Day 04 – Favorite Bette Midler movie
The First Wives Club! Beaches is a very close second, but The First Wives Club was my movie back in high school. I saw this movie about 50 times before I ever even owned a copy of it. I had every word memorized, and I still know a lot of it now. Not only is it hysterically funny, it has a great cast and great music. Bette, Diane, and Goldie singing "You Don't Own Me" while reminiscing about their old friend Cynthia is one of my very favorite parts of the movie. Bette is adorable as the "fat friend", a role she always plays with relish. I seriously cannot think of one bad thing about this movie. I will always love it, no matter how cheesy it is or how dated it may be in the future. This movie is a symbol of my youth and my love of Bette. Love it!
Day 05 – A photo of Bette Midler in the year that you were born
Bette with her husband Martin at LiveAid in 1985Day 06 – Least favorite Bette Midler album
Songs For the New Depression, 1976. After a phenomenal debut album and a sophomore effort that was also fairly well-received, Bette felt incredibly pressured to make her third album up to everyone's standards. The result was, quite frankly, a disaster. "Mr. Rockefeller" is the only song that has held up well over the years, and the Bob Dylan duet "Buckets of Rain" is a take-it-or-leave-it kind of song. "Marahuana" is campily delightful, but the rest of the album sounds the same: somber and way too toned-down. Up to this point, Bette's sultry songstress had been thriving but she just tried to hard to do something different with Depression. While the album does have its moments, it's definitely not a great work, and would not be recommended by any Bette fan to a non-fan.
I have to take back some of the awful things I said about Songs For the New Depression. It is not a disaster. It's decent. Still not an album I would choose to introduce Bette to a non-fan though.
ReplyDelete"No Jestering" is good, and "Shiver Me Timbers", although the live version of that is much better.