Big (1988)

Director: Penny Marshall

Cast: Tom Hanks, Elizabeth Perkins, Robert Loggia, John Heard

Have I Seen it Before: If I had to rank the top 10 VHS tapes played in my house in the years before DVD broadened all of our cinematic horizons, I’m reasonably sure this one would make the list.

Did I Like It: It’s a charmed comedy that can play just as well when I was kid than when I was middle-aged adult. The thrill of the fantasy of waking up one morning and all of the restrictions of childhood are gone might have terrified some, but it thrilled me. I was the opposite of Peter Pan, and so any world where my life had to suddenly halt in favor of a supposedly immediate need to take out the trash, or—God forbid—a world where I could be grounded was an enticing one indeed.

Now, the thought of living a world where room and board are a foregone conclusion, where a pittance of a paycheck can suddenly become a fortune, and all the communication you need with the outside world is a walkie talkie and somebody with a corresponding handset just next door does have a certain simplicity to it.

Is that the secret to the film’s longjevity? Probably, it’s hard to discount the profound well-cast Hanks in the title role. Legend has it that Robert De Niro was set to play Josh Baskin, but backed out at the last moment. That’s a pretty great endorsement for De Niro’s sense of what ought to work and what has no right working whatsoever. While David Moscow—the young Josh—might be just a hair more believable as an outer-borough kid that will eventually become De Niro, there are few—if any—actors at that point in time who would have been better suited than Hanks to play a twelve-year-old trapped in the body of an adult.

The Flintstones (1994)

Director: Brian Levant

Cast: John Goodman, Rick Moranis, Elizabeth Perkins, Rosie O’Donnell

Have I Seen It Before?: I think so? I have some degree of memory that Halle Berry was in the film, but the rest of it is hazy. I actually have far stronger memories of commercials embedded in my VHS recording of the Star Trek: The Next Generation series finale than I do of the film itself.

Did I like it?: Early on, I became a little concerned that I may actually like the movie. The creature work is sublime, bordering on actually bringing the improbable location of Bedrock to something resembling life. Dean Cundey as DP is always the thing a 90s movie needs. Whatever happened to him? Rick Moranis is pretty well cast, and he doesn’t appear in movies at all anymore, so it’s worth relishing the time we do have with him. John Goodman is a delight, because he is himself a delight. Here, he is indentured to the movie simply because he kind of looks like Fred Flintstone, and is relegated to doing a 90 minute long impression of Jackie Gleason, but that is hardly his fault. This is a movie based on a TV show that itself was a shameless rip off of The Honeymooners.

And so one is tempted to give the film a pass. This has got to be the best possible version of a movie based on The Flintstones possible. If they had to make a movie based on the material (and one supposes that they did), things could have gone far worse. Right? I would have thought the same thing, too, but then I read the recent comic book series featuring the characters. It was subversive and satirical, whereas the writing on display here (legend has it that the script was forged by a never-ending army of screenwriters) doesn’t elevate beyond the blandest sitcoms of the era. This movie could have reached for that level, but if there is one thing that Batman Returns (1992) taught us, it’s that subversive doesn’t sell Happy Meals.

But then one sees what I imagine is a Loch Ness Monster swimming around Bedrock lake, or half the scenes involving Dino, and realize that there may not be a pixel of CGI that has a shelf life of anything longer than fifteen minutes. Ever time I saw one of these polygonal monstrosities, I winced, and I winced far more than I did for any other part of the film. If the movie had only been Henson puppets, I just might have given it that pass for which it was reaching.