"Honey, I Shrunk the Iron Curtain!"

It may seem an odd choice for a personal classic, but you need to bear in mind under what circumstances this writer had first encountered Joe Johnston's less-than-pint-sized family adventure flick, "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids." The year was 1990, the Berlin Wall has just fallen, and the eight-year-old me was eager to lay his mitts onto any chunk of Hollywood fun that wandered into the emaciated landscape of post-Communist Poland. At the time, me and my friends would inhale anything that smacked of American affluence and unbridled pop energy. Most of us didn't own a pair of jeans, but we still craved movies showing people casually sipping Coke and having pizza slices when they pleased. (Hence the "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" craze, among others.)

With "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids", our latent commodity fetishism could go on a rampage - as the eponymous kids got smaller, everything around them (lawnmowers, Lego pieces, cookies) grew larger. In a strange way, the film's main plot device mirrored our own way of looking at the imagined joys of consumer society, which seemed bigger, brighter and more exciting than the one we knew first-hand. To give you an idea of how different a world I'm talking: it wasn't uncommon for Polish people to collect empty soda cans and display them as a decorative trophy in their living rooms, and when I happened to receive a Milky Way bar from a German aunt, my dad advised me not to eat it in front of other kids, so as not to make them sad.

Johnston's movie tells the story of a nutty professor's chance scientific breakthrough, resulting in shrinking both his and his neighbor's kids into quarter-of-an-inch walking specks. When the father unwittingly throws the kids away with the garbage, they have to cross the (vastly expanded) backyard in order to get back home. Their dangerous trek includes a number of adventures, most of which don't wander too far off "The Incredible Shrinking Man" (1957) territory, with giant ants, bees and scorpions lurking form every corner to first give and then take a beating.

Deep down, it's a story of children craving their parents' attention, and it's no accident that the two most traumatic scenes include the father dumping his offspring in a trashcan, as well as almost slurping up his son with a spoonful of Cheerios. Rick Moranis, playing the dad with his signature mix of bug-eyed mania and childlike wonder, is cast perfectly: in a way, the kids seem more mature than him from the word go. It's not until he patches things up with his wife that the family can reunite - as well as bury the hatchet with the next door neighbors (who are having some familial issues all their own).