Big (1988)

This review is sponsored by

BUY IT

General		Extras
Category	Comedy	Theatrical Trailer
Rating
Year Of Production	1988
Running Time	99:43 (Case: 104)
RSDL / Flipper	No/No	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Menu
Region Coding	2,4	Directed By	Penny Marshall
Studio Distributor	Twentieth Century Fox	Starring	Tom Hanks Elizabeth Perkins Robert Loggia John Heard
Case	Amaray-Transparent
RPI	$36.95	Music	Howard Shore

Video		Audio
Pan & Scan/Full Frame	None	English Dolby Digital 2.0 (192Kb/s)
Widescreen Aspect Ratio	1.85:1
16x9 Enhancement
Video Format	576i (PAL)
Original Aspect Ratio	1.85:1	Miscellaneous
Jacket Pictures	No
Subtitles	Czech Danish English English for the Hearing Impaired Finnish Hebrew Hungarian Icelandic Norwegian Polish Portuguese Swedish	Smoking	Yes
		Annoying Product Placement	Yes, extremely so and frequently
		Action In or After Credits	Yes, at the very start

    Josh Baskin (David Moscow) is 13, but desperately wants to be BIG. Cue carnival with sinister slot machine. Josh makes a wish on the Zoltar machine...and his wish is granted. The next morning, he wakes up BIG - as a 30-year-old adult (Tom Hanks). As you can anticipate, this causes quite a stir in the Baskin household, and Josh is forced to take flight to the big smoke until he and his best friend, Billy (Jared Rushton) can track down the Zoltar machine and reverse Josh's wish. The only problem is that it is going to take at least 6 weeks to get a list of places where the Zoltar machine could be. Josh is forced to find a job in order to support himself. He scores a job as a computer operator for MacMillan Toys.

    One thing leads to another, and Josh attracts the eye of the boss (Robert Loggia), who quickly promotes him to a position of great responsibility, evaluating toys. This also attracts Susan (Elizabeth Perkins) to Josh. But what of his old life? Will Josh want to return to it now that he has experienced life as an adult?

    The story is simple. The story components have been seen before and will be seen again. What makes Big so special is the subtleties of Tom Hanks' performance as a boy trapped inside a man's body. The way in which Tom plays this role is so convincing that repeat viewings are mandatory just to enjoy the numerous subtleties and nuances of his performance. You truly, honestly, believe that a 13-year-old boy has been transformed into a 30-year-old man when you are watching Tom Hanks on-screen.

Video

    The transfer is presented in an aspect ratio of 1.85:1 and is 16x9 enhanced. I have previously only seen this movie Full Frame, so it was interesting to note the noticeable loss of image in the composition of a specific shot of Tom Hanks wearing a T-shirt with writing on it. This scene is pretty much the only example I have ever seen where I can say that the Full Frame scene composition is superior to the widescreen scene composition. I hasten to add that the widescreen composition of the remainder of the movie was much more satisfying and theatrical than the previous Full Frame versions that I have viewed.

    In general, there is plenty of fine detail on offer here, both in the foreground and in the background of images. A few scattered shots here and there are softly-focussed, no doubt deliberately. Shadow detail is acceptable without being great in the few dark scenes in this movie. There is no low level noise.

    The colours were highly saturated and vivid without ever descending into colour bleed or oversaturation. The overall colour scheme is very rich indeed, and so the lack of colour bleed is appreciated. Of particular note is the cocktail party scenes from around the 46 minute mark onwards. Highly saturated reds are prominent in this sequence, and this sequence is free of the chroma noise and the colour bleed that have plagued every other medium that I have viewed this movie on.

    There were no MPEG artefacts seen. Aliasing was trivial, with the only scene showing any aliasing worth mentioning being the fairground scene near the start of the movie, where the bridge in the background shimmers slightly. There is some occasional image wobble which presumably is inherent in the source material, such as at the 31 minute mark in close-up shots of Tom Hanks and at 65:43. There is a slight skip in the video stream at 94:56, as if a single frame has been dropped at this point. Film artefacts, whilst more plentiful than in contemporary titles, are generally well-controlled and minimally intrusive. Grain is a minor problem at times for this transfer, with some of the white walls within MacMillan toys showing some slight grain. Fortunately, the massive amounts of grain in the 20th Century Fox logo that opens the movie disappears as soon as the movie itself starts.

Video Ratings Summary

Sharpness
Shadow Detail
Colour
Grain/Pixelization
Film-To-Video Artefacts
Film Artefacts
Overall

Audio

    The dialogue was clear and easy to understand at all times. There was a slight hiss noted in the dialogue at around the 42 minute mark. Audio sync was marginally out throughout the transfer. Not by much, mind you, but enough for me to just notice it as being ever-so-slightly behind the image. I checked the audio sync on the NTSC laserdisc version of Big, and found the laserdisc also to be ever-so-slightly out of sync, so this appears to be inherent in the source material.

    The score by Howard Shore is excellent, always setting the appropriate mood for the scene and never becoming overly sentimental or syrupy, which would have been all-too-easy to do given the subject material of this movie.

    The surround channel had limited and uneven use. The fairground scene at the beginning of the movie was nicely immersive, but most of the dialogue-only scenes were front-and-centre only. The music was generally mixed in stereo, with a little ambience contributed by the surrounds. Not reference material by any stretch of the imagination, but also not completely silent.

    The subwoofer was occasionally called into action. When it was, it tended to be used quite heavily, to the point of excess, such as the excessively bass-heavy rendering of Hot In The City.

Audio Ratings Summary

Dialogue
Audio Sync
Clicks/Pops/Dropouts
Surround Channel Use
Subwoofer
Overall

Menu (16x9 enhanced)

Theatrical Trailer

    There is censorship information available for this title. Click here to read it (a new window will open). WARNING: Often these entries contain MAJOR plot spoilers.

• 10 seconds of footage

• 16x9 enhancement

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall