I always loved the part in Shawshank when Morgan Freeman is asked why people call him “Red.” His response is straight from the book.
“Maybe it’s because I’m Irish” was written long before Freeman was cast. It wasn’t a joke in the book, yet it comes off as a warm and wry Freemanism in the movie.
Is Stephen King at his best when he isn’t writing horror?
Shawshank Redemption and Stand By Me might suggest that, but it isn’t so.
King is at his best when he’s inside a character and he’s giving you the internal dialogue of their thoughts. You start rolling around in someone else’s head for awhile and you forget that you’re reading.
Turned into movies, both “Shawshank Redemption” and “Stand By Me” let you know what the characters are thinking. You’ll notice there’s plenty of narration in these adaptations, and a lot of specific lines are used verbatim from the book
Just as King’s writing can help you forget you’re reading, Stand By Me helps you forget what year it is for a while.
I got to enjoy seeing this in the theater. The boys in the movie were about my age then, and Richard Drefuss was old.
Watching it again, he’s not that old anymore
Let yourself slip into all those character-thoughts, and they’re pretty darn comfortable in ways you had nearly forgotten, like a pair of footed pajamas. Pad around in them, pat-pat-pat across the kitchen floor to get a snack, and you’ll find yourself back in that universal realm of childhood.
Somewhere…somewhen…
Christopher Shelby 