The Outsiders (1983)
The Outsiders is a movie adapted from a book made by S. E. Hinton about a group of teenage greasers from the 1960's who live in the East side of a small town in the middle of Oklahoma. The main character, a 14 year old boy named Ponyboy, lives with his two brothers; Sodapop, and Darry. Are all a part of this gang of greasers. After a night out with Johnny and Dallas, two of the other greasers, and a fight with Darry, Ponyboy and Johnny, get caught up in a murder after a fight with Socs. Johnny and Ponyboy have to then travel out of town to the countryside, to avoid the police. The movie plays out in the exact way the book told the story. And sometimes (maybe even most of the time), exact dialogues from the book are used. This made the movie somewhat less interesting the first time I watched it in 8th grade after our class read the book. As the stuff on screen was almost a carbon copy. But watching the movie a second time, when I forgot the majority of the dialogue, and any word for word similarities would just fly by instead of sticking. The movie was much better, and even though I remembered the fact that the movie stuck very close to the source and basically had the book as a script, I couldn't really remember what was exactly identical. Another thing about the movie is how the acting from Dally's character in one particular scene near the end kind of subverted the importance of what was actually happening with the story. And it instead made me think, "Ok, that acting is pretty off." The description that I'm giving now may be very vague, but once you see the scene, you should be able to understand it. Even though the movie has a few things that make it a bit odd, in terms of storytelling. It is still a movie that is pretty good when compared to its book counterpart. Overall, I would give the Outsiders a 3.5-ish/5. It's a solid movie, that isn't in the Pretty Good region of a 4, but it isn't quite under the "Ok" region of 3 and under. And even then, I think that it is a good idea to watch this movie, especially if you have read the book, just do watch it immediately after you finish reading.