Before watching this movie, all I knew was that it was a coming-of-age story, and that Emma Watson and Nina Dobrev are in it. That's enough to make me a bit biased when it comes to reviewing it. Then I watched it and decided there's no way I can criticize this movie. So I apologize for all you Negative Nancys out there who really like criticism, but I just have so much good stuff to say about Perks.
Perks of Being a Wallflower is about a boy named Charlie, and how he enters high school a quiet and sad kid with virtually no friends, writing to an imaginary friend. Soon, though, he makes a handful of senior friends who help him adjust to high school. It's the typical coming-of-age tale with overtones of psychological twists and turns, and the little group of friends all go through turning points in their lives as they go off to college or into the next stage of their lives.
Actors, actors, actors. Logan Lerman as Charlie was flawless; that awkward but cute guy thing is hard to pull off! Besides that, though, Lerman does a great job showing those rare moments of emotion that can only appear so many times in a wallflower. Just recently, I watched a video of some Harry Potter actors trying to say things in American accents; Emma Watson was actually pretty bad at it, so considering that video was made only a few years ago, she did an impressive job with it in this movie. There were definitely moments when I suddenly started looking for Hermione, but her acting made up for it. Nina Dobrev, even though she played a relatively small role, did a great job as well. I actually prefer her style of acting with moments of heightened emotion; if you watch this movie, you'll see what I mean when I say that woman can put a hell of a lot of emotion in one very short word. She's definitely had her experience in acting out the more negative side of the emotional spectrum because of The Vampire Diaries, so it was quite a surprise to find out she wants to do comedy sometime in the future.
Within the plot itself, there are two main reasons why I am probably way too biased when I say I loved this movie: I love writing and psychology, and there was plenty of both. I actually just felt the sudden need to buy a nice old typewriter... Just kidding, I just realized how often I use the backspace button. God bless modern technology.
Fun fact: Perks was directed by the same guy who wrote the book. I found this immensely interesting, because the job of a director is to really understand the themes and message of a story, and so you can now rest assured the artistic vision of Perks is consistent throughout the book and the movie. What Stephen Chbosky did was add little snippets throughout the movie that became more important as time went on, which can only really be done by someone with a real understanding of what's going on in the plot and the characters' heads. Visually, some of the camerawork and effects matched perfectly with the mood and atmosphere.
Lastly, going back to the little snippets, this movie took advantage of something that isn't really seen in movies nowadays: implication. Today's films are all about getting raw video and seeing everything, stripping away any visual boundaries and forgetting about emotion in a whirlwind of an overload of images and sound. This is probably because of the availability of more and more technology that can produce more exotic images and sounds. While this can be done artfully and manage not to completely ignore the importance of emotion, sometimes it can lead to the audience not feeling any connection to characters, which defeats the purpose of a good story. In Perks, many things are implied, albeit conveniently because of Charlie's blackouts, but it was nice how they didn't actually film the most explicit parts of the movie. There's a theme of innocence and going back to childhood, and just filming things that are unspeakable to the characters would take away from the themes and the emotion. I'm sure there are people out there who disagree with me, but regardless, I appreciated the power of implication in this film.
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