Grease; Pretty Woman; Dirty Dancing; Stand By Me; Ferris Bueller’s Day Off – just some of the films I wore out on VHS tape as a girl with my constant watching and re-watching. I’d sit gazing at the tv screen intently, barely blinking, mentally trying to emulate the sassy style of the female characters; fancying the pants off the chisel-cheeked male ones. “You’ll get square eyes,” my mum used to say to my sister Karen and I, as we goggled at the box.\u00a0I think I believed that if I concentrated hard enough, some of their innate coolness and excess confidence would leap out of the telly like laser-beams and transfer as if by magic into my gangly teenage body.<\/p>\n
But if there was one film I loved above all others as a hormonal adolescent, it was Francis Ford Coppola’s The Outsiders<\/a><\/strong><\/span> – a coming-of-age movie about a gang of hard-up young men (who all just so happen to be absolutely drop-dead gorgeous), the ‘Greasers’, who desperately want to fit in and be accepted, but for whom life is a daily struggle, as they battle with the middle-class ‘Socs’: the clean-cut, chino-wearing rich kids.<\/p>\n