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The Perks of Being a Wallflower
REVIEW BY VIOLET LUCCA
Director: Stephen Chbosky
Country/Year: U.S., 201 2
Opening: September 21
Where: Limited
FOR THE UNINITIATED, STEPHEN CHBOSKY'S novel The Perks of Being a Wallflower, published by MTV Books in 1999, wholeheartedly engages in the teenage impulse towards pretentiousness. Routinely compared to Catcher in the Rye, the book has as its central theme the struggle to understand the terrible things that inevitably happen to those we love and to ourselves. The narrative unfolds through a series of letters written by "Charlie," addressed to you, the reader, and details his alternately painful and joyous high school freshman year. (He doesn't know you personally, but he hopes that you will understand him, because he's heard good things about you.)
Mercifully, writer-director Chbosky uses this framing device only loosely for his bigscreen adaptation, preferring showing over telling - you never see Charlie (Logan Lerman) speaking directly to the camera or thoughtfully pecking at a computer...