So I’ll get back to the question at hand: I grew up with one and later found the other, but hold both movies close to my heart. I think there’s a larger discussion to be had about why I tend to identify more strongly with certain female protagonists than with male ones, but maybe that’s a conversation better had on a therapist’s couch and is outside the scope of our discussion. There is no shortage of entries in this coming-of-age genre, but Now and Then cuts to certain feelings and emotional truths better than most.
Stand by me narrator movie#
I truly believe that the movie does not need the adult stuff and would be better if that had just been cut out, leaving a movie about a group of girlfriends over the course of one summer. Now and Then is kind of hacky, what with the “get it? It’s the ‘70s” soundtrack (that I have listened to dozens of times, make no mistake) and the distracting cameos and, worst of all, the whole conceit of the adults/kids casting. My brain is an asshole.īut, truth be told, there’s something I connect more with in the nostalgia of Now and Then than I do to Stand By Me, which I think is the better-made movie of the two. Most of the time, I’m able to tell this part of my brain to fuck off. Because it’s a movie about young girls and presumably aimed at them as well, there’s always been a part of my brain that tells me I’m wrong to respond to it the way that I do. Worse, I felt weird and bad about how much I liked the movie, which I maintain is the closest thing I may ever have to a guilty pleasure (if I believed in such things). I went to see it the Friday night it hit the second run near my house, making me the only solo male high school senior in attendance. Patrick: Well, now, here’s where I need to reveal that I am very, very old, because while Stand By Me was a movie I watched quite a bit growing up, Now and Then came out in 1995, the year I graduated high school. Did you watch either of these films or relate to them growing up? So I was always intrigued to watch them both and look at each film’s point of view of adolescence from different gender perspective. Also, it’s based on a novella by Stephen King called The Body. Being aware of general pop culture, I had an idea of what it was about: four male friends around adolescence sneak out to see a dead body.
I had never seen Stand By Me, but always thought it to be a male counterpoint. How do we escape the inability to handle our parents' divorce? By diving headfirst into the mystery surrounding local legend to distract your friends and yourself. How do we explore death? By exploring the taboo like Ouijia boards and tarot cards.
I think what Now and Then handles so wonderfully is what it is like being a teenage girl and tackle the 'big questions' - these questions that we want to tackle but don’t have the mental ability to handle quite yet. My friends and I held seances every sleepover and, being inspired by this film, even tried to sneak out to go to the local graveyard (unsuccessfully) to hold one. But also the fascination with death and sexuality arose around this time. Sadly, we didn’t not have the best soundtrack of all time (like the pop perfection of “Sugar, Sugar”) to accompany our adolescent adventures. We lived in a small town, where the furthest we had to walk to get to each other’s house was cutting across the football field. I had four friends with whom I was extremely close. Lexy: Now and Then was a story I thought was copied straight out of my life in middle school. Lexy and Patrick look back at two similar coming of age dramas and find truth in both.
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