Creative Loafing
Latest MST3K set, MGM classics among new home entertainment titles
Published 05.17.11
By Matt Brunson
BIG BUSINESS (1988) / MY FATHER THE HERO (1994). For approximately a 10-year span from the mid-1980s through the mid-1990s, Disney’s live-action arms produced an astonishing number of films, so many that the impression was given that the cash flow was allowing even the studio errand boys to light their cigars with one-dollar bills. Some of these films prospered (Three Men and a Baby), most flopped (V.I. Warshowski), and a few barely saw the light of day (Patrick Swayze’s Father Hood, anyone?). Disney has now licensed many of these films to Mill Creek Entertainment, which has just released about a dozen of them on Blu-ray. The offerings include Dolly Parton‘s Straight Talk and Tom Selleck’s An Innocent Man, but for my money, the best of the bunch are Big Business and My Father the Hero.
The underrated farce Big Business is catnip to anyone who’s a sucker for mistaken-identity plots (like, uh, me), as two sets of twins – one urban, one rural – are mismatched at birth, leading to complications when all four females end up in New York City decades later. Bette Midler and Lily Tomlin are terrific as they each tackle two distinct parts, while director Jim Abrahams (who had previously worked with Midler on their hit Ruthless People) adopts the right pace to complement the clever screenplay.
