![]() She is curious to discover what role her own parenting – as well as the genetics which led Emily to start physically resembling her absent father – has had in ‘making’ Emily who she is, for good or ill. ![]() Olsen’s mother character in ‘I Stand Here Ironing’ is interested in how the various details of her daughter’s early life should have led to this culmination, this arrival at a sense of self that is, oddly, about negating or removing one’s true inner self for the purposes of performance. Emily, who has already had to take on various ‘roles’ as a child (including, significantly, that of ‘mother’ to her younger siblings, to help their mother out), finally locates her sense of self in the world of drama and theatre: in other words, her identity is, ironically enough, founded on an absence of one specific ‘self’ which is authentically her. It makes ‘I Stand Here Ironing’ not a story about Emily, or a story about her mother, but a story about both of them, and the ways in which they are both still forging their identities in relation to each other. One of the distinctive things about Olsen’s approach is that she allows us to observe the nineteen-year-old Emily only through her mother, who acknowledges early on in the story that her own knowledge of her daughter is incomplete: she dismisses the notion that she possesses some ‘key’ to understanding Emily’s identity and behaviour.Īnd this narratorial stroke of genius works to do something else, too. Cracks Reiner, ”I can’t believe that little fat schmendrick is married to Rebecca Romijn.In some ways, it makes sense to view ‘I Stand Here Ironing’ as a story about adolescence and coming of age, even if the narrator of the story is the mother, rather than her teenage daughter. ![]() They swap memories and take digs at the absent O’Connell, whom they still treat like the tubby ne’er-do-well. The new 25th Anniversary Edition Blu-ray comes with some nice new Extras, including a picture-within-picture commentary from ? a reunited Reiner, Wheaton, and Feldman. Jesus, does anyone?” Good luck choking back the tears, folks. At the end of the movie, Wheaton’s grown-up stand-in (Richard Dreyfuss) sums up that fateful summer, writing: ”I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was 12. And all of his young actors are great - Wheaton as the sensitive narrator, Feldman as the slightly crazy wild card, and especially Phoenix as the tough-yet-tender doomed soul. But Rob Reiner’s film is all about the journey, not the destination. The next day, they head off for adventure, walking along the railroad tracks to find the body and become local heroes. When the pudgy scaredy-cat Vern (played by an unrecognizable preteen Jerry O’Connell) overhears some older kids talking about a dead body they saw a few towns over, he shares the secret with his three best buddies (Wil Wheaton, Corey Feldman, and River Phoenix). ![]() Based on a Stephen King novella, the film tells the sepia-tinted story of four childhood pals destined to go their separate ways one day, but who, for now, in the summer of 1959, are bound together for what feels like an eternity of campfire tales, pinkie swears, and debates about whether Mighty Mouse could beat up Superman. Then there’s a movie like Stand by Me (1986, R, 1 hr., 28 mins.), which gets your tear ducts working honestly. And while they might succeed in making us reach for the Kleenex, we rarely feel good about it afterward. We’ve all been held hostage by coming-of-age stories that shamelessly cudgel us into sniffling submission. The line between sappy and sweet is a razor-thin one. ![]()
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