I first saw Rumble Fish in Dublin, Ireland when it originally came out. I've seen it a couple times since, but was possessed by a need for its lush, narcotic dreaminess and bought the DVD yesterday. It's a recently released special edition with commentary by Coppola and a few docs, including a piece with Stewart Copeland on the innovative, percussive score.
Coppola's commentary isn't fun, or funny really, but it is fascinating. He's still such a filmmaker - really still in love in the medium - and he peppers his comments with intriguing asides about Ingmar Bergmann or D.W. Griffith or Pabst, then he's all mushy about 8 y.o. Sophia Coppola playing Diane Lane's little sister, then he's talking about how his eldest son snuck back onto the lot after Zoetrope went bankrupt to steal back a specific set of lens that Coppola had bought himself, and which he's leaving for his children.
He's just such a lovely guy, so fond of his cast, and the experience of making this movie. Questioning why he didn't make more little movies like this. And the movie itself is just so innovative in many ways - vastly moreso than the story required. But it is its own little dream world, and it's cute watching Suzie Hinton show up in a scene to flirt with Matt Dillon or a young Diana Scarwid.
The first scene alone (after some gorgeous time lapse photography of b/w clouds formations tumbling and rolling) has Lawrence Fishburne, Tom Waits, Matt Dillon, Chris Penn and Nicolas Cage, and Vincent Spano in it. That's some cast. (Whatever happened to Spano? He was so good in Baby It's You.) It's odd looking at Mickey Rourke's young, handsome face before he ruined his looks and then ruined them again with the plastic surgery. He's so good in this movie - really underplaying the character to excellent effect. Similar to his characters in Diner and Body Heat. Shit - it's not easy playing a teen dream juvie Camus.
(I keep thinking about David Lynch's direction of Kyle Machlachan in Dune: "More enigmatic! More charismatic!")