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A movie and book review blog

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May 29, 2022

We were all twelve once. If we had regular childhoods, I did, we know there is nothing like those endless childhood summers with our friends-in-arms. That pit in the stomach sense of nostalgia of things we lost as grownups is captured in the heart-tugging lines from Stand By Me - "I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone?"

I often make the mistake of forgetting how amazing a writer Stephen King is. He is so mainstream with his paperbacks overpopulating airport kiosks, that one falls into the trap of underestimating King's story telling abilities. Stand By Me is one of the novellas (The Body) from Stephen King's book Different Seasons. The director Rob Reiner said that this was the one movie among all his movies, that he connected with the most. Makes sense, the movie is set in late 50s and Rob Reiner was a 12 year old in 1959, just like the four protagonists in the movie.



The story follows the events of a couple of nights - Labor Day weekend 1959, in the lives of four 12 year olds in a small town in Oregon called Castle Rock (Rob Reiner named his movie production house Castle Rock later.) In the picture above from L to R they are - Gordie Lachance played by Wil Wheaton, River Phoenix as Chris Chambers, Vern Tessio essayed by Jerry O'Connell and Corey Feldman as Teddy Duchamp. 

The Sixties was around the corner. Kids stayed out late till the sun went down, rode without seatbelts and on truck-beds of strangers' trucks and a penny had more value than what it cost to produce a penny. It was the search for some buried and lost pennies that led one of the characters, Vern to gather his friends and go on a quest to recover a dead body.

The four kids go into the woods armed with the innocence and invincibility of childhood and emerge out of it robed off those powers. Although all of the four actors live their roles, the one that made the most impression on me is the late actor River Phoenix. His sensibility, commitment and passion shines through his portrayal of Chris Chambers - the intelligent and sensitive roughneck who wants a break from his family's ill reputation. 

Whenever I watch this movie it brings tears to my eyes not just because of the nature of the story, but it also reminds me what a big loss to the movie industry (and probably to humanity as well) River Phoenix's death was. I wrap this up with a quote by another one of the actors we lost young, here is Brandon Lee in his final interview, quoting Paul Bowles' The Sheltering Sky, this quote is also Brandon's tombstone. 



"Because we don’t know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. And yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really… How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless..."


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