BEFORE: OK, taxes done. Not filed, but calculated, and that's the toughest part. We just have to plug the numbers into the forms on the computer tomorrow and hit "print". On with the countdown...
I did see "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids" back in the day, but this is also sort of the answer film to last night's offering. If Mad Science can shrink a housewife, it can also turn a baby into a giant. A word of warning, though - if you're looking for this film on the interweb, it's very easy to stumble upon its similarly-titled porn parody instead.
Linking from "The Incredible Shrinking Woman", Lily Tomlin was in "All of Me" with Steve Martin, who was in "My Blue Heaven" with Rick Moranis.
THE PLOT: Disaster strikes the Szalinski family when an experiment causes their new toddler son to grow many stories tall.
AFTER: The key question for me is, how much did special effects improve in the 11 years since Hollywood produced "The Incredible Shrinking Woman"? The answer is - somewhat. I think there were still scenes where they put a small child in a tiny room with scaled-down furniture to make him appear 7 feet tall, and other times where the kid was seen from behind and could have been a large man in a curly wig trying to walk like a baby. And clearly anytime the giant baby's feet were seen without moving, they were probably large phony feet. But for a lot of the shots, I think they used green-screen, with mixed results. Often characters in the same scene were lit very differently, and some of the sight-lines were way off.
Of course, it can be unpredictable making a movie with kids, and some of the conversations between Moranis' character and his toddler son seem improvised - or more accurately, Moranis picking up on whatever the kid wanted to talk about. Which is fine, the dialogue here wasn't exactly Shakespearean.
The MacGuffin here is the ubiquitous "magic ray" device, which is slightly more of a movie trope than a time machine or a bomb that removes people's clothing (trust me, kids, the 80's were a weird decade). And as with any magic, er, sorry, science-based device, there's always some kind of corporation or evil business-person trying to control the technology. In last night's film, it was John Glover, who played Lionel Luthor on "Smallville", and tonight it was John Shea, who played Lex Luthor on "Lois & Clark". Sure, it's typecasting, but those guys probably got a lot of work from it over the years.
But, what's the overall message here? You could say that the kids in "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids" were so desperate to get their parents' attention that they felt ignored, almost invisible. And last night's film could be seen as a commentary on the marginalized, almost shrunken role of the 1970's American housewife. But with a giant baby? Are kids that hard to take care of, that it feels like they take up gigantic parts of a parent's life? That's a stretch - maybe I'm overthinking it, and sometimes a giant baby is just a giant baby.
NITPICK POINT: It's tough to explain how the kid's clothing grew with him. Yeah, he was wearing it when he got hit with the ray-beam, but then he drew more power from the microwave and the TV. Somehow the kid's brain knew to direct that power at increasing the dimensions of his clothes? I mean, I don't want to see a giant naked baby either, but how does the science work here?
NITPICK POINT #2: I don't care what else is going on in your life, even if your baby brother has been turned into a giant, there are no circumstances where it's OK to tie up and gag a teenage girl. Not cool.
Also starring Marcia Strassman, Robert Oliveri, Keri Russell (last seen in "Mission: Impossible III"), Lloyd Bridges (last seen in "Joe Versus the Volcano"), with a cameo from Julia Sweeney.
RATING: 5 out of 10 Vegas casinos
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