Big (1988)

  This is one of those movies that is embedded in popular culture for some reason.  I never saw the fascination personally.  It's a cute movie, I'll grant you, but it's not an Oscar winner.

Nominee but not a winner.

Honestly, the fact that it was nominated for Best Actor and Best Original Screenplay just points toward a mass hallucination brought on by the 80s.

Josh is a twelve-year-old boy who makes a wish at a carnival to be "big".  The next day he wakes up and has transformed into a 30-year-old man (Tom Hanks).  He tries to go back to the carnival but it, and the magic Zoltar machine, are gone.  He goes to the city and gets a job as a data processor in a toy company while he's waiting for a request he filed with the city for the locations of all the carnivals and fairs with a Zoltar machine to come through.  His parents believe he has been kidnapped and the only person who knows the truth is his best friend Billy (Jared Rushton).  He manages to impress his boss (Robert Loggia) with his intuition of children's toy preferences and is promoted to Vice President.  He also begins dating a co-worker (Elizabeth Perkins).  Eventually, however, the six weeks are up and he finds there's a Zoltar machine nearby.  Now he just has to choose between going back to being a kid and staying an adult.

Here's my problem with this movie:  it would have been completely different if the character was a girl. No chick in her right mind would ever choose to go back through puberty, especially not if she could jump into having a Manhattan high-rise.  It would be stupid.  Think about it.  The odds are against you ever being able to get a job that good once you'd technically become eligible which means that you'd always have the memory of making more money doing less work, which would only make you bitter and resentful.  And, yeah, you could make the argument that he was missing out on all the growing-up between 12 and 30 but you'd also miss all the shitty parts.  And what about from his girlfriend's perspective?  Are we really saying that, as women, we wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a grown-ass man and a child?  Or that subconsciously we want our men to be children so we can mother them?  That's disgusting.

Now that I've completely overanalyzed that movie, I'm going to go eat chocolate and watch something else.