Word: plotting
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...injury is to Andy's authorial ego, when his book turns out stinky and she writes next year's best seller. In Smith's bruised glare you can see the befuddled pain of anyone married to a blockhead with writer's block. But that's just subplot. The main plot is barely sodded: sound effects in place of wit, and rural goofuses who wouldn't dare show their faces on Newhart...
Dunne tries to dazzle with expensive brand names and superficial sociology. He deals in story threads, not plot lines. One is about revenging the murder of a young woman reminiscent of Dunne's own daughter, Actress Dominique Dunne, who was killed by her former boyfriend in 1982. A new low in exploitation...
...movie or TV show. So leave it to the folks at Disney, the Everest of High Concept, to produce a movie based on this line: "Bette Midler and Lily Tomlin as twin twins." All twists and splits of the story proceed from this inspiration; the concept propels the plot. After a merging of those stars and that theme, everything else is just homework...
...style; they may yawn at an old mirror-image routine that Midler essays, which is lifted from Silent Comedian Max Linder and the Marx Brothers' Duck Soup. But Big Business was designed as a compact car, not a classic. Once Director Jim Abrahams (Airplane!) hot-wires the mechanism, the plot takes care of itself, and the movie pretty genially takes care of any audience looking for frenetic summer fun. It's value for money to get two fish-out-of-water stories in one, especially with the planet's two most gifted performing females in the main roles...
...plot is so beguiling that the only real surprise is that no one thought of it before (though Francis Coppola's 1986 Peggy Sue Got Married was Big in reverse). Josh Baskin (David Moscow), a twelve-year-old who has just discovered girls, realizes one day that he is not big enough to get the one he wants, a sophisticate of 15 or so who, of course, likes older boys. What could be simpler than to plunk a quarter in a carnival wishing machine and ask to be, well, big? But Josh did not specify just how big, and when...