The Outsiders - "The Complete Novel"

I was most curious to see this new version of a film that had so moved me in my youth. And, well, the DVD features are well worth seeing, for fans of the film. All the major cast members save Emilio Estevez and Tom Cruise, as well as Coppola and other members of the crew, participate in a short retrospective. There's also kind of a neat idea, a sequence showing the actors reading short passages from the novel about their characters.

The cast contributes a breezy commentary; Rob Lowe in particular is endearingly self-depreciating. Coppola's commentary, unfortunately, collapses under its own pretentious rationalization. It spotlights the fact that this is the most ill-conceived "special edition" since Star Wars.

First of all, changing the music was a terrible idea. Yeah, the original score was melodramatic. But you know what? So is the story. And more importantly...so are your emotions when you're a teenager. By replacing it with rockabilly and surf tunes, Coppola seems to cheapen those emotions. And drapes some of the most dramatic scenes in the film with a message that says: "Don't worry. It's just a romp." Or worse, god help us..."Tarantinoesque" irony.

Coppola was right to cut the footage he did back in 1982. Replacing it in the name of making the film more resemble "the complete novel" does not convince. Why? Real simple. A movie is not a novel. In a novel, you can have epilogues and digressions from the main spine of the story. In a movie, they just seem like anticlimaxes and padding.

Because of the age I was (11) when it first came out; The Outsiders is one of those movies that are just in my matrix. I knew the novel like the back of my hand at the time too. I'm glad to see Coppola's epic screen pictures in wide screen for the first time since its theatrical release (this is a movie that really suffers in pan-and-scan).

But I know, with the certainty that an 11-year-old knows, it was once a better movie than this.