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October 04, 2005
Sincerely.
Categories: Pictures
Last night I was not in a good mood, for various reasons. I found myself flipping around the channels; I landed on AMC and The Karate Kid. I watched this movie uncoutable times during my childhood; it was one of the few we had on tape. Sure, it's a little silly now, though I found myself actaully getting a little tense during the big tournament at the end. Sweep the leg, Johnny, indeed.
What affected me more was the movie after The Karate Kid. Stand By Me started at 10:30. I was tired, so I only watched an hour of it (it was the edited version anyway), but I do love that movie.
Stand By Me, based off the Stephen King short story "The Body" is great for many reasons. It features a host of young (male) acting talent -- River Phoenix, Wil Wheaton, Kiefer Sutherland (who is damned scary in the movie), Jerry O'Connel, and John Cusak. It also has Corey Feldman, who is the ubiquitous 80's teen. Richard Dreyfus narrates and briefly appears. Great cast.
The movie is also great because it functions on mutiple levels. One one level, it's just funny, with uncountable great lines. "Chopper, sick balls." ". . . and then your mother goes around the corner and licks it up." "LARDASS! LARDASS!" It's also a very effective coming of age tale, about friendship and the loss of friendship, about what it means to be a kid. (I claim that few adult writers write children as well as Stephen King; "The Body" is the work that proves it, I think). It's also an allegory. Four boys on the verge of adolescence ditch their folks, follow some tracks, leave the tracks to founder in a swamp, then find a dead body. Is that when adulthood begins, when you confront death for the first time? The boys are never the same after that; their quartet (ka-tet, to use another King term) is broken.
I was 10 when the movie came out in theatres, so I must have been about 12 when I saw it for the first time on video. I, too, had three good friends I spend lots of summer hours with -- building forts in woods, hanging around the school playground, playing Dungeons and Dragons. We saw ourselves in those kids in the movie. There was a tough kid and an overweight kid. I, of course, was Gordy -- the smart, kinda quiet, writer kid. One thing I am not sure I realized consciously until last night was that the kid who identified most with Chris, (the River Phoenix character), is now, like Chris in the film and River Phoenix in real life, dead. I don't know why it took me ten years to make that realization.
The film ends with "I never had friends like I did when I was 12. Does anyone?" While I am not sure about that, there is something about that time. You're on the verge of something big; you know it on some level. But for the moment your friends are your world -- your summers are free, girls are not yet part of the picture, -- almost no adult pressures are put upon you. It is the last time of Youth.
Stand by Me gets that. And that's why it's a great film.
Posted by Nakia at October 4, 2005 10:43 AM