The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Ratings: 6.6/10

Film Class: C+

Genre: Teenage Drama

The Perks of Being a Wallflower reminds of a modern age Donnie Darko film. It's dark, it's "cultist" and it's a film which left me thinking, "What the hell just happened?"

Charlie is an introvert freshman who just entered high school. He manages to join a clique of friends who have issues of their own. The movie is about troubled teenage children, and how they thrive in this not-so-innocent world. Topics such as sex, drugs and homosexually will be covered. However, those scenes are mild, at times even implicitly represented.

It makes a decent watch, but because I can't relate to it, since I'm no longer teenagish and too singaporeanish, I doubt it will appeal to most local audience either. It does give us a perceived view of how some American teenage kids would go through their younger years as a high school freshman, the difficulties he/she faces and how they overcome them to become "better" adults.

In terms of accuracy, I sure hope it only voices out the minority of American kids, if not they seriously need to look into the issue... "Developing" emo kids at that age is definitely not healthy, for the individual nor to the society.

Emma Watson was the starlet of this dark movie. She brings such radiance to the scenes she's in and it just shows how versatile the Hermoine girl is. Together with lead actor Logan Lerman, and her stepbrother Erza Miller, there were too many pretty faces hurdling the average audience to be pulled into the casts' troubled minds. 

To sum it up, it's an eye-candy teenage flick which is supposed to be dark, yet more fun to watch than most others of similar genres. Didn't quite get to me on this one, but I did learn something... the meaning of the term "wallflower" used in this context. For you bums out there too lazy to search it in google or wikipedia, it's an informal term to describe people who are anti-social. 

The term was originally used to refer to woman, first appeared in an 1820 poem titled County Ball and is derived from an image of a person isolating from social events such as school balls/proms and who remained close to the walls of the dance hall, blending in like a wallpaper.

In fact, the title is a misnomer (intended?). I don't think the movie explained what the perks of being a wallflower is, if anything at all, the only "perk" I see is that it allows one to see that there's nothing good about it and should prevent themselves from being such a person.