Something to watch tonight: Thursday 4 July

Big (Marshall, 1988)

Watching TV and movies in this house is – as you might expect – like a military exercise.

Combinations of spreadsheets, Google docs, various shared calendars, apps like JustWatch and Letterboxd – they all contribute to the well-oiled machine that is Funerals & Snakes.

But last Friday night presented us with a challenge.

I was hosting a couple of young guests, waiting for my wife to fly home from Australia. The initial viewing request was for “something not depressing”. That was easy. I have a 4K UHD disc of the least depressing film in history, Paddington 2.

Job done, I think, but then the text arrives about the delayed flight from Sydney. Lawks, I might have to busk something! How to keep these young folk* entertained and amused for an extra couple of hours?

This is where a subscription to Disney+ pays for itself. That back catalogue is so extensive, and such high quality, that there should always be something to keep all generations amused. A quick scroll through the “Movies” tab – bypass the brands – and you cannot fail.

I came across Penny Marshall’s Big – in the Disney collection because they now own the Fox catalogue – and asked whether my companions had ever seen it. The answer was in the negative – why would they? – so we fired up one of the most satisfying comedies of the 80s.

It’s a body swap movie, which was a popular genre then and still is. David Moscow plays Josh Baskin, an ordinary New Jersey 13-year-old, waiting for the growth spurt that will allow him to take the big rides at the fair. Frustrated, he uses his last quarter to make a wish with a mysterious mechanical fortune teller called Zoltar.

Zoltar grants Josh’s wish to be “big” and the next morning he wakes up as Tom Hanks - baby Tom Hanks, though. Fresh-faced and on the verge of super stardom and two Oscars.

While trying to find Zoltar (not trying all that hard, to be honest) and reverse the spell, Josh hides out in Manhattan and becomes a toy industry guru and catnip for fellow executive Elizabeth Perkins, who has grown tired of the yuppie, ambitious, dog-eat-dog guys that inhabit the corporate world.

Aware of – often revelling in – its own weirdness, but always trusting in the effervescence of its star, Big remains a winner to this day.

Incidentally, the script for Big was originally attached to Robert De Niro and would have had a very different vibe indeed – a weirdly Taxi Driver-esque experience of Manhattan’s dark side through the eyes of a child. Intrigued as I am by that idea, I am so glad that Hanks’ charm and chops are what we remember from Big.

*“Young folk” is relative, obviously. Anyone under 30 is ‘young folk’ to me.

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Where to watch Big

Aotearoa, Australia, Canada, Ireland and UK: Streaming on Disney+

USA: Streaming on Disney+ or Hulu