My fascination with Stephen King started with a paper boat. The boat bobbed and weaved its way along a tiny stream created by the day’s rampant rain fall. Little Georgie, whose boat it was, happily followed the paper toy until it disappeared down a drain. Saddened and a little ashamed that he had lost the boat his older brother had made him, Georgie begins to walk home but is alerted by a gravely voice from within the blackness of the drain. Georgie investigates. He peers into the drain. To his surprise a smiling clown stands before him holding the boat…

…they never did discover Georgie’s body.

Films that make us happy. It can depend entirely on the day of the week, a particular mood, a desire for a specific genre or type of story. But I do know that films offer at least one of our outlets when we turn to entertainment as a means to lift our mood. But, choosing ten, twenty, or in this case twenty-five movies that make us happy is an almost impossible task given the very unique and personal reasons why we choose a film to make us happy in the first place.

What films make you happy?

“Stand By Me” is one of the finest Stephen King book-to-screen adaptations ever made. Director Rob Reiner had a knack with King’s material as he also brilliantly brought “Misery” to the screen. In “Stand By Me”, a tale steeped in 1950s nostalgia, four childhood friends set off on a journey to find the missing body of one of their classmates. The friends, portrayed by young actors River Phoenix, Corey Feldman, Wil Wheaton, and Jerry O’Connell, discover more than just a body on their travels, each finding a bond within one another that would last for the rest of their lives.

The ‘coming of age’ movie is a bit ambiguous. There’s a tendency to link the sub-genre to films about kids, so Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate, and Jeff Daniels in Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild, and Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker in Star Wars seemingly came of age too late in life. It appears there’s a timeframe on the coming of age movie that sits somewhere between childhood and adulthood before, as protagonists grow into their twenties, the film fuses itself with other sub-genres like the yuppie-in-peril or social problem movie …