The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012)'s comments

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Camille Deadpan

Well if I was 16 when I watched the movie the first time it would probably blow my mind. I've watched the movie for the first time just now and I'm not 16. The movie's nice but to me it doesn't feel special.
What is special and charismatic is Miller's performance.

10 years 9 months ago

rociwi

How can be Heroes so hard to find?

9 years 1 month ago

devilsadvocado

It's fine to make a film depicting the naivete and narcissism of youth, but to take it as seriously as TPOBAW did is downright nauseating.

I think I would have fallen for the giddy quixotism of this film -- with all its forced cleverness and callow spirit of adventure -- had I seen it 10 years ago, when I was living up in my own little high school cloud in the sky. But as an almost-30-year-old, I was put off by the artificialness of the characters and the fanciful world they were determined to create around them.

Characters and setting aside, I did find the story to be a moving one especially after everything culminates in the end. I just wish it could have been told more authentically with characters truer to how life in high school really is.

10 years 11 months ago

TanteGazeuse

I thought this a good teenage/coming-of-age movie, to be enjoyed by highschoolers themselves as well as by older generations. When young Charlie is introduced on his first day of high school, one feels for him, and that is true for much of the story; when he goes through several phases of the teenage emotional rollercoaster, which is for him often much bumpier.

However, the real stand-outs are , to me, Emma Watson and Ezra Miller. Both actors prove that they are part of a new generation who can handle different kinds of characters. Here we don't see a Hermione rip-off, nor an evil Kevin (Miller in We Need To Talk about Kevin) but an emotionally vulnerable yet excited music adept and an all-out, extraverted gay guy, both gifted with a lot of sense of humour and fun. When Charlie is with the two of them, the best things in the movie happen.

The story is strongly indebted to its era, the early nineties with all its pop music and culture (mixtapes, the big cars, real books for that matter!) in a way that reminded me of Donnie Darko (with its eighties soundtrack). It contains dark spots, but luckily, often enough painted with a light brush and that is what makes it enjoyable.

11 years 3 months ago

Liv Ullmann

Am I the only one who thinks this is an overrated movie?

9 years 9 months ago

ermi

Apart from boring me to death, what made me hate this movie this much, is the caricaturistic portrayal of a disturbed so-called "introvert". FYI, for a real introverted outcast, who doesn't dare to utter "Charles Dickens" in class, with a history of being molested and feeling such intense remorse, there's no chance in hell he would get naked like that in front of such crowd and do those rocky-horror-picture-show atrocities, attract that many attractive girls and "cool" boys and not get beaten his living crap out after punching those 3 muscular guys. It's simply not the case. At least not so fast that's depicted in the movie.

Come on dear "expert" IMDB voters (i.e, high schoolers who dig teen movies). You really believe this is one of the best 250 movies EVER MADE?

10 years 2 months ago

Jaqo

When you see a film that hits you on so many levels, there are hardly any other films in the universe you can relate to more than this. #ThatFeeling!!

The Perks is about being different. Being the one who not in a good way stands out in a crowd. Being the one who has not the same interests as everyone else. Being the one who behaves a little bit different than what is expected to be "normal". And not giving one single ounce of crap about it!
This is the film for all of us outsiders out there. We, who dared to speak our own mind, regardless of what other people said about it. Thank you, Stephen Chbosky, for writing this story. It made us realize we are not alone out there!

10 years 3 months ago

GalsGotMoxie

Oh god does this ever hit the nostalgia notes -- both good and bad. Such a lovely film.

10 years 4 months ago

Malteser

I don't know why but I cried in this movie!

11 years 1 month ago

dreiser

How is it possible these kids never heard of David Bowie?!

WTF

11 years 5 months ago

nymusix

Good, but not great movie. Emma Watson's attempts at an American accent took me out of the movie, but for the most part this was a very effective film that really hit a great wistful tone. Don't know that I'd watch this a second time, but it's certainly not a film I regret watching.

11 years ago

Beremat

I'm with Osahi on this one. Personally, I thought the characters were incredibly hard to believe, mostly (but not entirely) due to the acting.

11 years 6 months ago

Osahi

I must be the only one here that didn't like it. It has some touching and funny moments, and great acting and terrific music, but on a whole it didn't connect and lacked imagination. (Stuff like the tunnel scène usually give me goosebumbs in these kind of movies, but I felt... nothing)

Above all it was an issue with believability I guess. I had a pretty hard time believing the main character, who fluctuates between personalities from one scène to the other (timid Freshman guy who feels disconnected, next scène he delivers zinger after zinger after zinger (even when not high), then he stands against the wall again, avoiding eye contact). I understand the character evolves offcourse, but the path from closed up to part of the crowd didn't feel right...

And then there was the Emma Watson character back story. spoiler

After the film I can suspect why the book is regarded with so much love, but I guess the film just fell short...

11 years 6 months ago

Paravail

It's like a movie from 1996 that somehow got released in 2012.

3 years 11 months ago

Siskoid

Probably a film that works best on teen audiences who are going through these things, it nonetheless had interesting things to say to this adult. Considering I was a teenager in the era represented (just a couple years younger than the characters, judging by the music they love), I should have connected to it more, but it just seemed so urbane to me. Maybe I just wasn't one of the rich kids. Or it's a case of looking at it from this era's perspective, with today's sensitivity towards mental health issues especially. Stephen Chbosky who wrote the book also made the film and probably lived this life; I don't dispute its reality. I do wish he'd relied less on narration, a trope I often find dull and unnecessary, but that often comes up in book adaptations. Maybe he had difficulty letting go of the book's details. This kind of reads as a negative review, but it's not. The movie had plenty of great moments, a good soundtrack, many things that rang true... I'm just struggling to explain my general ambivalence. I came out of the experience calling it "cute", and that's nowhere near what I wanted to feel from it.

8 years 6 months ago