Saturday, May 2, 2015

The Perks of Being a Wallflower, 2012 - ★★★★

You can also find this review on Letterboxd

Wanted to see this for a long time. Yesterday it got released on Netflix so I had to watch it ASAP.
And I enjoyed it.
It's about Charlie (Logan Lerman) who starts as a freshman in high school and doesn't have any friends. And then he meets Sam (Emma Watson) and her stepbrother Patrick (Ezra Miller) and they invite him to a party, where he meets more of their friends. From then on, his life gets better.
This movie made me feel good. It's a well known movie scenario: The main guy is a loser who finds new friends and his life gets better.
But there is a twist to it in that Charlie is a little weirder than the others, his best friend killed himself not long ago and he is depressive.
This movie has it's dark moments for sure, but it also has fun moments, you really feel the actors having a great time themselves. The acting is great, Logan Lerman did one hell of a job playing this weird boy Charlie. Ezra Miller also gives a great performance as the gay friend. Emma Watson does also a great job. All in all it felt very real.
I loved to see Tom Savini as a teacher in this movie ... I wish Tom Savini was my teacher ... but whatever.
Also, Paul Rudd played a more serious role as the English teacher and sort of a friend to Charlie, who wants to be an author some day.
I gotta say though, there was one moment that made me turn off the movie for a short time because I was cringing so much at what Charlie was doing that I needed a break before I could go on. I won't spoil it, but he introduces the scene by telling that this was probably the worst way to do what he did.
Talking about introducing, we have lots of narrating by Charlie, not too much, it's just the right amount. The movie is narrated in form of letters Charlie writes to his friend who killed himself. I liked how they used that as a way to narrate that makes actually sense, since this seems like something the character really would do.
This movie was directed and written by the author of the book it is based on, which is something we don't see often (Stephen King tried it once and it turned into Maximum Overdrive).
All in all I really enjoyed this movie and can just tell everyone to watch it. I give it 4 out of 5 stars.

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