Word: midlerisms
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...Club break records. Its $18.9 million opening weekend was the highest ever for a so-called women's film and captured more than one-third of the movie-going market from competition such as Bruce Willis' Last Man Standing. The characters played by Goldie Hawn, Diane Keaton and Bette Midler are like the Furies crossed with the Three Stooges--college friends spurned by their husbands in middle age who plan a madcap payback. But for all the one-liners and pratfalls, the movie is more than satiric fluff. Like Thelma & Louise, which five years ago set audiences to cheering when...
Divorce is traumatic at any age. But for middle-aged women whose husbands leave them for what Bette Midler in the movie calls Pop-Tarts, the emotional and economic devastation can be profound. "Remember," says Lynne Gold-Bikin, a divorce lawyer and former chair of the American Bar Association's Family Law Section, "the first wife is normally the one that lives over the store, who puts hubby through school, who works and raises the kids." The second wife gets not only the fruits of his career building but also the benefits of his midlife interest in family. "Now, when...
...history of feminism goes a long way toward answering the questions, Why this movie? At this time? Quite simply, the women who marched in the '70s are now, like Keaton, Hawn and Midler, facing 50--and the specter of being traded in for a new model, at work or at home. "Everyone I know who is hitting this age feels stimulated that they have another 30 years to live, but they have no blueprint on how to proceed," says Colette Dowling, author of Red Hot Mamas, Coming Into Our Own at 50. "This movie captures their new protest. This group...
...tell you the truth, I just don't have a clue," says Bette Midler. "But I'm so excited I couldn't care less." "Do you believe it?" asks Diane Keaton, "I just thought it was going to be a nice comedy," she says. Only Goldie Hawn asserts that while she didn't necessarily expect such success, "I totally get it." The movie, she feels, is about "that primordial thing that men feel and women innately know." And that is? The consequences of the male impulse "to just walk around and impregnate and spread their seed...
...threatening to sue. "I'll take your house," an insider remembers her threatening. Hawn stayed in but asked for changes to make the women less shrewish. "I stuck with that bone and didn't let it go," she says. Addams Family Values screenwriter Paul Rudnick polished the script. And Midler, demanding more comedy, improvised some of her sharpest lines, including her comment to her husband's lithe mistress: "My, my. The bulimia certainly has paid...