“The harder you hit me, the more I know you love me.”

This might be a movie that only gets better the older it gets. I still remember seeing it on the big screen when it first came out, like I vividly remember the stupidest details of the screening like the sound cutting out in the opening credits and my cousin refusing to sit down for practically the whole movie lol. It really made an impression on me and Alisan Porter was one of my first ever movie crushes (I was eleven … it’s kinda ok … that I still find her adorable can be discussed another time lol) It would’ve been the simple slapsticky things that got me there – the finger licking, the second car hit (“Now you really killed him!”), the singing of the national anthem – but I still remember getting severely choked up at the end (that must’ve been an emotional year for me, I just realised – My Girl was also released then).

Watching now, it’s like a whole different movie. There’s stuff in here that I’d never really noticed before, a lot about parenting and responsibility and a girl’s need for a mother no matter how good the father is. Kevin Smith certainly took a lot of cues from it when he made another favourite of mine, Jersey Girl, and I noticed immediately as the film began another thing I always forget, that it was Smith fave John Hughes’ last movie as director. It’s full of massive early-90s clichés (a triple screaming punch scene, thousands of cellphones ringing in a restaurant … “it’s mine!” ... even a shopping montage) but they all now work if anything better than they did back then. Even the Looney Tunes sound effects worked for me this time around. I don’t know, maybe I’m just biased, lol.

The other thing that I really noticed this time around is how perfectly cast either Jim Belushi or Alisan Porter is – I don’t know which was cast first, but they actually look more like father and daughter than any similar onscreen partnership I can think of (thinking of Hayley Mills after the past week’s viewing, even more than The Truth About Spring, say, where John Mills actually played her dad, lol). George Delerue’s score has some scarily immense sadness in it too, even at the joyful end. Also keep an eye out for an early appearance by Steve Carell – I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw him, lol.