Rob Reiner

The world just keeps getting uglier. There's the recent shooting at Brown University, the antisemitic rampage in Australia, and the various ongoing wars and attempted genocides around the world. Famed director Rob Reiner and his wife were murdered by their son. For some reason, this particular story has heightened the gloom of all the others. I wouldn't even have ranked Reiner among my top ten favourite directors, but his great movies, The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally, Stand by Me, Spinal Tap, are such simple-hearted pleasures, such reliable exercises in seeing what's good in life. Consequently, last night I didn't feel like watching one of his movies. I was in the mood for a noir with murder and someone grimly pushing through (I watched Powell and Pressburger's The Small Back Room).

Here in Japan, Stand By Me is one of those handful of American movies that students and teacher frequently bring up to me. I can tell many of them truly do love the movie.

Last year, in June, I wrote about The Princess Bride and When Harry Met Sally after I had what I called a "Rob Reiner festival" over the weekend. The Princess Bride was a charm that never failed. When I was a kid, it was something I could always watch with friends and family and it remained great after I'd grown up. It's a parody but its longevity is due to its sincerity. It may mock some of the conventions of '30s swashbucklers, but it honours the best intentions behind them, the simple philosophy of love and chivalry.

When Harry Met Sally is almost the same thing for adults, though now that we're caught between the sexually repressive forces of the religious right and the neurotic left, it's something more of an artefact of a time when a healthy middle class was having enough casual sex to incorporate the experience into nuanced thoughts about life. That was the world in which When Harry Met Sally was made. It was a movie that recognised the gravity of challenges normal people faced but showed life to be something funny and bearable.

Rob Reiner made some of the best movies to help people just get through the bullshit of life. Who the fuck would murder him? Apparently it was his own son, who co-wrote a 2015 movie his father directed. It was about a troubled young man with a history of substance abuse, perhaps it was autobiographical. One could infer a motive for the murder just from that but, to paraphrase Sherlock Holmes, it's a capital mistake to draw conclusions without all the facts. One thing's for sure, it's a monstrous event.