THINK BIG
Your February 2006 Random Movie Club Results Are In!TAGLINE: All they had was strength, determination, and a lucky chicken bone. Brains aren't everything.
The Preshow Entertainment was SYLVESTER AND TWEETY cartoons. We weren't really interested, so we talked for 40 minutes as they played. I was never a big S & T fan, and I guess I'm still not.
The movie selected was yet again a film unavailable on DVD. Then again, it's not like Criterion is chomping at the bit to do a makeover on it. Barely released in 1990, we're talking THINK BIG. Where do I begin?
I'll start with the cast and just maybe you'll get the idea. The leads are David Paul and Peter Paul, a/k/a The Barbarian Brothers (twin wrestlers in the 1980s), TV's Ari Meyers (KATE AND ALLIE), TV's Peter Lupus (MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE), TV's Claudia Christian (BABYLON 5), TV's Richard Moll (NIGHT COURT), Richard Kiel ("Jaws" in two James Bond movies, and head honcho Kanamit in the famous TWILIGHT ZONE episode "To Serve Man"), Martin Mull (an ARISTOCRAT!), Michael Winslow (of POLICE ACADEMY funny noise guy fame), and David Carradine (who when making THINK BIG must have muttered under his breath "Kill me, vol. 1").
It's a D-List bad, bad, bad, bad world as Martin Mull tries to sell an invention created by teen genius Holly Sherwood (Ari Meyers)- a remote control that can make anything electric go off or on by pressing a series of numbers (that somehow the user always knows, even when they've never used it) to bad guys, (proving it works by stopping the pacemaker of the Secretary of State)...but the device doesn't work, so the bad guys Mull it over and give him 2 days to make it work...meanwhile, truckers/lovable morons Victor and Rafe (The Barbarian Brothers) only have one payment left before they own their truck, but repo man ("...and David Carradine as 'Sweeney' ") wants it now because their last payment is late, however he gives them 2 days to make the payment anyway. So...
The pumped-up-'80s-torn-shirt-wearing-Macy's- Thanksgiving Day-balloon-looking -trucker brothers decide to take the job of transporting toxic waste from Billings, Montana to San Pedro, California, and they have, yep, 2 days to do it (in case we forgot, their boss Thornton, a hair-wearing Richard Moll, put an actual countdown clock on the truck's dash).
In the '80s/early '90s, I used to meet with friends every Friday evening and see a movie in Times Square that started at midnight. One night, after seeing TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES, four of us went to the Cine 1 and 2, which was a 24 hour theater (no, not one of those, though I bet it was in the '70s). At 2:30am, we watched HARD TO KILL. Afterwards, at 4am-ish, we went into the other auditorium and saw THINK BIG. We were captivated. Just watching the names in the titles was getting us excited. We giggled like schoolgirls as we watched the movie among the sleeping homeless men who used the theater as a place to spend the night (for $6).
Off story: At 6am, we went back to one of our apartments to watch THUNDERBALL, PENN & TELLER'S INVISIBLE THREAD, and some SUPERMAN cartoons. Then back to Times Square at noon for the double feature of TRANSYLVANIA TWIST (Robert Vaughn) and NIGHT GAME (Roy Scheider), food at B-B-Q, a nap, then back to Times Square for a 10pm show of THE FORBIDDEN DANCE and then across the street to the midnight show of LAMBADA. Life was so perfect back then. And I used shorter sentences, too.
Anyway, back to THINK BIG. It's not a good movie, but I can't say it's a bad movie either. I mean, if you're looking for a harmless, sometimes even charming movie as big and dumb as its leads, this is for you. The jokes are pretty lame, although we did enjoy when one of the brothers (doesn't matter which) and henchman Irving (giant Richard Kiel) are holding crowbars, ready to fight. They swing, hitting each other's crowbars. The brother says, "Let's not do that again!" and Richard Kiel says, "Yeah. That really hurt." So they drop their crowbars and fight. Act now and you also get a fight in an airport which no one in the airport seems to notice, words on the computer screens too small for us to read, a theme song written and performed by The Barbarian Brothers, and the chant the brothers do to start their truck:
Rabbit rabbit treat 'em good
Lucky lucky knock on wood
Yogi Berra, Tug McGraw
Start 'er up, kumbaya!!!
The feature debut of director Jon Turtletaub (he did the wonderful DISNEY'S THE KID and now doing the I'm-gonna-guess not so wonderful NATIONAL TREASURE 2), and written by (get this) five writers, THINK BIG is a stupid little movie that's fun to watch with a bunch of people in the room. Sadly, we were shy about 10 people.
Tags: random movie club, think big, the barbarian brothers, sylvester & tweety
