Stand By Me

take a second to listen.
and trust me, you're going to want to watch it :

PLOT

To me, the plot of Stand By Me was pretty consistent with the going-ons in the short story, The Body. Of course there were a few added scenes (i.e. mailbox baseball with Ace's gang) and a few scenes deleted (i.e. the omission of Gordie's story Stud City), but I think overall they didn't change the story. However, I noticed one difference; one difference I believed to be a pretty big change to King's original work. The relationship between Denny and Gordie was very different. In the book, Gordie reflects upon Denny saying, "In a family situation like that, you're supposed to either hate the older brother or idolize him hopelessly-at least that's what they teach you in college psychology. Bull, right? But so far as I can tell, I didn't feel either way about Dennis" (pg 311). The book-Gordie felt like he didn't have a relationship with Denny-he cried at the funeral more for his parents than for his dead brother. The movie-Gordie was portrayed as having a really close, special bond with Denny.  There were flashback scenes and moments in the movie where Gordie thought about Denny & became very saddened; this never occurred in the book. Overall, I believe that the movie sticks to the plot pretty well, besides the Denny/Gordie relationship and the ending details (such as Vern and Teddy living, the lack of the boys getting beat up by Ace, and Ace's character).

POINT OF VIEW

In the movie and the story, there is definitely a difference of point of view. In the story, the point of view is purely Gordie's; it is entirely in first person, and we hear the story through his eyes. We know it is through his eyes by the first word on page 293 "we." Of course, this had to be altered for the movie. It would be highly boring to simply hear grown-up Gordie narrating the action and the events throughout the entire movie with a few snippets of dialogue scattered throughout. I think the movie's screenwriter and director did a great job compromising with the original story by using bits of the grown-up Gordie narrating with the actual dialogue. There are several moments throughout the movie where Gordie does narrate and fill the audience in on a few things that we are unaware of with the third-person limited point of view. I also thought the flashbacks of Denny and Gordie were a smart way to fill the audience in on Denny's personality, and the relationship between the two. In my opinion, changing the point of view was completely necessary to create an interesting movie. I believe that it made the movie stronger to show the action as older Gordie's memory of the time in his childhood by allowing him a few narrations throughout the story.

CHARACTERIZATION:

Once again, I thought the movie stayed pretty close to the original story. This was especially true regarding characterization; I still got the same sense of character and personality from the movie as I did from the story. I thought the train scene in the movie best showed the four boys' character. It showed me that Teddy was still "the dumbest guy [the boys] hung around with...and he was crazy" (pg 296); Vern was still the type of scared boy who always "ran first" (pg 418); Chris was still "the best out of [them] at making peace" (pg 435); Gordie was still "the writer" (pg 496), the storyteller of the group. I also thought that most the other characters, like Ace and his gang, the parents, the teacher who stole Chris' lunch money, stayed the same character wise. The only person whose character really differed was the grocer, George. In the story, he was a grump and a man who tried to "jap little kids" (pg 344). In the movie, he simply reflects on the type of individual Denny was, as he does in the movie, but there is no argument or swindling. I am uncertain as to why the movie would need to alter this character. Overall, I think the movie did a good job of staying true to character.

**warning: expletives**

SETTING

The setting in the movie was just how I had imagined it in my mind. The treehouse, the town, and the journey into the woods were exactly how I thought they would be. I thought the movie did a perfect job of capturing the world in the 1959 and reflecting that onto the screen. However, there was one big difference I caught. It was simply something the grown-up Gordie said, rather then something portrayed on the screen. In the movie, Castle Rock was supposed to be in the state of Oregon. In the story, Castle Rock is in "southwestern Maine" (pg 300). I really wanted to understand why the movie would be switched to this location because I didn't understand why there would be a need for the change. I looked it up online, and this website says that "Stephen King explained it in a rare interview...the screenwriter mistook the city of Portland as being in Oregon, but King meant it to be Portland, Maine. Hence the mistakes withe the states." I don't know about the reliability of this, since I could not find the interview with King. However, I found this to be a plausible reasoning. In searching for the reasoning I found another really cool website that reveals a lot about the setting of the movie, and compares it to the real Oregon town Brownsville (the town where the movie was set) today. Check It Out! Overall, I thought the movie setting added to the story. 

THEME

To me, the movie carried on the same theme about friendship as the story did. However, in the movie, Gordie didn't seem to be so torn up about friendship. In my last blog, I thought that book-Gordie contradicted himself regarding friendship. I thought this because at one point he states, "I never had any friends like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, did you?" (pg 341), and then he later says, "Friends come in and out of our life like busboys in a restaurant, did you ever notice that?" (pg 432). Yet, I got a different vibe from the movie. The grown-up Gordie reflects upon his friends and his relationships with them as special gifts and special moments in his life. His portrayal of his friendships is much more poignant than anything. I think moments, such as the boys singing songs on the journey, show the closeness of the friendships reflected in the movie. In the movie, the boys were all very, very close; this was easy to tell because of their easygoing attitudes, their joking interactions, and their unguarded behavior. For me, the moment I realized the importance of these friendships to grown-up Gordie was when his son and son's friend interrupted his writing at the end. Gordie's reaction to this showed me that he realizes how special young friendships are; through the window at the end, the focus on his son and son's friend clarify Gordie's beliefs about friendship. Although I thought that the movie slightly altered King's original theme of friendship to make it more emotionally touching, I believe that the movie's theme was pretty on track with the story's as well.