Rebel Notorious

**The Complete Novel** * “Nothing gold can stay.” The Outsiders *is a flawed yet deeply touching film that takes you on a journey of family, friendship and innocence. It can be an oddly constructed film, littered with stilted performances, bizarre editing choices, glaring continuity errors and far too many split diopter shots, all of this is just the first half of the film. These are compounding issues that can lead to sequences I can only really described as haphazard. The second half evens out, still with… oddities… but is more cohesive and is where the thesis of the film comes into focus. It isn’t paced all that well but it does eventually clamber its way to a satisfying thematic conclusion. Even if it leaves a burning question of “why?” when it comes to the film’s framing. A highlight and letdown of the film is the stacked cast, most of whom go completely unutilised. One major thing that I think hampered my enjoyment of this is the sound mixing. Now sometimes I can mention things like this or visual things, that by and large will not bother a majority of people sitting down to watch something. However, *The Outsiders* possibly has one of the most frustrating audio mixes that will bother almost anyone that watches it. What little intense sound effects there are (car engines, gun shots, trains etc), are so overwhelmingly loud they drown out the dialogue, so does the music and it’s because the dialogue has been mixed so quietly that turning my soundbar up to 3 or 4 times louder than I usually set it, I still couldn’t understand most dialogue when nothing was there to effect it without the subtitles on. And this also means having the remote to hand anticipating the moment something too loud is gonna happen otherwise the volume will bring the fucking house down.

*“You met me at a very strange time in my life.”* It’s incredible that 1) I haven’t seen this movie at some point in my 29 years of life and 2) even tho I knew the “big twist”, it still didn’t ruin the movie. You take a film like *The Sixth Sense*, it is heavily built around not knowing about that one thing and it loses a lot if you go in with that knowledge. However with *Fight Club*, you can know the general twist and still know absolutely nothing about the film, its themes and messaging.

*“The net is vast and limitless.”* I’ve been on a bit of a cyberpunk genre kick while finishing up another playthrough of *Cyberpunk 2077*. So of course, it’s a great opportunity to watch one of my favourite movies of all time. I’m always surprised how short this feels while giving the audience time to soak in what’s going on. I’ve said basically everything I ever could have put here in a review in the first ever episode of Anime Lane, so you should go listen to that. I love that one shot of a helicopter circling a building where the building is a very rudimentary CGI structure, it’s such a cool visual effect. I own so many copies of this movie and yet watching it now, I realise, I’m still missing the Japanese UHD which has a different translation.

*“Welcome home, stranger.”* The trailers really didn’t have me convinced about this one. They lacked something, heart maybe? Or maybe they felt clinical in a way? Nolan’s specific style seems almost diametrically opposed to creating the kind of Epic *The Odyssey *is. But he pulls it off. Someone once described the game *Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey *as the world as the ancients Greeks saw it, I feel similarly about this film. Things that maybe feel anachronistic at first embed themselves in the view of this world. Not making the dialogue overly wrought or poetic makes it easier to be absorbed, to not feel the outsider looking in. That being said, Nolan still fucking sucks at dialogue mixing and I thought being in a theatre with a proper sound system would remedy this but alas, he’s just fucking bad at it.