thoughts on The Perks of Being a Wallflower

In honor of Kate Walsh playing a minor role in this movie, please enjoy my two favorite clips from her days on Grey's Anatomy. They are awesome, though I incorrectly remembered her calling Meredith a "tramp" in the first one, and I also incorrectly remembered Derek telling her, "I'll see you in Hell, Addie," in the second one. They would be better my way, but again: still awesome.





Okay. Now that that's out of the way...The Perks of Being a Wallflower. Logan Lerman plays Charlie, who has psychological issues stemming from a repressed childhood trauma (that he doesn't remember until late in the movie, and which I won't reveal the details of here) and from his best friend's recent suicide (which he tells his then-new friend Sam (Emma Watson) about while stoned at a party, promptly freaking her out). He starts high school with no friends, eating alone in the cafeteria (his older sister goes to his school and seems nice enough, but is, through much of the movie, constantly hanging out with her boyfriend, "Ponytail Derek"). However, he is fairly quickly taken in by two seniors-- the aforementioned Sam and her stepbrother Patrick-- and their group of friends, who Sam refers to as "the island of misfit toys." Indeed, they are not the "cool kids"; they include Mary Elizabeth, who has "somehow gotten angrier since becoming a Buddhist," and Alice, who "is constantly stealing jeans from the mall, which doesn't make any sense, since her parents are rich." I'm not sure if this is the type of movie I can say I enjoyed, exactly, as it dealt with some pretty heavy stuff, but there are definitely things that I appreciated, including...

1) ...lunch on that first day of school, when Charlie nervously looks around for someone to sit with. I've been the new kid before, and yeah, they capture this accurately. You can practically hear his heart beating in this scene. One of my problems with a lot of TV and movie teens (and I may have complained about this before) is that they seem way too confident; Rory Gilmore on Gilmore Girls, for example, was always just casually eating lunch by herself, wearing her headphones and reading a book, and I really had a hard time believing that she cared so little about fitting in. Like, there is one episode where she goes off to a room by herself during a party and opens a book that she's brought along with her, and I remember screaming at the TV, "WHY CAN'T YOU JUST BE NORMAL?" Charlie, though dealing with a host of serious problems, is ASTOUNDINGLY normal, which I also really appreciated. A lot of movies with mentally ill characters make that illness the single defining aspect of their lives, and that isn't the case here. It is an important aspect of his life, and sometimes plays a bigger role in his life than in others, but there is a lot more to him than that.

2) ...the sheer joy Charlie feels at just having friends. Now, as I've mentioned before, Patrick, Sam, Mary Elizabeth, and Alice aren't the "cool kids," and, since they are all going off to college at the end of the movie, they won't be the only good friends Charlie ever makes, and I doubt he'll even keep in touch over the years with Mary Elizabeth and Alice (though I think Sam and Patrick, especially Sam, will always be special to him). That's how it works, when you're in a new situation: you fall in with the first people to be nice to you, and maybe you stay friends with them, maybe you don't, but just that feeling of belonging is HUGE. The movie captures that really well, also.

3) ...the fact that Charlie knows all of the answers in his English class but won't raise his hand for fear of singling himself out as "different." Again: he isn't overly confident like a lot of TV and movie teens. (Though I could relate to Charlie in a lot of ways, though, that isn't really one of them; sure, there have been individual classroom situations where I haven't really talked a lot, but in high school, I totally would have been obliviously constantly raising my hand and then been genuinely confused when people found me annoying.)

Basically, you're getting the idea here: this movie gets a lot of the little things right that a lot of movies get wrong. During the movie, I wondered when, exactly, this movie was taking place; I guessed the late eighties or early nineties, and yep, looking it up just now, I learned it was during the 1991-92 school year. The kids are constantly making each other mixed tapes; I was making mixed tapes right up until the day I got my first car with a CD player, which I'm going to go ahead and admit was in 2004. But, yeah-- I miss the mixed tape, and how sometimes it would run out of room mid-song, as Charlie experiences (see? Again with the little details). Oh, and Kate Walsh (who plays Charlie's mom) is always wearing these flowered dresses like EVERYONE wore back then. Oh! And there's this moment where Charlie just puts down the cordless phone when his girlfriend-at-the-time won't stop talking, and his dad gets exasperated because he needs the phone. Remember cordless phones that the whole family shared? Remember when not everyone had their own cell phone? Man.

Another thing that is nice about this movie is that, though some of the high school characters in this movie do your average, jerky high school things (such as calling Patrick "Nothing" FOR THE ENTIRE SCHOOL YEAR because of ONE incident in shop class), and though some truly awful things have happened to Charlie over the course of his life, he is basically surrounded by good people. His friends abandon him for awhile as a result of something that happens at a party but like him again when he sticks his neck out for one of them-- again, the type of thing that happens ALL the TIME, especially when you're young, but even sometimes when you're an adult. His parents seem to give him a pretty decent amount of freedom considering his past issues and even his age, and they don't seem to freak out about too much, even though over the course of the movie he 1) brings home an older girl with a white streak in her hair 2) is found passed out on the snow after taking acid and 3) gets into a pretty major fight at school at one point. His brother is a college football player and doesn't seem to have much in common with him, yet he seems to take a genuine interest him. His sister, as noted before, isn't above ignoring him at school, but knows to tell a friend to call 911 when Charlie calls her freaking out. Again, basically good people, even if they don't always do everything right.

Here are a couple of bits of randomness (yes, in addition to the Grey's Anatomy clips): 1) Paul Rudd plays Charlie's English teacher. I don't really have much to say about that. I just thought it was cool.

2) Sam, Patrick, Mary Elizabeth, and Alice are all members of the cast of the Rocky Horror Picture Show, which seems to play year-round in their town. My thoughts on this are a) that movie is SO inappropriate for high school students to even be watching, let alone to be so involved in and b) GOD. I haven't ever been to a "real" showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, I've just seen it on VH1 a couple of times, yet SOMEHOW, something happens to get "Toucha Toucha Toucha Touch Me" stuck in my head for days on end like once every two years. Before this, it was when the Glee kids tried to put on The Rocky Horror Show in their school (only it wasn't allowed, because again-- SO INAPPROPRIATE). Now-- this movie. It's just a weird thing to find yourself singing to yourself on your normal Thursday morning run, is all I'm saying.

And on that note, I will leave you with this somewhat disturbing clip of Miss Pillsbury from Glee singing "Toucha Toucha Toucha Touch Me" to Mr. Schue while Britney and Santana look on. You're welcome.