Stand by Me

After the death of a friend, a writer recounts a boyhood journey to find a body of a missing boy

• Director: Rob Reiner
• Genre:Adventure / Drama
• Runtime:89 minutes

Cast

Wil Wheaton : Gordie Lachance
River Phoenix : Chris Chambers
Corey Feldman : Teddy Duchamp
Jerry O’Connell : Vern Tessio
Kiefer Sutherland: Ace Merrill

Gordie LaChance is a quiet, bookish boy with a penchant for telling stories and writing, rejected by his father, following the death of his football-star older brother Denny (John Cusack) in a car accident, who paid Gordie much more attention than his parents. Chris Chambers is from a family of criminals and alcoholics, and he is usually stereotyped accordingly, even though he is completely different from the perceptions and stigmas attached to his family. Teddy Duchamp is an eccentric and physically deformed after his mentally unstable father (whom Teddy sees as a war hero who “stormed the beach at Normandy”) held his ear to a stove and nearly burned it off, thus forcing him to wear a hearing aid. Vern Tessio, overweight and timid, is easily scared, and thus often picked on.

The film is narrated by an adult Gordie , known as “The Writer” (Richard Dreyfuss), writing the memoir about his youth. Set in the fictional town of Castle Rock, Oregon, over Labor Day weekend in September 1959[1], Gordie (Wil Wheaton), and his friends Chris (River Phoenix) and Teddy (Corey Feldman) learn from their friend Vern (Jerry O’Connell) that the dead body of a boy named Ray Brower, who was struck by a train while picking blueberries in the woods, has been found. While under his porch looking for his buried jar of pennies, Vern overheard his older brother talking about finding the body while in the woods with a friend. The boys then embark upon a two-day journey near Castle Rock to see if they can find the body.

They set out to find the body, first encountering Old man Pressman, owner of a junkyard they must cross. They then walk across a train bridge and Vern and Gordie are nearly run over by a passing train. At the end of the day, the boys set up camp. Gordie tells the boys a story he had been thinking of lately. Later on in the night, Chris reveals to Gordie his fear of being stereotyped as a criminal and never making anything of himself. As they continue on, they swim through a swamp, only to discover that they are covered in leeches. Gordie becomes very disturbed after finding one on his testicles, causing the other boys to wonder if they should go on. Gordie ends up being the strongest of them, knowing that they have put in too much work not to see the body. They get to the boy’s dead body, and it reminds Gordie that his father liked his brother better than him. Just then, Ace Merril and his gang show up to take the body, but Gordie threatens him with a handgun that Chris had brought on the trip. They decide to leave the body and make an anonymous call to the police. Read more

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