Stand By Me

Comparing the first train  scene from Stephen Kings novella The Body to the same scene in Stand By Me, I believe that the adaptation in the film was successful. In the novella the character models are completely different that in the film. They come off as more adult like in the novella but I feel like the portrayal of them in the movie was better. Instead of Gordie being the one to pull Teddy off the tracks it was Chris. This worked in the directors favour to change The roles, I feel it made the characters of Chris and Gordie more believeable. Overall the scene was successful in my opinion.

What I think films do best

I think that films have the ability to take the viewer on a very intense and sometimes relateble or understandable story. The actors in film use their skills to accurately and skillfully portray all of the details of the film in short easy to follow segments. A novel on the other hand requires one maybe two chapters simply to establish the scene and mood. In film this can all be achieved by a 15 second camera shot of the characters surroundings. So using the ability to show highly detailed things in a relatively short time film can draw people in and make them feel as though they are their and one with the character making them have emotions for the things happening on screen. That I think is what film doe best.

4 Elements that films do best

The four key elements of film are moving through time, moving through space, breaking language barriers, and magnifying an actors art. With a small stretch of the imagination all of these elements can be found in the movie Rush a Rob Howard film.

The movie moves through space with cuts from race to race.
The movie moves through time both through parts of the races and different events in time.
The movie breaks language barriers because there is English and a few other languages like Italian throughout the movie.
Finally the movie magnifies the actors art because they had to play race car drivers and one played a burn victim. I imagine that this would have been very difficult. Also they had to portray their characters realistically because they where based on real people.