Stand By Me

Stand By Me (1986) dir. Rob Reiner
Starring: Will Wheaton, River Phoenix, Corey Feldman, Jerry O’Connell, Kiefer Sutherland

***1/2

By Alan Bacchus

The expert casting by Reiner and company solidifies the legacy of this fine film. I can’t think of any other group of child actors that commands the screen more effectively and with greater emotional depth than Stand By Me. This is a movie with almost no adult presence. Sure, Kiefer Sutherland and his gang of bullies provide periodic glimpses of young adults, but for 90% of this film we are with four 13 year olds holding their own on camera.

Directors will tell you the secret to directing child actors is casting the right kids and letting them be themselves. For Wheaton, Feldman, O’Connell and arguably River Phoenix, this was the pinnacle of their careers.

Including The Big Chill, The Wonder Years and others, Stand by Me fits in with a common theme of the 80s, filmmakers looking back on 1950's/60's post-war era from the skewed point of view of dreamy nostalgia. Of course, this story originated in a novella by Stephen King, his first non-horror film adapted as a feature. It’s the story of a group of four young teens in a lonely rural town who embark on a two-day hike to find the body of a dead boy.

One of the four kids is Gordie Lachance (Wheaton), a meek and skinny kid with feelings of inadequacy after his older brother passes away. Since the death of his brother, Gordie has retreated to the comfort of his childhood friends and his love of writing. There’s also Teddy Duchamp (Feldman), a loudmouthed shit-disturber who’ll do anything to wind people up, a defence mechanism masking his fractured home life. Vern Tessio (O’Connell) is the fat kid teased and pushed around by his buddies, but still a respected member of the foursome. And lastly, Chris Chambers (Phoenix) is the confident rebel and defender of the group. He’s from a hardened criminal family and desires to escape the expectations of failure that society has placed upon him.

Rob Reiner’s invisible direction is subordinate to the kids’ performances and the mood and tone of the period. The journey is effectively broken down into a number of set pieces along the way. Gordie’s tale of the pie-eating contest, for example, is cleverly incorporated as a story-within-a-story. The chase scene across the train bridge provides the most suspenseful moments, and sharp R-rated humour misdirects us from the sombre finale that awaits the kids.

The film’s narration is essential to conveying the nostalgic qualities of the story. The theme of memory and storytelling mix elegantly. We watch the film from the memories of Gordie as an older man reflecting on the times. We all know the effect of the passage of time – reality shaped by what we choose to remember about the past. As a result, the elder Gordie becomes an ‘unreliable narrator.’ We don’t really know if the actions, altercations and events of these four kids happened exactly as we see them. But based on Gordie’s memories, the tall tales significantly convey the importance of this time on his life as an adult and a father.

Casting Richard Dreyfuss adds even more rich texture to the film. Sure his nasally radio voice has a soothing effect on our ears. But his mere presence connects us to one of the film’s antecedents, American Graffiti, a similar film recalling the same era told with the same style of embellished nostalgia. Stand By Me stands tall beside George Lucas's own celebrated masterpiece.

Stand By Me is available on Blu-ray from Sony Pictures Home Entertainment

Misery

Misery (1990) dir. Rob Reiner
Starring: Kathy Bates, James Caan, Richard Farnsworth, Lauren Bacall

***

Its obvious 'Misery' is not the work of a genre director or even anyone with any experience with horror. Rob Reiner’s work on Stephen King’s intense novel is workmanlike, unflashy, but anchored by William Goldman’s tightly plotted script and two fine lead performances. After 19 years 'Misery' remains a highly watchable light horror film for people who don’t like horror films.

It’s a classic Stephen King set-up, a high concept picture which began from King’s own neuroses as an author dealing with the confining feeling of his audience’s expectations. King writes himself into the character of Paul Sheldon (James Caan), a romance novelist excited because he’s just completed his first non-romance novel, a cathartic feeling of freedom as an artist. But when his car runs off a snowy road in the mountains with his manuscript, he becomes face to face with the greatest challenge of his life.

He wakes up from consciousness in the spare bed of Annie Wilkes (Kathy Bates), Sheldon’s #1 fan, a Susan Boyle-like spinster and shut in who lives vicariously through Sheldon’s romance heroine, Misery. In just seven minutes King, Reiner and Goldman establish the rules of Sheldon’s shut-in world. With his legs broken, in the middle of nowhere in a snowstorm, it’s the same narrative shackles King loves to revel in. Whether it’s the car in 'Cujo', or the Overlook Hotel in 'The Shining', its a Stephen King world with characters isolated in spaces and a psychological and physically duel to the death.

Goldman uses King’s novel as a jumping off point effectively detailing the common sense predicament for both Annie and Paul. He finds the right amount of details to weave into the struggle and paying them effectively throughout the film. The opening shot of the wine glass, cigarette and match is no coincidence, a clever detail which serves two narrative purposes 1) the symbol of Sheldon’s accomplishment as an author and 2) the instrument which Paul uses to defeat Annie.

It was Barry Sonnenfeld’s last picture as a cinematographer, and he employs a very ungenre-like bright and flat lighting scheme for a horror flick. Under someone else’s watch Annie’s home would be a nourish, Norman Bates-like layer lit with deep shadows and gritty textured surfaces. Most of the film is played in daytime, in a warm, quaint and protective home, counter-playing the madness residing inside.

Reiner’s inexperience with the genre is visible. His execution of the suspenseful moments are adequate, because of Goldman’s well-timed plotting and Caan and Bates’s perforamnce. And so it takes only the bare minimum to pay off the half a dozen key set pieces. Though we can’t help but think how a John Carpenter, or Roman Polanski or even an M. Night Shyamalan would have done with say, the hobbling scene, or the dinner table scene when Paul tries to poison Annie. With Reiner’s visual style, the suspense feels like an artificial injection of fear, a cinematic suspense, manufactured from editing and the nature of the concept as opposed to a pure visceral horror.

“Misery” remains a fun movie to this day in part because of Reiner's funny bone and his desire not to take the film too seriously. The wink of self-acknowledge allows mainstream audiences to enjoy being scared - a disposable kind of horror film which leaves you immediately and doesn’t give you nightmares.

“Misery” is available on Blu-Ray from MGM Home Entertainment

This Is Spinal Tap

This is Spinal Tap (1984) dir. Rob Reiner
Starring: Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, Harry Shearer

****

I doubt the four creators of Spinal Tap (Reiner, Guest, McKean, Shearer) would have predicted the staying power of this little movie. Yet, 25 years later, the comedic force of Tap continues unabated. Evidence of the breadth of comedic material available from this concept includes, numerous reunifications tours, music albums which were released years after the film, occasional cameo appearances at rock festivals, award shows etc.

“This is Spinal Tap” was remarkable for its ability to laser in on a very specific subject – the career trajectory of many 60's/70's bands as well as the documentary form itself, and specifically, the 'rock documentary'. Stylistically the film uses Led Zeppelin’s “The Song Remains the Same” as their template. Perhaps even positing, in an extreme situation, what could have happened to Zeppelin if they had stuck around through the 80’s – a washed-up sad parody of themselves, unable to see the forest for the trees.

Though Reiner serves as director, the films made by Guest later in the 90’s suggest the comic and visual style in “Spinal Tap” is more collaborative than what his credit would suggest. You know the story… with an invisible improvised/naturalistic style Guest, McKean and Shearer inhabit the skins of Nigel Tufnel (lead guitarist), David St. Hubbins (lead singer) and Derek Smalls (bassist), the washed-up 70’s hard rock band Spinal Tap. Using the language of a traditional documentary – stock footage, interviews and fly-on-the-wall cinema verite, we watch as the band lose their dignity as they attempt to release their latest album on a record label that no longer wants them to an audience that is virtually non-existant.

In a series of wonderfully deadpan comic situations we watch the naïve and portentous bandmates fail miserably at everything they do - from their disastrous album signing, to their Stonehenge stage production snafu to their much-argued album cover which ends up being ‘all black’. As things go downhill, the strain and pressure of their increasing self-awareness causes the band to split up thus threatening to erase their 30 year friendship.

The backstory created for the band, told to us in interviews filled with wonderful comic subtext, references the minute details of rock lore such as the Beatles' beginnings in the ‘skiffle’ movement, Led Zeppelin’s first incarnation as a pre-psychedelic folk band the New Yardbirds, and the devolving artistic creativity of many other bands toward hideous sexism and role-playing heavy metal. Rob Reiner (aka Marti DiBergi) as documentarian does not come out unscathed either. His pretentious and stagey first person introduction to camera is hilarious, poking fun at manufactured television documentary specials. DiBergi's naval hat, his ‘director’s beard’ and his unncessary reaction shots during the interviews suggest the powerful but pompous ego stroke of Hollywood filmmakers.

“Spinal Tap” wasn’t the first mock documentary – Albert Brooks and Woody Allen laid some of that groundwork prior to ‘Tap’ – but the film sustains (like Nigel’s Les Paul guitar) because of its wonderful attention to character. It’s very clever. As we marvel in the deadpan absurdities of the behaviour of these idiotic characters, without realizing it, Reiner’s crafting a surprisingly emotional and profound study of friendship. More than just a story of has-been rockers, by the time Nigel and David reconnect their band "This is Spinal Tap” reveals itself as a story of lifelong friendship which breaks apart and then is mended with forgiveness.

Spinal Tap's continued cultural relevance is remarkable - starting as a TV sketch in 1979, expanded into a full feature in 1984, which then grew into it's own alternate world of characters and new stories which evolved over the next 25 years. As evidence of the comic legs of the concept, the Blu-Ray and DVD even features a full length, in-character audio commentary of the band commenting on their film, which is just as funny as the actual movie.

"This is Spinal Tap" is available on Blu-Ray from MGM Home Entertainment