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Rob Reiner

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I’m struggling to process the appalling news about Rob Reiner and his wife. When someone whose work has given me so much pleasure dies my usual reaction is to dig out some of that work and enjoy it again. When the circumstances are as they appear to be that doesn’t seem right, and I’m not even sure I could enjoy it until at least some time has passed. What horrific news to wake up to.

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  2. Utterly, utterly grim news – what a world.

    I was literally in the cinema on Friday watching The Princess Bride, a film that retains its absolute magic after all these years. Sat there watching it, I reflected that I really struggle to think of any movie with more perfect casting – pretty much everyone knocks it right out of the park.

    Reiner is responsible for any number of my happiest moments in front of a screen, and his preposterous five film directoral run from 1984 to 1989, taking in Spinal Tap, The Sure Thing, Stand By Me, The Princess Bride and When Harry Met Sally, has to be some sort of pinnacle in terms of delivering pure enjoyment, particularly across so many different genres.

    This is a terrible loss, and an awful way to have gone out after having lit up so many lives.

  6. I should probably check the news before coming here in the morning as I had no idea. What a terrible tragedy.

    Excellent director, his career reminds me of his fellow former child actor/ turned director Ron Howard. Not necessarily a director with a style that you immediately recognise, but someone who did his job very very well.

    • That jerk doesn’t have an ounce of compassion in his sorry frame. I also saw a few posts on Facebook saying they didn’t like Reiner’s politics. WTF!

    • I also ignored it at first thinking it was crude satire. It’s hard to believe that we have reached the stage where a leader, even Trump, would allow such bile to be issued in his name. Cruelty is the point, though, isn’t it? Push the envelope until every foul deed and opinion are accepted as the norm.

      Here’s a link to a link showing the full message. (Not a link to X)

      this is one of the most psychotic things Trump has ever posted

      — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2025-12-15T14:52:36.457Z

          • I can’t imagine the mindset one would need to write a message like Trump’s following the (alleged) murder of an older couple, one of them a man responsible for making so many people happy. What an awful place the inside of his head must be.

            Interesting to see that people on X, which is normally a hellsite of awfulness, appear to be rounding on Trump over his post. It would be surprising if, after his endless list of dreadful deeds and comments, it was a post about Rob Reiner that opened the MAGA faithful’s eyes to what a catastrophe he is in every way, but we can hope.

      • That is absolutely lovely.

        I finally read The Body this Summer just gone, nudged to do so by one of the Stephen King threads on here.

        I’d always avoided the story, because I felt that nothing could possibly top the movie, only take a little away from it. But now I wanted to read something of King’s that was outside Horror, to get a proper sense of the quality of his writing.

        Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was a real pleasure – most of the film’s genius is right there on the page. The various set pieces, the dialogue that rings so true, many of the best lines. I still preferred the movie, but I could appreciate that – much like Peter Jackson’s Lord of The Rings trilogy – the director’s art had been in what to cut away, rather than in adding new treasures.

        But there was one passage in The Body that properly sat me down, that I had to read three times before I could turn the page, and it’s the same one Will Wheaton has quoted at the top of his post. I’ll repeat it here:

        “The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them — words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they’re brought out. But it’s more than that, isn’t it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you’ve said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That’s the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller, but for want of an understanding ear.”

        I think a major part of the genius of Stand By Me is that it speaks so directly to that quote, even while excising it from the story. That it shows without telling how important your secrets are, and how carefully you should choose with whom you share them.

        The quote is some of King’s absolute best work, based on what I’ve read to date, and it sums up beautifully the relationship between child and man – that struggle to identify and speak your own distinct truth, no matter how daft it might sound. How much easier it is to speak that truth with the friends you love and trust, even if they’re only passing through. Perhaps especially if they’re only passing through.

        Thank you for sharing that.

  8. I suppose Trump has achieved his aim of taking an event, any event, however awful, and making the himself the centre of attention. I’d prefer not to be such an arsehole and loudly advertise myself as such, but maybe that’s why I’m not in such high office.

    • It works though; this thread is going to end up being largely about him.

      Trump’s behaviour is neither surprising nor illuminating. In this particular case, it has no actual bearing on the subject. Best ignored so focus can stay on the wonderful art produced by Rob Reiner, who left the world better than he found it.

  9. To which end… favourite Rob Reiner movie? Favourite scenes?

    I’ll start us off with this magic moment from The Sure Thing:

    Let’s please have at least one good thing in life that isn’t sullied by the orange vulgarian.

  10. There’s a beautiful little story on Bluesky about Rob Reiner’s reaction to viewing Shawshank (a film he coveted but could not have to direct) for the first time.

    When Rob Reiner was on his all-time epic run at the start of his career, he had an opportunity to read a script that was looking for a production partner, and he lost his mind for it. He decided Castle Rock had to have it, no matter what.

    — Drew McWeeny (@drewmcweeny.com) 2025-12-15T07:37:08.347Z

  11. As well as his largely excellent films, I like his occasional bits of acting. One favourite is his turn as Tom Hanks’ mate in Sleepless in Seattle.

    TH’s grieving character is considering going back on the dating scene for the first time in years. RR’s simple advice? “Tiramisu.” This prompts the oblivious TH to say, “Tiramisu? What is it? Some woman’s gonna want me to do it to her and I’m not gonna know what it is!”

    RR holds his own against the mighty Hanks, and makes a brief chat into a funny little scene that, I read online, helped introduce tiramisu to US audiences. Bravo.

  13. 39 years ago, 1986, I was 17. I saw more movies that year at cinemas in Brussels than I would for the rest of my life. Practically one a week. There were some fantastic films on release then.

    I can still remember the cinema I walked into to go and see this one. It was a magical night, and I loved every minute, the title song is one of favourite earworms and singalongs of all time.

    When I was 12, I left rural Salwarpe and never really went back to my childhood home of dens and tree houses, building dams in the stream, putting pennies on the railway line, walking across ploughed fields on rainy days so the mud caked the wellies into platform boots, heading off on bikes until the sun started coming down.

    But this film took me back there, even though it’s from another continent.

    Too much fucking perspective.

    • Ah, Sal.

      I posted The Sure Thing above, but the end of Stand By Me is my real favourite Rob Reiner moment.

      I grew up in Sheen, South West London, within strolling distance of Sheen Common, with its small woodland that leads to a gate into Richmond Park. Probably the last generation of kids whose parents would let them out of the front door in the morning and ask only that they return through the same door by nightfall.

      We explored every inch of those woodlands, building bases, playing hide and seek, climbing trees. I remember as a tiny child standing on a tree stump in a small clearing, pretending to address an audience of thousands. I remember riding bikes full pelt through the narrow lanes, and stumbling upon rope swings left behind by older kids. I remember forever the freedom of that woodland, how it made me feel; as the poet said – ripened by legend, with a feathered cap and a wooden sword. And my friends shared all of it with me.

      At the end of the Summer I was turning 12, my family suddenly and unexpectedly moved out of London. It was a sudden and unexpected event, a sting in the tail of what had been perhaps the greatest Summer of my life, I had graduated to hanging out at the local sports centre with some rougher kids from the area, and was spending my days playing football and getting into trouble. The first knocking of adolescence, of life beyond the woodland. But with a week left of Summer before we left forever, I knew instinctively what needed to be done – I sought out my old friends and we spent those final days back out in the woods, fabricating gunfights and wild adventures, before retiring home for board games and movies. I will remember for the rest of my life how those final days felt; how those woodlands felt like home and those friends felt like family.

      I watched Stand By Me for the first time that Summer. I was 11 years old, and it struck squarely at the absolute root of me, because I recognised those days, those kids, those adventures. They were my life at that time. And I broke a little at the ending, because I recognised that we too were growing up and would inevitably go our own separate ways. Different schools, different roads to travel. Summers a little less magical forever until one day the magic was all but gone.

      I stayed in contact with a couple of those boys. We’ve been with each other through ups and downs, and I’ve watched them get older, even though every time I look at them I see the kids they were that Summer. Stand By Me remains a favourite movie – the poster was on the wall at my 40th birthday party and I return to it every few years, to wonder again at how Rob Reiner took that fantastic short story and made a movie that not only matched but transcended it.

      Every time I watch Stand By Me, I’m back in those woods – I’m 11 years old again, riding out that last great wave of emotion and imagination before you start to see the world as it really is. Sharing that experience with my friends, the memory made a little more bittersweet by the knowledge of the battles they had ahead.

      I was with one of those same friends on Friday watching the Princess Bride. Afterwards he told me over drinks that he has nowhere to be on Christmas morning. Parents gone, no partner. Alone. So he’s now staying at mine for Christmas, because he’s family in every way that matters, and because of the bond forged in those woodlands all those years ago,

      I watch Stand By Me, and as the movie ends, as Richard Dreyfuss leaves his laptop and heads outside to the two boys playing with their beach towels on the lawn, I pull out my phone – every single time – and I text the same message to the same people. “I just watched Stand By Me. I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was 12 years old. Jesus, does anyone? Thank you for everything”. Thanks to them, and thanks to Rob Reiner. When I heard the awful news yesterday, my reaction was to send the same text to the same people.

      Stand By Me is a magical film, because it captures the heady myth of that time in your life. That sense of having it all ahead of you, even as shadows creep into the margins. It captures the way you see the world, the stories you tell yourself and one another. It captures the magic of kids out deep in the woods, and the sensation of looking back at it all from a remote of decades. The dense romanticism of looking back at it all once it’s long gone, of knowing what a fleeting moment in time that was, and how lucky you were to have been there for it, together.

      There will conceivably never be another movie about childhood like Stand By Me, which means there may never be a more moving paean to childhood’s end than the final few minutes of that movie. And even if such a movie does in future get made, it will never finish on a more perfect song.

      Thank you, Rob Reiner. Thank you.

  14. I recently read his book (with Christopher Guest/Michael McKean/Harry Shearer) ‘A Fine Line Between Clever & Stupid’ about Spinal Tap & it was wonderful. Well worth a read for anyone who loves the film as much as i do.

    Could you imagine being behind both Spinal Tap & Stand By Me?!? Any one of them would be the pinnacle of most careers

  15. I once chose Stand By Me to show to a group of 13/14-year-olds on a summer trip. I thought they’d totally relate to it and love it to bits. I thought at least they’d love the barf-o-rama scene. I was wrong. They couldn’t have been less enthusiastic in their appreciation. They wanted a superhero film. Bloody philistines.

  16. Regarding Stand By Me.
    One thing that has always struck me about this film is how good the dream scene is, it genuinely evokes that feeling of what a dream feels like & is a staggering piece of film making because of it.

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