Stand by Me (1986)
Directed by Rob Reiner
After learning that a boy their age has been accidentally killed near their rural homes, four boys decide to go see the body. Gordie, Vern, Chris, and Teddy encounter a mean junk man and a marsh full of leeches, but they also learn more about one another and their very different home lives. Just a lark at first, the boys' adventure evolves into a defining event in their lives.
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What critics compared Stand by Me to
From familial discord, the death of a parent, and the like “Super 8” channels these themes from classic Spielberg fare like “Close Encounters,” and “Jaws” with a sprinkle of “Stand By Me” and “The Goonies” for good measure.
Sure, by technicality, the story is original, but when the entire picture is an homage to ’80s Spielberg and borrows heavily from Steven’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T., and more than a share from Rob Reiner’s Stand by Me, it’s hard to really call it original.
Besides Richard Donner’s Spielberg-produced “The Goonies,” the scenes with the kids most directly recall Rob Reiner’s “Stand by Me.”
Produced by Spielberg and reminiscent of E.T., Close Encounters of the Third Kind and even War of the Worlds, it also has some of the coming-of-age quality of Rob Reiner's Stand By Me.
That starts with the central characters, a group of young teenage misfits who may remind you of the kids from The Goonies or Stand by Me .
It definitely feels like an homage to great movies past, particularly E.T. , Stand by Me , and Close Encounters of the Third Kind .
The young heroes in “Mud” recall the sentiment of the teenage rebels in Rob Reiner’s “Stand by Me” – they are at that stage of adolescence in which their future will forever be shaped by the experiences of that moment, and the adults around them dictate it with situations of impending emotional gravity.
The teenagers' thrill and adventure in secretly aiding Mud gives the film a Huckleberry Finn-ish flavour that blends with something akin to Rob Reiner's 1986 classic Stand By Me and Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter .
It's a stirring ode to innocence that evokes classics like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Stand By Me.
Their adventure brings to mind Stand By Me with a touch of Mark Twain, and Nichols' lingering shots of the natural world are comparable with the work of film-maker Terrence Malick.
This is a junior adventure story echoing Huckleberry Finn and Stand by Me, a tale which is in no hurry to unfold, but beautifully done, exquisitely performed, and filled with terror and wonder.
But Mud has a rare big-screen beauty, and its old-fashioned storytelling recalls A River Runs Through It , Night of the Hunter , Stand By Me , and Huckleberry Finn .
The slight but captivating indie-comedy The Kings of Summer has the ragtag look and feel of a movie made in some teenager’s basement: lots of slow motion; a blaring, catchy soundtrack that opens with a joyous rendition of Thin Lizzy’s “Cowboy Song;” and themes inspired by classic films about youthful friendship like Stand By Me and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.
"The Kings of Summer" has been compared in certain circles to 1986's quintessential, possibly ultimate, coming-of-age film "Stand by Me."
The film is now called “The Kings of Summer” and while it may recall Rob Reiner’s fondly remembered “Stand By Me,” it’s really quite different from that film.
Obvious Stand By Me references aside, The Kings of Summer comes across as little more than a TV sitcom with enough swear words included to earn it an "R" rating.
And while it openly evokes the spirit of pictures like “Stand By Me” and “Moonrise Kingdom,” it scores originality points in the shading of its characters and its utter fearlessness in going for the big laughs.
More Thoreau’s “Walden” than Golding’s “Lord of the Flies,” “The Kings of Summer” could have gotten away with using the tagline for Rob Reiner’s “Stand by Me,” which is: “For some, it’s the last real taste of innocence, and the first real taste of life.
Right down to a stolen pistol shoved in a backpack, James Ponsoldt’s unhurried, sun-kissed coming-of-age drama plays as an all-female homage to Rob Reiner’s “Stand By Me” — a reference that won’t mean much to the pre-teen girls at whom it’s aimed, but may make some of their parents a little misty-eyed.
It’s this generation's female “Stand by Me,” right down to the discovery of a dead body, just not as poignant or memorable.
It amounts to a modern retelling of Stand By Me , with lower stakes, less ground to cover, and a wild lack of logic.
Of course, the obvious, hit-you-over-the-head answer is Rob Reiner's 1986 adaption of a Stephen King novella, The Body, called "Stand By Me." But, that one sentence is the only direct similarity to the 80s classic.
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Though “Horns” doesn’t follow the paces of any specific genre, blending everything from tongue-in-cheek supernatural horror to grounded “Stand by Me”-style coming-of-age scenes (including a terrific near-death encounter on a log slide), the plot essentially reduces to that of just another routine procedural: Who killed Merrin?
A long flashback of Ig, his brother Terry and their best friend Lou recalls the pubescent taunting and near-tragedies of Stand by Me, the movie made of King's story "The Body."
There are even scenes of adolescent camaraderie that parallel Stand By Me and its ilk, similar to what J.J. Abrams slung together with his young cast in Super 8. Horns may take many diversions, but they never feel like they’re spliced in from another movie.
Both urges — the fondness for crude "Creepshow" morality tales, the sentimental "Stand By Me" kid drama — seem awfully Stephen King.
A series of flashbacks to his childhood, when he first meets Temple’s character, trade the humorous implications of the contemporary scenes for a fairy tale-like nostalgia trip that calls to mind “Stand By Me.”
Flashback sequences involving a group of childhood friends may seem familiar to fans of “Stand by Me.”
And when Joel encounters a working MAV1S (a helper robot that feels like a subplot that got curtailed in the final pass) and it plays Ben E. King’s “Stand by Me,” sure enough, just a few scenes later, echoing Rob Reiner’s touchstone film of the same name, Joel emerges from a river covered in leeches — though these are of the fist-sized poisonously psychedelic kind.
In another sequence, Joel finds himself beset by leech-like creatures that he pulls off himself in what has to be an homage to Stand by Me (1986).
But Joel’s quest is no less anecdotal than that sounds, and keeps serving up bland variations on scenes from other movies—everything from Tremors (“sandgobblers” racing just beneath the ground) to Stand By Me (Joel emerges from a pond covered in giant leeches, though they’re proportionally way smaller than everything else).
Comparisons to Stand By Me and Donnie Darko have already been made, but the film in which Super Dark Times footsteps seems to be following is It Follows.
But these references are texture rather than the point of the exercise (although a bit where two of the characters argue over who would win a fight between Silver Surfer and Punisher calls back to Stand by Me pretty loudly).
Here they reunite with cinematographer Eli Born and editor Ed Yonaitis for a story which consciously echoes the likes of River's Edge and Stand by Me in terms of plot, while also displaying thematic and stylistic debts to Donnie Darko and the small-town pictures of John Carpenter and David Cronenberg.
A slow-burn high school thriller that’s like a tortured cross between “Stand By Me” and “Donnie Darko” (with a bit of Dostoyevskian madness thrown in there for good measure, Phillips’ feature-length debut begins by welcoming us to a grey Hudson Valley town that’s lost in the barren phantom zone between fall and winter.
While the period setting dispenses with plot complications such as mobile phones, it does lead Super Dark Times into Stand By Me territory - and it’s to Phillips’ credit that his rich character study mostly stands up to that scrutiny.
The long shadow of “Stand by Me” will always haunt films about the confluence of childhood and death, though “Super Dark Times” largely ditches nostalgia for a decidedly darker turn, and not just because the 1990s suburban community where it takes place is awash in wood paneling and brown furniture.
Despite its compact scale and structure, this high-concept mini-thriller from writer-director Jon Watts packs in the references: the pre-teen trauma of Stand by Me is in there, as is Spielberg’s highway stand-off Duel , and the blackly comic crime capers of the Coen brothers.
Watts set out to blend a coming-of-age story (à la Stand By Me and the Amblin Entertainment movies of yore) with a leaner, meaner thriller evocative of the old Westerns.
So far, so good — the boys' lighthearted adventure, as they play at adulthood while careening across the flatlands, has been rightfully compared to "Stand By Me."
Like a cross between Stand by Me and No Country for Old Men, Cop Car puts Harrison and Travis through a gauntlet of dangerous situations that force them to grow up in a hurry, and watches as they mostly fail, with disastrous consequences.
Imagine Stand by Me directed by the Coen brothers circa Blood Simple.
“Cop Car” is unlike most traditional neo-noirs in that it flips the script by centering on two innocent kids instead of the typical, morally gray protagonist, like if the gang from “Stand by Me” had discovered Anton Chigurh’s briefcase of money and kept it for themselves.
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From Stand by Me, to IT, to Back to the Future.
Dizinin ilk sezonunda henüz 10’lu yaşlarının başında olan karakterlerimiz, elbette Stephen King romanından uyarlanan 1985 yapımı film “Stand By Me”yi de hemen hatırlatır.
The season also strongly recalls Stand By Me, the 1985 adaptation of Stephen King’s novella, one of the finest cinematic portrayals of friendship. While the film had not yet been released in the show’s timeline—Season 1 is set in 1983—the thematic echoes are unmistakable.
…they ride out into the night streets on their bicycles (a touch of the Goonies and Stand by Me springs to mind)…
Herein lies the beginning of innumerable era-appropriate comparisons to Spielberg’s E.T., Stephen King/Rob Reiner’s Stand by Me, and Chris Columbus/Richard Donner’s The Goonies, to name just a few.
…it references everything from E.T. to Stand by Me by way of Poltergeist, Aliens and plenty more…
Although Good Boys largely plays like a tween version of Superbad —with an explicit nod to Stranger Things and even a touch of Stand By Me —it’s clear that writers Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky (who also directs) are fans of the great old Tom Cruise vehicle, Risky Business , too.
They are, now and forever, the Bean Bag Boys; the kind of youthful coalition that Stephen King could make good use of and indeed he has in both Stand By Me and It .
There’s as much chemistry among them as there was in the group featured in Rob Reiner’s 1986 work, Stand by Me.
Movies like Stand by Me, The Squid and the Whale, Little Darlings and, if we’re going really dark, 1992’s Kids (wait, that’s NC-17, forget it) have made a lasting impression on popular culture.
As the great coming-of-age film Stand By Me concluded: “I never had any friends later on like the ones I did when I was twelve.
The iconic line from Stand by Me still remains an emotional gut punch.