Hacker Cinema
The Outsiders
1983 · Film · 91 min
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola
In 1960s Tulsa, class divisions ignite a violent rivalry between the working-class Greasers and the privileged Socs. When a deadly encounter forces two Greasers, Ponyboy and Johnny, to flee, their struggle for survival and redemption exposes the fragile innocence and enduring bonds of youth on the wrong side of town.
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5 comments on Hacker News
Many of the movies you've listed are indeed excellent, for example The Outsiders is by now a cult icon for how many future stars it launched and both Tetro and Twixt made it to the Cahiers du Cinema top 10 movies of the year (and Youth Without Youth was also very highly received there).
I think most people are unaware that Coppola has also directed the following: Twixt (2011), Tetro (2009), Youth Without Youth (2007), The Rainmaker (1997), Bram Stokers' Dracula (1992), The Godfather Part III (1990), Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988), Gardens of Stone (1987), The Cotton Club (1984), Rumble Fish (1983), The Outsiders (1983), and One from the Heart (1981).
In other words, Coppola has directed plenty of bad to mediocre films after his incredible run from The Godfather through Apocalypse Now (1972 to 1979). Granted, that run was enough to forever ensconce him in Pantheon of great films directors. I think Megalopis is getting so much (undeserved press) because Coppola says its his last film and it was self financed. The trend line in his movies, however, has been negative for a long time. So, were it not for those two remarkable attributes, Megalopis would probably have come and gone with little notice, much like the rest of his since the 90s.
100% this.
School largely ruined my interest in reading until I became an adult and re-found it.
Being regularly told to read boring books, of course any interest in doing it casually was going to go out the Window.
Sure there is value in needing to read certain things from an academic standpoint, Beowulf is a good example. But there was zero reason I needed to read "The Outsiders" when we just watched the movie after reading it anyways.
Just because something is a classic, doesn't mean we have to consume it in its original form to get the meaning.
Instead fill the library with a diverse collection of books, let the kid choose what they want to read, don't rush them, and importantly if it just isn't working let them move on to a new book.
Side note:
I know some people are going to groan at this. But seriously, books based on video games can be a fantastic gateway towards actually caring about reading. It is how I re-discovered by interest in reading as an adult.
There’s a line in a film from 1983 called The Outsiders which is like “give me one of those cancer sticks”, so I think smoking was understood to be harmful earlier than that.
I think this idea that the teen mental illness epidemic began in 2012 is probably wrong. What is far more likely is that society began to open up more to these ideas, more people got diagnosed than before, and more young people identified with these struggles and felt more comfortable talking about them.
Susanna Kaysen's 1993 mental health memoir "Girl, Interrupted", which recounts her experience as a young female adolescent struggling with mental health in the late 1960s, for example, received an enormous amount of renewed attention and interest when it was adapted into a film in 1999.
The popularity of that film really opened up the conversation for a lot of young people in the 2000s, but even before that, similar struggles by teens were covered in the 1967 novel "The Outsiders", which also was adapted into a film in 1983, and if memory serves, there was also a similar rise in reports of an epidemic in the 1980s.
I’m not saying that any of these books or movies led to a mental health contagion, I’m saying that the struggles that today’s teens are going through have always been there, but in the past, they were either ignored or hidden away. Today, everything is shared far more widely and freely, which is why it looks like teens are suffering more than the past.
I also think if you go back into the literature of the past, you’ll find these same mental health concerns expressed just about everywhere. It’s just that instead of talking about them, they did everything possible to hide them away. Let’s not forgot Bertha Mason, the character in the 1847 novel Jane Eyre, who was locked away in a room in a house. We are no longer doing that to people so it seems like there is a new epidemic at work, when it’s always been with us.