Tuesday, December 3, 2013

Perks of being a Wallflower

I don't know just why I netflixed this one.  Must have been the cast, Emma Watson, and Logan Lerman. Logan has had some decent roles, The Lightening Thief, Three Musketeers, and this one.  And everyone wants to see Emma Watson as anything besides Hermione.  (Is there life after Harry Potter?) 
   Emma steals all the scenes.  She is pretty, slender, well dressed, the life of the parties. And there is a lot of partying.  She is vivacious, and Logan falls in love with her at first sight.  But by the end of the movie, despite having spent a lot of time together, Emma complains that after all that time, Logan never asked her out. 
  The flick is about surviving high school.  Logan, entering as a freshman, has his doubts.  For a shy freshman he does OK, manages to get into a clique with pretty girls (Emma) and the class clown.  He finds a sympathetic teacher, he gets invited to all the parties.  Kids have done worse. 
   Especially as Logan's character (Charlie) is a zero.  He never does anything, at least not on camera.  He has no skills, he isn't into sports, either as a player or a fan. He has no hobbies, he doesn't ride, or camp, or hike, or boat, or drive, or hack computers, or play computer games, or fly model airplanes, or anything.  Hell, he doesn't even watch TV.  And he dislikes high school, keeps counting the days until he can graduate and get out.  This despite having a decent social life. 
   The irritating thing about this flick, is that neither Logan or Emma ever DO anything.  Stuff happens to them, but they never take any action to swim up stream.  Or down stream, or anything.  They just show up, and somebody else does something to them, and they just take it.  No guts.  Or the director doesn't want to show anything.  What should have been the climax, where Logan stands up in the cafeteria and defends the class clown with his fists, the camera just blacks out, we don't see anything.  By most people's standards, standing up to the football team to keep them from beating up a friend is heroic.  But, we don't see this happening, they tell us about it afterward.  And, although it gets Logan and Emma back together after a quarrel, that's about all it does. 
    There are some anachronisms.  The high school students all dress too well. Someone's favorite song turns up on a 45 RPM record as a gift.  Hell I haven't seen a working 45 RPM record player for 30 years.  Emma gives Logan a manual typewriter as a gift (Logan wants to become a writer).  I ditched my manual typewriter shortly after I got my dual floppy disk MS-DOS IBM PC back in the '80s. 
   Then to round out the movie, Logan suffers a nervous breakdown right after graduation and spends a month in a funny farm.  Although the director had been hinting thruout the movie that there is something wrong with Logan, the hints are ambiguous, and we are looking to see Logan get well as things work out for him in school.  But, soon as school is over, and Emma is off to summer school at Penn State, Logan falls apart and gets hospitalized.  And then after doing some time, he recovers.  We don't see Logan doing anything to make himself well, it just happens.  Like everything else, it just happens.
   The critics liked this flick even though I didn't.  That's movie critics for you.   
   Anyhow, a low speed movie.  Hunger Games is gonna be better.  

   

2 comments:

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Dstarr said...

Thank you. I post about the movies I go to see, which isn't all that many these days.