly, and was pleased that the mistaken-identity elements weren’t played for cringe-comedy as much as I had expected. As has been noted, this is a classic Hollywood farce, which really serves to demonstrate to what extent Old Hollywood was still working from a centuries-old storytelling paradigm; this isn’t really an Old Hollywood Farce so much as it is a Old Globe Farce, based on William Shakespeare’s genre-defining Comedy of Errors. In essence, Big Business is a throwback to a time when films were based almost entirely on dramas that were ancient even then, making the film old-fashioned by default, not that this is necessarily a bad thing. My major problem with the film comes from the way that its antiquated nature shows through in the film’s moral.

When viewing the four main characters, only Poor Rose and Rich Sadie seem truly suited for their positions in life, with Rich Rose and Poor Sadie being reasonably well-adjusted but largely unfulfilled. Ignoring the two women who are in their “rightful” lives, Poor Sadie’s desire for a more exciting life than pig wrasslin’ and yodeling can provide evokes more empathy for her than the audience can really muster for Rich Rose, who certainly has the financial means to forsake her supposedly incomplete life for the purported pleasures of rural domesticity. As such, Rich Rose is the character who gets the least characterization, really only developing once Roone shows up in the third act. This would be a fine exploration of the nature/nurture dichotomy, were it not for the fact that, ultimately, Poor Sadie comes to the decision that not only is the way of life in Jupiter Hollow worth preserving, it’s worth praising as well; she forsakes her biological sister’s urban and urbane world to return to performing percussive cow milking alongside toothless men whose musical expertise is limited to playing moonshine jugs, and we, as an audience, are supposed to feel gratified by this conclusion. Rural living is the right fit for everyone, except the shrewish antagonist.

Now, don’t get me wrong: I got plenty of laughs out of Tomlin and Midler’s performances here, and even the potentially painful farce worked for me. I was just hoping for one more twist (for instance, that the Sadies were actually the children of the Ratliffs and that the Roses were the Sheltons’ daughters) that would make the film less overt in its praise for downhome simplicity over metropolitan cynicism. To a man, all of the New York-based characters that are not Rich Rose are foppish, conceited, untrustworthy, manipulative, and greedy, with the implication being that Rose feels unfulfilled because she is genetically predisposed toward “goodness,” being the child of salt-of-the-earth outlanders. But the “goodness” of rural living is enough to almost completely deprogram Poor Sadie, who is tempted by the carnal delights that ensnare and comprise Rich Sadie’s identity and existence but is able to reject them. It just doesn’t sit well with me.

Erin, am I reading too much into this, or allowing my perception of the film to color my enjoyment of it too much? Is there something that mitigates this seeming moral that I may have overlooked? And what do you think about the Old Hollywood elements–do they work?

Erin: Boomer, I feel a little differently about the portrayal of country vs. city life, and I think that I came to slightly different conclusions about Big Business‘s moral assessment of both. I’d have to say that in true farcical fashion, both city life and country life are portrayed with an eye to their preposterous sides – yodeling and “making love in the back of a recreational vehicle” versus designer women in designer sneakers and the pompousness of grapefruits under silver lids.

Where I feel differently is that the on-screen portrayal of urban life seems to be much more positive than the portrayal of rural life. The Welcome to New York Montage, while funny, adheres pretty closely to the cinematic trope of New York as a vibrant, wonderful city (thought this might be more related to the visual presentation of Poor Sadie’s desires). Big Business‘s New York seems to be entirely made of the Plaza hotel and satin, even if its denizens are amoral and greedy. Rural life has gingham, and large, poor families.

If the moral of the story really is that rural life is better, I think it balances strangely against the onscreen portrayals of the rural and urban worlds. In a way, I think that starts to answer the second part of your question about the Old Hollywood elements (or the Old Globe elements, Big Business is truly a Shakespearean farce). I agree that that the movie reads as an old-fashioned screwball comedy and is pretty simple in terms of plot. On the other hand, I think that Big Business reads extremely well as an 80s movie. It’s got Bette Midler as a Power Lead (in TWO roles!), Big Business as the Big Bad, and steel drums lining the streets of New York.

What do you think, Britnee? To continue Boomer’s line of question, does Big Business manage to read well as an 80s movie? Does the old fashioned plot work well amongst the shoulder pads and polka dots of the 1980s?

Britnee: I’ve always viewed Big Business as a prime example of an 80s comedy. It’s packed with cheesy humor, wacky facial expressions, pumps and power suits, and of course, Bette Midler in her prime. It’s an 80s explosion! It wasn’t until this discussion that I realized that there are quite a few Old Hollywood elements present in this film. Now that I’m looking at the film through a much different lens, the movie is more interesting and much smarter than I initially thought. Creating a film that contains classical comic film features for an 80s audience mustn’t have been an easy task, but it’s a match made in heaven.

I know that this is completely off track, but I think that the film’s music deserves a bit of discussion. There are only two major lyrical songs in the film: Steve Winwood’s “Higher Love” and George Benson’s “On Broadway.” Both songs work well in the film (they’re so New York!), but as for the film’s instrumental tracks, they’re all kinds of ridiculous. It’s the type of music that belongs in a department store’s training video. Part of me feels as though the music was a bit too much, but another part of me thinks that the obnoxious tunes contributed to the film’s campiness.

Brandon, did you find the instrumental music in the film to be annoying or am I overthinking this?

Brandon: I don’t know if “annoying” is the word I would use. Maybe “cheesy”? Maybe “eccentric”? It’s undeniable that the background music of Big Business is always present, always noticeable, and perhaps even always awful, but I found it somehow added to the film’s charm. The soundtrack is another one of the areas where the film feels trapped between two times. Its big band music (which is mostly contained in the 1940s prologue) & countryside yodeling are decidedly old-fashioned, but the department store pop songs Britnee mentioned & the endless droning sax are so 80s it ain’t even funny (well, it’s a little funny). I don’t know if it was the exact DVD copy Britnee & I were watching or if the film was intentionally mixed this way, but the soft sax rock aspects were particularly noticeable (in that they were deafening) & particularly amusing. What really got me laughing, though, was the obnoxiously dramatic drum fills that crash the scene at the film’s climax. It’s as if Neil Peart had dropped in at the sound booth to add some last minute touches for the soundtrack.

Going back to that 1940s prologue for a second, the film starts in the old-timey countryside town of Jupiter Hollow, which prompted me to write “Stars Hollow” (the fictional town from Gilmore Girls, of course) in my notes. It was a surprise, then, that Gilmore Girls vet Edward Hermann (who, sadly, passed away a little over a year ago) appears in this film, delivering one of many great performances. It was also cool to see Seth Green run around as a raucous baby (almost literally) as well as the weird coincidence that both of the Roses’ beaus are future Tremors compatriots (Michael Gross & Fred Ward). All of this and Deborah Rush, aka Jerri Blank’s mom. The cast of supporting characters is surprisingly stacked, as long as you care about the niche pop culture properties they’re best known for.

Boomer, were there any supporting roles in particular that stood out to you as a favorite? Midler & Tomlin easily get the most to do, but I feel there was plenty enough opportunities for the other actors to shine.

Boomer: It’s funny, I was delighted to see Deborah Rush in this film, as she’s always an absolute delight, especially when she’s playing a terrible mother figure (Jerri Blank was a hot mess before she ever showed up, but Piper Chapman’s insufferable insulated white privilege nonsense is all on Rush’s padded shoulders). I was pretty disappointed that she disappears after her part in initiating the plot, but she does make the best of her limited screen time. I also really enjoyed watching tiny Seth Green run around as a screaming terror, and got a kick out of seeing Michael Gross, who will always be doomsday prepper Burt Gummer of the Tremors franchise to me (although I didn’t make the Fred Ward connection that Brandon did). My favorite minor role came from Mary Gross, Michael’s sister, who played the soft-voiced secretary working for the Sheltons; as an actress, she’ll always have a place in my heart because of her involvement in Troop Beverly Hills. On the opposite end of the spectrum, I looked up the name of the actor who played the put-upon desk clerk, Joe Grifasi, but I couldn’t place him in any memorable roles based on a quick scan of his IMDb page; he must simply be one of those classic “that guy” actors.

It was a very minor role that has really stuck with me since watching the film. The narrative saw fit to include a vagrant character who oversees the comings and goings of the Plaza. This is a well-worn comedy cliche: a drunken vagrant sees some unbelievable sight, looks at the bottle in his hand, back at the unbelievable sight, and then tosses the bottle behind him. Normally, this character is never seen again, but this film brings back our friend a few times; we watch him catch sight of the Roses and Sadies coming and going multiple times. All in all, it seems like he gets more screen time than some of the lesser love interests. From the outside, this mostly low-stakes (give or take the fate of Jupiter Hollow, which is easy to forget in all the identity confusion shenanigans) rom com farce occurs entirely outside of the context of this character; as a result, his story plays out as a window into an existential horror that he can only passively observe. The Plaza: if you stand outside long enough, you’ll see yourself come out of there. And then he does! That’s some In The Mouth of Madness… um, madness.

While prowling through the sparse information that the internet has to offer about this film and its development, I read that the sets for the film were so expensive that ABC created an entire television series to use the sets in an attempt to recoup their losses. The series flopped and never made it out of its first season. It does make one wonder, though; would Big Business have worked as an ongoing series? It seems like it would, what with the potential to have stock twin hijinx intersect with stock cultural differences plots.

What do you think, Erin? Would this idea have legs? And in what stock sitcom situations would you most like to see the Shelton-Ratliff sisters (recast for a TV budget, of course)?

Erin: Boomer, I can definitely see at least a two-season Big Business show combining stock twin hijinks and stock cultural differences.  It would take a deft hand to extend the premise outside of the obvious shenanigans.  I’m envisioning a Green Acres meets Beverly Hillbillies situation.  Shoulder pads on the farm!  Country Rose get mixed up with big city Mafia!  Mistaken identities galore!  Pie and jam competitions at the fair!  Rich Sadie turns out to be a heck of a pig-caller!  Moonshine!  Country twins accidentally attend the Met Ball!

There’s at least half a season right there.  The challenge would be extending the premise into something stable and complex enough to keep a show on the air, but the promise of the ensemble cast might make it work.  I wonder if it’s cheaper to find multiple sets of twins or to constantly produce a double effect through camera and editing tricks.

I think that that my best description of Big Business would include words like madcap and zany.  It was definitely a lot of fun to watch, and it looked like the cast was also having a great time during filming.  That always makes a movie better for me.  All in all, I think that it was a solid entry in the filmography of the 1980s.  It’s charming and fluffy, with few dull moments and lots of shoulder pads.

Lagniappe

Erin: The fashions worn by the two sets of sisters are almost characters in themselves.  Big Business is almost worth watching just for the clothes!

Britnee: I really like Poor Sadie’s initial yodeling number that she performed at the Jupiter Hallow fair. “Well, hello, Jupiter Hallow. I know you’re doing fine. Every day you work the factory, every night a jug of wine,” is what immediately enters my head when I think about Big Business. I’m not a big fan of yodeling, but Midler has one of those voices that can make anything catchy and enjoyable.

Boomer: I was a bit disappointed that Sadie Ratliff ended up with (as I interpreted it) Sadie Shelton’s ex husband. They barely shared a scene or two, and she had much more chemistry with the desk clerk.

Brandon: Going back to what Boomer was saying about the vilification of city life vs the deification of the countryside, that push & pull didn’t bother me too, too much, but I will say that the evil “big business” end of the equation felt a lot more convincing & well-developed. I especially appreciated the Reaganomics-speak of the NYC twins’ inherited company, Moramax: “More for America”. As far as satire goes, that specific phrase easily ranks up there with Robocop & Gremlins II: The New Batch in poking fun at the state of class structure in the 1980s, even if most of the film’s message boils down to a simple rich = stressed out & snooty, poor = sweet & serene.

Upcoming Movies of the Month
March: Erin presents Mrs. Winterbourne (1996)
April: Boomer presents My Demon Lover (1987)
May: Brandon presents Girl Walk // All Day (2011)

-The Swampflix Crew