Big

I will be writing the last few Tom Hanks related entries. I'd probably still write about his moviews here and there, but I'd probably be writing a couple more entries just to wrap up Tom Hanks week at mrfilmreviewer.blogspot.com. I intended to write a lot more but with work I wasn't able to do so. I apologize for that, but hopefully what I've done did Tom Hanks week justice.

Apparently, a person transforming into an older/younger verion of him/herself has been a trend for a while now. While the present generation had 17 Again with Zac Efron and 13 Going 30 with Jennifer Garner, several age-changing movies were released in the 1980s like 18 Again (yes there's a movie called 18 Again which makes me wonder if 17 Again was meant to be related to this one), Like Father Like Son, Vice Versa and so on. One that was released in 1988, which also turned out to be one of the more successful ones, was Big.

Big was directed by Penny Marshall, and was written by Gary Ross, the director of The Hunger Games, and Anne Spielberg, sister of Steven Spielberg. It starred Tom Hanks, Elizabeth Perkins, Jared Rushton, Robert Loggia, John Heard, and David Moscow as the young Josh Baskins. Out of everyone, aside from Tom Hanks, who got an Academy Award nomination for his performance, Jared Rushton was the star of the movie. I just found out that he's also the kid from "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids," which I absolutely enjoyed when I saw it a long time ago. He was great in Big, and it's a shame he stopped acting. Robert Loggia was another awesome person in the movie. He wasn't shown a lot, but his scene with Tom Hanks playing the keyboard was probably one of the most memorable moments of the movie.

As a movie, I couldn't help but just smile throughout the movie. It's lively and funny, and entertaining the whole time. Again, probably because it's from another era, it's a different kind of comedy. Turns out Tom Hanks was quite the comedy actor in the 80s. Maybe his roles in Philadelphia and Forrest Gump put him in the drama category, but it's enlightening to know he could do comedy quite as impressive as his drama movies. I'll try to look for a recent Tom Hanks comedy movie just to see how that will work. With the minds of Gary Ross and a Spielberg on the works, it should not be surprising they came up with such an incredibly smooth movie.

This is a movie for the kids, and the kids at heart. I greatly enjoyed the experience and found the movie a very entertaining old movie. If you want to see the range of Tom Hanks as an actor, you probably might want to see this one as I think this was very different from his normal roles. Good scrpit, good directing, good cinematography.