STAND BY ME (1986)

STAND BY ME (1986)

Tagline : For some, it's the last real taste of innocence, and the first real taste of life. But for everyone, it's the time that memories are made of.

(Drama, Adventure) [R] 

Do you think Mighty Mouse could beat up Superman?

This one takes place in the summer of 1959 in Castle Rock, Oregon. We meet Gordie (played by Wil Wheaton), Chris (played by River Phoenix), Teddy (played by Corey Feldman) and Vern (played by Jerry O’ Connell), who decide it’s a great idea to go look for the body of one of their peers. Vern overheard some older kids talking about it in secret. While they didn’t kill the kid, he’d been missing for days and they were not going to be the ones to say where the boy was found. Chris however, believes if they find the boy first they will be the talk of the small down and end up on TV. The area they have to go to is about a 2-day walk, so there is just a lot of damn walking in this movie. 

The great things about this movie I want to get to first. One of the characters named Ace is played by Kiefer Sutherland. He does a fantastic job in this thing being a jerk. I kind of wonder if he got picked to play another jerk in THE LOST BOYS because he was so good at it in this movie. For the record, Sutherland is just an amazing actor. He’s great at playing good guys as well. In fact, I would venture to say that all of the performances in this movie are amazing. As a coming of age movie this thing is decent, but I was more intrigued by the beautiful setting and soundtrack than the actual dialog. 

Sadly, when we get to the bones of this thing, there just isn’t much meat there. This is 89 minutes of almost nothing happening. I’m not kidding, nothing really happens in this movie. The script could have just been thrown out and they could have had ANY 4 boys at that time, walk for a few days and have a random conversation, and we would have gotten a more interesting movie. I know this is a classic or whatever, but it’s just blah. Like I said above the performances are great, but the actors are not given much to work with. It also reminded me a LOT of The Wonder Years TV show which may have been at least in part inspired by STAND BY ME’s narrative style storytelling. Having said that, the first 2 episodes of The Wonder Years I found more intriguing than this movie. On top of all this, parts of the ending were a downer. 

I don’t hate this movie by any means, (I own it) but for me it just falls flat and doesn’t live up to the praise it gets. The movie is kind of a snap shot of childhood that could have been told in a paragraph or by any parent with a camera. It’s one of the few movies that has maybe more walking than the LORD OF THE RINGS. For me this is a 3 out of 7. 

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