- published: 16 Nov 2013
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Big is a 1988 romantic comedy film directed by Penny Marshall and stars Tom Hanks as Josh Baskin, a young boy who makes a wish "to be big" to a magical wishing machine and is then aged to adulthood overnight. The film also stars Elizabeth Perkins, and Robert Loggia and was written by Gary Ross and Anne Spielberg.
Big was the latest, and most successful, of a series of age-changing comedies produced in the late 1980s; the others being: Like Father Like Son (1987), 18 Again! (1988), Vice Versa (1988), the Italian film Da grande (1987).
After being told he is too short for a carnival ride while attempting to impress an older girl (Kimberlee M. Davis), 12-year-old Josh Baskin (David Moscow) from Cliffside Park, New Jersey goes to a wishing machine called Zoltar Speaks, and wishes that he was "big." His wish is granted, but he finds out that the machine is unplugged, and backs away. By the next morning he is shocked to discover that he has been transformed into a 30-year-old man (Tom Hanks), and when he goes back to the wishing machine he finds that the carnival has already left. Fleeing from his mother (Mercedes Ruehl), who thinks he is a strange man who has kidnapped her son, Josh then finds his best friend, Billy Kopecki (Jared Rushton), at the school they both attend; Billy is shocked at first, but Josh convinces him of his identity by singing a secret song that only the two of them know. With Billy's help, he learns that it would take a couple of months to find the Zoltar Speaks machine, so Josh rents a flophouse room in New York City and gets a data entry job at MacMillan Toy Company.
A gun is a muzzle or breech-loaded projectile-firing weapon. There are various definitions depending on the nation and branch of service. A "gun" may be distinguished from other firearms in being a crew-served weapon such as a howitzer or mortar, as opposed to a small arm like a rifle or pistol, but there are exceptions, such as the U.S. Air Force's GUU5/P. At one time, land-based artillery tubes were called cannon and sea-based naval cannon were called guns. The term "gun" evolved into a generic term for any tube-launched projectile-firing weapon used by sailors, including boarding parties and marines.
In modern parlance, a gun is a projectile weapon using a hollow, tubular barrel with a closed end — the breech — as the means of directing the projectile (as well as other purposes, for example stabilizing the projectile's trajectory, aiming, as an expansion chamber for propellant, etc.), and firing in a generally flat trajectory.
The term "gun" has also taken on a more generic meaning, by which it has come to refer to any one of a number of trigger-initiated, hand-held, and hand-directed implements, especially with an extending bore, which thereby resemble the class of weapon in either form or concept. Examples of this usage include staple gun, nail gun, glue gun, grease gun. Occasionally, this tendency is ironically reversed, such as the case of the American M3 submachine gun which carries the nickname "Grease Gun".