Stand by Me

This is the same poster I had in my room when I was a kid.

Even after 23 years, it still holds up. What a powerful film. It's even more powerful when you are holding your newborn son while watching it.

Every time I watch it, it brings back a lot of memories. In a way, it's a hard movie for me to watch. I'm not sure why, but this movie really stuck with me. It's my favorite movie of all time. It's a coming of age story for young boys on the road to being young men. Every time I watch it I see something I didn't see before. It's hard to describe, but to me, the movie is perfect.

River Phoenix was ahead of his time. He would have went on to do great things. Wil Wheaton continues to blog and use Twitter, which I'm going to start following again. He seems to really eschew any kind of celebrity that he gained from being a childhood actor. Sometimes it's hard reading things where the actors say they did other, better work elsewhere or when they allude to the fact that the movie didn't mean as much to them as it does to you. As they say, don't look at your heroes too closely. I have a feeling that after all these years, it's kind of hard for the actors to go back and watch that movie considering how River Phoenix ended his short career.

It's hard to watch that movie and realize how good movies were back then compared to now. Before cell phones and IMDB, there were quality movies. I'm not saying that Hollywood didn't lay a stinker here and there, but going to the movies just seemed like a singular event, something to get excited about. Back then, they were almost all great, even the bad ones. Maybe we just have way too much entertainment now. Maybe we have too many distractions. Watching Stand by Me hearkens back to a simpler life, for sure. Maybe that's just the way it seems looking back. Maybe at the time, they thought the 50s looked great.

I really would like to visit Brownsville, Oregon some day and check out some of the locations used in the film. When we visit Portland, I'm going to go there, take photos and have a beer at the saloon. From what I read on the Internets, the Blue Point Diner closed, but I saw a photo dated 2007 that had a sign up in front of the place on the other side of the saloon.

Hopefully one day when my son grows up he will enjoy this movie as much as I do. It's hard to imagine that eventually kids will want to go their own way and be their own person, but I don't ever want my kid to want to be around his friends any more than he would want to be around his own family as it seems the 4 boys in the movie do.