Stand By Me and counting the years

Quite how it had taken so many years for me to finally watch this film is quite beyond me. Its not as if I never read Stephen King stories or watch the movies based on them- quite the contrary. And yet it has taken so many years- Stand By Me was released back in 1986, which is what, 34 years ago, now. I suppose its nice that even after watching so many films over the years, there are still some genuinely good ones waiting for me to catch up with them. Films are patient. There’s great ones waiting for all of us.

That length of years is frightening, though. For instance, does anybody else think its scary that the length of time since the film came out is more than the distance in time between the films original release and when it was set, in 1959- a gap of just 27 years. So the narrator looking back and telling his tale is looking back 27 years, and me, I’m now 34 years distant from when the film came out. I imagine viewers in 1986 thinking that the films period setting was a distant time ago, and yet here I am now…. crumbs.

It just lends the film a certain feeling, seeing some of those actors -Will Wheaton, Richard Dreyfuss, Corey Fieldman, Jerry O’Connell, Kiefer Sutherland, John Cusack- all looking so young, not to mention the added poignancy of seeing River Phoenix. Just on the evidence of this one film, its clear that he was an actor of considerable merit and screen charisma, destined to be a future star possibly as great as Brad Pitt or Tom Cruise or Johnny Depp… who knows where his future might have lead? As it turned out, he didn’t have that future, because he died of a drug overdose just 7 years after Stand By Me was released.

So Stand By Me is like some kind of impossible bubble of spacetime with those actors so incredibly young, the kids with their whole lives ahead of them… and me, sitting here in 2020 watching it for the first time. Suddenly appreciating why people have praised the film and sometimes remarked to me “what? You’ve never seen that yet?” in disbelief. The realisation that I have only watched it now because of something of a whim, having noticed the 4K UHD edition in a sale for £9.99 and thinking, maybe its worth a punt, maybe its as good as people say, and the film might cheer me up. We all need cheering up in these uncertain times. Chalk up one more positive to Covid19 then.

Its a lovely little film. Hardly perfect but still, very good, and certainly one of the better Stephen King adaptations. Naturally it reminded me of American Graffiti, not just because Richard Dreyfuss features in both: the films are cinematic cousins, really, both period films about growing up, and how they used Rock n’Roll songs to form a soundtrack. I thought Jack Nitzche’s score and its use of the Ben E. King song was particularly fine, delicately done. Hey, American Graffiti– now there’s a film I really should find time to watch again.

Me, now, wondering what in the world I was doing back in 1986 that meant I was too busy to go watch this film or catch it on VHS rental or watch it on television showings over the years since. 1986 was the year Aliens came out, wasn’t it. And The Mission, and Day of the Dead, Poltergeist 2, Big Trouble in Little China… and Howard the Duck. Those were the films I watched at the cinema that year. Its funny how I remember years by what films I saw, sometimes its the only sense of perspective of time that I have now.

But that’s how films trick you, and release dates in particular- Stand By Me may have been released in late summer of 1986 in America, but digging around a little I discover that the film wasn’t released over here in the UK until early 1987. We forget it was a bigger world back then, and releases of films were spread across several months over International Territories.I remember one of the most exciting things about having a region-free DVD player when they came out in the late nineties (mine was an American machine with a transformer the size of a house brick) was that we could see films at home that still hadn’t even been released in the cinemas over here. So sure, Stand By Me was released back in 1986 in America but for us in the UK it was 1987, the year I went to watch other films like The Fly, Platoon, Full Metal Jacket and Innerspace instead. That’s just how I count the years.

 

 

Flatliners (2017)

I’m sitting here feeling somewhat numb. What can I possibly write about this new edition of Flatliners? It feels about as pointless as the film itself. I expected it would be bad, but it turns out it’s worse than I had imagined. Frankly, life is too short, but here goes, I’ll try keep this brief-

I remember watching the 1990 original of Flatliners and thinking it was pretty good at the time- I saw it on VHS rental, so what, that’s 25+years ago now, and I can’t recall watching it again since, as it was pretty forgettable really, the most notable thing about it being the cast (Kiefer Sutherland, Julia Roberts, Kevin Bacon), who all went on to bigger better things. The set-up (medical students deliberately flatline/kill themselves for a few minutes prior to being resuscitated in order to study/discover what happens after death), is daft but full of potential- I remember hoping for something like Brainstorm, a film that would offer an answer to the inevitable questions: is there a Heaven, is there a Hell, or is there Nothing? At least Brainstorm, for all its flaws, had suggested an answer, albeit just really offering familiar religious iconography in doing so, but hey, it’s one of my guilty pleasures and it’s a decent movie. But Flatliners just ducked the questions like a coward, afraid to upset anyone in the audience and offered up guilt-trips instead, but hey, that’s show business, and I believe it made lots of money (more than Brainstorm, certainly).

Incredibly, this new Flatliners makes the exact same mistake but compounds it by featuring a mostly uninteresting cast of unconvincing and bland characters with a script that is shockingly inept. Its terrible, really, not that I should perhaps be surprised, but really, the stupidity is what’s most shocking. Ellen Page’s character flatlines and has an out-of-body ‘experience’ of rising up out of the hospital into the sky above it, afterwards convincing her colleagues by daft nonsense like “I flew above the roof of the hospital- I’ve never seen the roof of the hospital before!” as if thats some kind of proof. Suddenly she’s super-smart and can also play the piano, but these sudden bursts of knowledge and creativity, a catalyst for others of the group to give flatlining a go, is subsequently ditched as a plotpoint in favour of jump-scares and standard horror tropes. Religious imagery seems to have been consciously avoided in order to not question any audience belief-system. Its therefore completely anemic and bloodless and boring, certainly to me. And none of it makes any sense- the film suggests that everything is happening in each person’s mind, like a guilt-trip for past transgressions, but this does not explain how Ellen Pages character gets dragged across the floor of her apartment or how James Norton’s character gets stabbed in the hand by a knife. Its preposterous and silly nonsense that falls apart with any thought.

But you know, it really is so typical of the bullshit modern films have become. The characters are all beautiful and rich. They are all students, but one drives a new car (minus plates) another rides a big motorbike, one of them lives in a big apartment, another in a luxurious home, another lives on a bloody yacht for goodness sake. After a cursory glance at fancy 3D graphics on a laptop following the first experiment, they follow the further flatline experiments by going to rave parties or dances, getting drunk or having sex, they don’t seem to delve into the successive medical results or ponder What It All Means or worry about getting a night’s sleep before attending med school the next day. And don’t get me started about how fully-functioning and totally unmonitored medical machinery and equipment just conveniently sits in the hospital basement for our characters to play with each night.

Horrible. Time to dig out my Brainstorm Blu-ray I think and thank the lord no-one has sullied it by a vapid remake featuring young beautiful Somethings. Yet.