FEATURE: A Stephen King Halloween!...Stand By Me

5. Stand By Me

(Rob Reiner, 1986)

"Maybe you'll even write about us guys if you ever get hard-up for material." 

"Have to be pretty fuckin hard up."  I gave him the elbow.  There was another period of silence, and then he asked suddenly, "You ready for school?"

The Long and Short of It

Gordie LaChance (Richard Dreyfuss) just learned that a childhood friend died.  While visiting his hometown, he reflects on his youth.  The friends he made, the adventures he had, and the challenges he faced.

Adaptation Decay

Improvement.  Stephen King's novella (published in the same collection as Apt Pupil and Shawshank) was a story about the simple struggles of growing up, but he modulated that with some frightening dream sequences and a more melancholic attitude.  The film retains that spirit but cuts out an aggravating story-within-the-story, a piece of debris called "Stud City" that derails the momentum.  It reads like King re-discovered an old manuscript, said "Fuck it," and shoved it in.  However, the film keeps "The Revenge of Lard-ass Hogan," which is equally meaningless in the larger scale of the story, but much more fun and more indicative of a preteen boy's attitude: the awfulness of adults, and the beauty of a really good barf.  Minor adjustments include Castle Rock getting relocated to Oregon, and the title changing from The Body to Stand By Me.  Reiner keeps everything else intact, most importantly the train imagery.  The kids keep dodging it, but, like adulthood, it looms, both slow and implacable.

Forget All That - How's the Movie?

Quietly wonderful.  Rob Reiner makes a film about children that doesn't feel condescending.  The key?  Letting them talk as King wrote them: the way preteen boys actually talk.  They try swearing, they digress into tangents, they mix childhood interests with pubescent curiosities - they notice that Annette on The Mickey Mouse Club is really filling out her shirt these days.  The four boys are beautifully acted by River Pheonix, Wil Wheaton, Corey Feldman, and Jerry O'Connell.  They fully inhabit their characters.  While the story leads to a stand-off with bully Ace Merrill (Kiefer Sutherland), the journey is the point.  The four boys walk along the tracks, get into fights, dream big, and pick each other up after they fall.  The film reminds me of days spent biking with friends, in a little town called Carroll, from one edge of town to the other, down gravel paths and along back alleys, until we got home as the sun set and as the fireflies began to play.  Those were days when life was so full and invigorating that our inability to realize so was a mercy.

Alright, but Is It a Good Halloween Movie?

Nothing to see here, move along.

Kingwatch 2012

As mentioned above, the kids' hometown of Castle Rock was moved to Oregon, which takes away any  associations with other Castle Rock stories.  The closest reference to King or King's other works is that the main character is a writer, and King's hinted in interviews past that this is one of his more autobiographical stories.  Of course, all stories are autobiographical in some ways...

But You Know What Sucks?

5. Dreamcatcher

(Lawrence Kasdan, 2003)

King wrote Dreamcatcher after a car hit and nearly killed him in 1999.  It was great therapy for him, but the novel lingered so much on suffering that he wanted to title it Cancer.  The movie is true to the book in terms of incident, but with less room to build, the whole thing just feels goofy.  The first time I saw Dreamcatcher, I deluded myself into liking it, on account of the remarkable talent involved.  Jason Lee, Timothy Olyphant, Damian Lewis, and Thomas Jane as the heroes?  Lawrence Kasdan supervising?  How can you lose?  By ending the first act with one hero getting his face chomped off by an alien "shit-weasel" that just jumped out of a toilet.  The sheer volume of incident in Dreamcatcher is a big problem (a helicopter/rifle face-off is both ridiculous and weightless), but the biggest problem is how abruptly the flick switches from drama into sci-fi weirdness.  A flashback reminiscent of Stand By Me ends with a mentally challenged kid gifting the four heroes with psychic powers.  Oh, and the mentally challenged kid is really an alien sleeper agent, deep undercover.  Go home, movie.  You're drunk.

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A Stephen King Halloween

01. ?
02. ?
03. ?
04. ?
05. Stand By Me / Dreamcatcher
06. The Dead Zone / The Mangler
07. Misery / Sometimes They Come Back
08. The Mist / Firestarter
09. "Battleground" / Creepshow 2
10. Creepshow / "The Road Virus Heads North"
11. Dolores Claiborne / The Tommyknockers (TV)
12. The Stand (TV) / Maximum Overdrive
13. 1408 / The Lawnmower Man
14. Christine / Silver Bullet
15. Cat's Eye / Thinner
HM. Hearts in Atlantis / The Shining (TV)