MWG: The Outsiders (1983)
Posted On March 2, 2008
MWG: The Outsiders (1983)
For this month Movie Watching – I have chosen the movie based on my favorite book when I was growing up.
From Netflix:
Francis Ford Coppola‘s drama about teen turmoil in rural Oklahoma features nearly every big name of 1980s cinema — including Tom Cruise, Matt Dillon, Emilio Estevez, C. Thomas Howell, Diane Lane, Ralph Macchio and Patrick Swayze. In this faithful adaptation of S.E. Hinton’s popular novel, the hardscrabble “Greasers” face off against the affluent “Socs,” and the resulting conflict proves sad and deadly for these ultimately lovable delinquents.
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Maybe I would have liked this more if I had read the book at an age when I would have empathized with the characters. I felt bad for Ponyboy when everyone would turn to him with their “deep thoughts”, but other than that I mostly was thinking how glad I was to not be a teenager and 157% emotion all the time.
The thing that amused me the most was seeing how young everyone was in this movie.
Besides this movie having a bunch of big names being super duper young, it is an oversimplified look at different social classes. The preppy kids are jerks and shown as always starting fights with the greasers, which are really just sweathearts underneath all their greasy hair. They read Robert Frost poems and Gone With the Wind to each other. The fight between the two gangs that leads to a death is pretty goofy. There is no tension when the kids are hiding out. They come back while people think that maybe they should view greasers in a different light than just hoodlums. Then another big gang fight and some random dying tragedy that isn’t very sad. It seemed very short with no real character development so random stuff happened and then it was over. Maybe the book got into all of that stuff better than the movie. It most likely did.
I did like laughing at everyone looking young, especially Rob Lowe who looks almost exactly the same as he does now. Same with Matt Dillon. Jeremy started to sing Dirty Dancing songs when we saw Patrick Swayze since he looked just the same as that movie. He might have even been wearing the same clothes.
Rating: C+
So many hot men in this movie I just couldn’t stop drooling.