Stand By Me (Special Edition)

Stand By Me: The novella, the movie and the DVD
"Stand By Me" is a classic coming of age movie about growing up and friendship and the pain of disillusionment when the adults you depend upon let you down. Highly recommended.

In this review I'll focus mostly on the relationship between the movie and the Stephen King novella it is based on, and the DVD extra material that closes the ring.

The movie "Stand By Me" was made in 1986. It is based on a novella published in 1982 and the story takes place in 1959 (movie) or 1960 (novella). But the story is timeless - the conflicts and the difficult transition from child to adult apply to every generation.

There is a lot of trivia (pop songs, slang expressions, TV shows, etc.) from 1959/1960 in the movie and the novella, but this doesn't really anchor the story to that era. Every generation has it's own trivia that is very important to that generation. But today's generation can smile at the trivia of 47 years ago and still see the parallels between that...

Much better sound than the Special Edition
I purchased the Special Edition of this movie recently and couldn't believe that the audio was monophonic. I was thus pleasantly surprised to see that in this edition of the DVD they restored the original multi-channel soundtrack. Even the casual listener will notice the difference immediately.

To my knowledge the movie itself is the same as on the Special Edition (no added or cut scenes) so I won't waste your time commenting on that. I just wanted to bring attention to the fact that the Deluxe Edition of this movie is the ONLY one any serious movie collector should consider.

Definitive
I'm not going to write a synopsis of the plot here or tell you how great the movie is. You already know that. If you are going to buy this movie on DVD and have never seen it, plan to watch the bonus documentary included on the new DVD release first, "Walking the Tracks," a behind-the-scenes look at the making of film as told by Rob Reiner, Stephen King, Wil Wheaton, Corey Feldman and Jerry O'Connell. You'll hear Wil explain why Gordie doesn't get his brother's Yankee cap returned, what Jerry O'Connell really thought of Kiefer Sutherland, and how Rob Reiner made two of the cast members weep during the train trestle scene! The docu footage appears to have been shot on the late 1990s or even early 2000, and it's wonderful to see these people together again (River Phoenix, who died in 1993, is not part of the documentary, but is referred to by just about everyone being interviewed).

The best part for me was watching the movie with English subtitles, which made me...

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