Word: comical
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Hollywood loves a gimmick -- and too often loves it to death. One year there are three movies about gallant farm women battling fate and fortune; the next it's comic-book heroes saving the world or muscle-bound hulks trying to write a different ending to the war in Viet Nam. This year's flavor is a gentle fantasy about body switching: the young and old changing places with supposedly comic results. But 18 Again!, Vice Versa and Like Father, Like Son were more frantic than comic, and it remains for Big, the last out of the gate, to show...
None of the films that followed Splash -- Bachelor Party, Volunteers, The Money Pit, Nothing in Common and Dragnet -- attracted quite the attention that his first hit had. Big will almost certainly bring the spotlight back, and his next two pictures, Punchline, the story of a stand-up comic, and The 'Burbs, a dark comedy about a suburbanite's fixation on his weird neighbors, may even raise Hanks' asking price, which is now something more than $1 million a picture...
CINEMA: A beguiling comic fantasy may become one of the summer' s biggest hits...
...momentary alliance with some Japanese tourists who prove to be funnily adept at karate; a friendship with a black man determined to project a menacing image, though he is actually a peaceable stationery salesman. But the film's many narrative obligations keep interrupting the consistent development of a lively comic-adventure pace and tone. John Cornell makes a diffident first-time director, unable to punch up a scene or a performance -- especially Hogan's. And Hogan is so determined to underplay his role that you sometimes have trouble hearing...
...such brashness was shocking. It was also courageous. Toward the end of his life, when Capote had become a talk-show Scheherazade, his high voice and bizarre costumes were no more than comic effects that served to keep Middle America awake till the next commercial. But at the beginning of his career, it took nerve to fly his unpopular flag...