No Jazz Before the Rumble

Recently, I read S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders for the first time. From the first pages, I was completely engrossed in the book. It reminded me of Holden Caufield (The Catcher in the Rye), but with more raw emotion and less snarky, self-defensive humor. I read it in an evening and am working my way through her other novels. I finished Rumble Fish the other night with the same enthusiasm and am impatiently awaiting the other books from Amazon.

Growing up, the Francis Ford Coppola's movie of the book had always been one of my favorites.  So, you can probably imagine how excited I was when I found an extended cut on Netflix ( The Outsiders: The Complete Novel). A lot of reviewers complained that they had replaced the original score with a 50's soundtrack and ruined it, but I'm starting to believe that there are too many people in the world resistant to change.

For me, the extra 22 minutes of footage was pure bliss. While reading the book, I was astonished that so many fantastic scenes were missing from the movie. I missed the relationship between Ponyboy and Sodapop. Also, the new music felt more authentic to the book. It made me feel like I was living in the characters' world. The extended cut included crucial information in forming the characters and helped to fill in all of the missing pieces from the book. Sodapop and Two Bit are my favorite characters in the book, so it was really nice because so many fantastic scenes that were added included a lot about their characters. It also helped to fuel my new bizarre crush on Rob Lowe.