JACK (13)

Directed by: Francis Coppola

Starring: Robin Williams, Diane Lane, Brian Kerwin, Bill Cosby

The Pitch: A boy is born with a (very!) rare disease accelerating his growth process, so that he looks 40 when he's only 10.

Theo Sez: Reasonably well-made, though maybe it just seems that way out of a kind of vestigial respect for Coppola (you don't mock a favourite uncle, even when it's clear he's become senile) ; but, short of a darkly lyrical ELEPHANT MAN approach (some hope!), it's hard to see how a good movie could've come out of this terminally maudlin, rather creepy premise. The nauseatingly sentimental view of childhood ("he's the perfect grown-up - 'cause on the inside he's just a kid") isn't really a surprise, but you have to wonder at the kind of warped minds for whom kids at play are synonymous with farting contests and eating gross concoctions (why are so many children's movies so scatological? is it that screenwriters - a pretty anal-retentive crowd, in my experience - went through very strict toilet-training as infants and invariably associate childhood with bodily functions? or is it that they actually have no idea what kids are like, because when they were children they never had any friends but were always in their private little worlds, which is how they became screenwriters in the first place?). A dumb, doomed movie that's barely worth talking about ; oh, and Williams's fidgety, gotta-go-to-the-bathroom-now impersonation of a 10-year-old is light-years behind Tom Hanks in BIG.