BIG (dvd) *NEW* Tom Hanks Oscar nominated and 12 similar items

Brand new factory sealed dvd with the back slightly bowed inward. BIG describes the adventures of Josh Baskin, who, in a brief opening sequence, is a normal, pint-sized adolescent. He has a crush on one of the girls in his class--a girl who stands a head taller than he does. I had forgotten (or repressed) my memories of those strange days in the seventh grade when all the girls suddenly become amazons, but they all came crashing back during the movie's most poignant scene. In a carnival, Josh manages to stand in line next to the girl of his dreams, and it looks like he'll be able to sit next to her on the ride--but when they get to the front of the line, the carnival guy tells him he's not tall enough to go on the ride. This is a species of humiliation beyond the limits of human endurance. As the girl gets on the ride with a taller boy, Josh wanders off, forlorn and lonely, to a remote corner of the midway where he finds a strange fortune-telling machine. He puts in a quarter, wishes he were big, and wakes up the next morning as Tom Hanks. Hanks carries most of the movie, and does it well; as a thirteen-year-old in a thirty-year-old body, he is able to suggest such subtle things as a short attention span, a disregard for social niceties, and an ability to hop, skip, and jump through an office lobby. Through a stroke of good luck, he gets hired by a toy company, where his childlike innocence soon gets him a promotion to vice president in charge of product development. He and the company president (Robert Loggia) are the only two guys in the place who really like to play with toys, and there is a brilliant comic sequence where the two of them play "Chopsticks" by dancing on a giant computerized piano keyboard (now classic). As Hanks slowly adjusts to his incredible good fortune, he attracts the attention of Elizabeth Perkins, a company exuctive who falls genuinely in love with his childlike innocence, little realizing it is real. BIG is a tender, soft-hearted, and cheerful movie, well-directed by Penny Marshall and a script that has a lot of fun with simple verbal misunderstandings (When the kid says, "What's a market research report?" Loggia nods and barks, "Exactly!"). BIG is no less than the fourth almost simultaneous variation on the same theme and so we got 'Like Father, Like Son', '18 Again', and 'Vice Versa'. In the sweepstakes of generation-gap movies, BIG is not as funny as 'Vice Versa', and Hanks does not have as much fun with physical humour as Judge Reinhold did in that movie. But both films are way ahead of the other two contenders, and this one may be the only one of the four that could really be identified with by a thirteen-year-old kid.