The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Written at the time of the film's release...

Something from Nothing
or
No Man is an Island of Misfit Toys 

Charlie (Logan Lerman) is starting his first year in High School as a freshman and he has a lot to learn. He's shy, introverted, and fragile the result of some trauma we know not what going in. He walks the corridors friendless, a punching bag for the cool kids and their posses. His parents (Dylan McDermott and Kate Walsh) are lightly caring, and his English teacher (Paul Rudd) reassures—"If you make one friend on your first day, you'll do good." "If my English professor is the only friend I make today, that'll be sorta depressing."

But Charlie does have one friend, writing to him about his experiences, pouring out his frustrations and observations in letter after letter about his "trying not to be a loser." The friend is anonymous, may not even exist, or once existed, but those letters keep Charlie going and serve as his avenue of expression, rather than having his day pulled out of him at the family dinner table. It's an uphill battle from some valley that isn't discussed, but Charlie is self-aware enough to know some perspective. "My life is officially an after-school special," he grouses.

At a football game, he meets Patrick (Ezra Miller), a senior and the subject of some casual bullying, but Patrick has a wicked sense of humor that he throws out with no hesitancy as a shield. Charlie gravitates to him, and meets Patrick's step-sister Sam (Emma Watson), also a Senior, but who is coming back from "having a reputation." After the football game, the three hang out at a diner and compare notes of commonality, which involve a distinct lack of fitting in with the high school social structure, and Charlie is introduced to more of the group, who hold fast, hang out, and provide safety in numbers and a fresh perspective on the puerile benefits of normalcy.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower (written and directed by Steven Chbosky from his own novel) is a fine quirky example of a "Coming of Age" movie, that sub-set of the teen flick where lessons are learned (his life really is an after-school special) and is not so much a film about growing up, as growing out. Growing out of the insular self-inspection, narcissism and selfishness that is comfortable and has no risk, it's dark and warm and safe in that little "black cave of the psyche." But is it? That cave only echoes one's own thoughts back to us, providing no perspective and no horizon to reach to or for.

Yeah, it's pretty safe in there...if there aren't any demons or other creatures of the nightmare lying in wait to strike when you're most vulnerable. And we all have those. And even if we don't, the echoes of our own thoughts are only phantoms and zephyrs, not sustaining, and if that's all we cling to, they become echoes of echoes, distorting, becoming less clear, and often impenetrably undecipherable—a feedback loop. 

And feedback loops, uninterrupted, can become weapons.

Charlie is scared. And ashamed. And that limits his choices, when he does make a choice. Most of the time, things are just foisted on him and he has to make a decision: like this, or don't? Comfortable or not? Aware, or comatose? And by the time, he makes a decision, it's usually too late, putting him a tail-spin, and another trap. His fellow wallflowers are in traps, too (isn't that what High School is all about?), but one thing he learns is that they're not the only ones and the traps, self-made or imposed are universal.

It's a good film, with good imagery, but a neophyte director's tendency to hit things a little too square—the shot from the communion wafer to the LSD tab, please—but the performances feel real, Emma Watson is a helluva dancer, and it's a good trip down memory lane, now that it's gone and out of our lives. "See ya, wouldn't wanna be ya"

For the truth of the matter is, we all grow out. We couldn't survive if we didn't. Yes, "we are infinite" as the movie's tag line wants to be sure we know.  

But not individually.

And not by ourselves.

Out of the black cave and into the light

Fury (2014)

Are you Saved?
or
"Here I Am; Send Me"

There is no good day in war, just like there's no good day in Hell. "Good" days are only for the immature and the vain-glorious. Or for those who merely observe and report. "The only glory in war is surviving, if you know what I mean" wrote Samuel Fuller in his screenplay of The Big Red One. There are no gradations in the conditions of war. It's all bad. But if you want the worst days, look to the end of a war, where communal desperation mixes in with the carnage and the nearly complete rubble of what used to be civilization. No holds are barred. No one is safe. It comes down to numbers and bodies, and the second of our 20th Century "world wars" was emblematic of that, in all theaters of combat, but, most desperately, in the battles taking place in the center of what was to be an aborted "Thousand Year Reich," Hitler's Germany. They put helmets on kids and told them to do their duty for the fatherland, a Children's Crusade, and as successful as all the others. The last sacrifice in war is always the future. And that is the world of David Ayer's' new film, titled simply Fury.

Ayer's last movie (of note—in between he did an Arnold Schwarzenegger DEA movie, as long as we're talking about desperation—was the run-and-shoot End of Watch about L.A. cops in a drug war-zone. The camera-work has settled down and become more professional and traditional, but the shooting only intensifies in Fury, his film about a WWII tank platoon during the final stages of World War II.

The Allies have made their way to Germany and Hitler is down to using children as fighters. But, they're only a few years younger than the grizzled vets who have been years at war. The 66th Armor Division is limping along amid the rubble of battles and one Sherman Tank, nicknamed "Fury" by its crew (Brad Pitt in command, Shia Labeouf, Michael Peña, and Jon Bernthal) who have been together since North Africa, has just lost their co-pilot/bow-gunner "Red" in the last battle—there are parts of him still in the tank when they roll into a bivouac. The men are exhausted and Sgt. Don "Wardaddy" Collier (Pitt) is barely keeping it together. So, it's not good news when he gets a new gunner/driver straight out of the typing pool (Logan Lerman).

Life inside a tank

This is just another bad piece of news for Collier who comes by his name "Wardaddy" quite literally. Things are already going badly and he gets a raw recruit, barely better than the kids Hitler is sending out, to work with the men he has diligently tried to keep alive (so that they can do the same for him) since Tunisia, and he has to employ the toughest of tough love to whip him into (or bend him out of) fighting shape. It's Blood n' Guts 101 and it would seem like hazing if it weren't a matter of life and death. The kid learns all too quickly the "simple math" (as Collier calls it) of combat—"You kill him or he kills you"—and pushes him beyond the tolerances of physicality and morality, of body and soul, and into the Practical and the Now.

Pretty typical war movie stuff. The tank crew is ethnically diverse, besides Pitt's father-figure and the waif, there's a bible-thumper (who is presented not ironically or cheaply and played by La Beouf in one of his better performances), an ethnic type (Latino division) and an "okie"-type, the kind of diversity (for the time) that represents the melting pot that is America, in visual contrast to the uniformly blonde soldiers of the Nazi forces. Where the American crews are rag-tag, the Nazi soldiers are tightly grouped, and more often than not faceless and indistinguishable from one another.

What's different is the savagery and conditions. Yes, the tank-crew is typical, but their behavior is anything but—they're all exhausted and in various shades of stunned PTSD as walking and rolling wounded. The guns spew out tracers that look like they've zapped out of a "Star Wars" movie and the casualties are quick and final—limbs and heads are vaporized in an instant by rocketing shells, and not contemplated or mourned—they just are and then are not. And that "simple math" is pretty basic—you either shoot an enemy soldier or you stab him or you club him, just so long as he is dead, dead, dead. Then you shoot them again, just to make sure. "No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country.." blah blah blah.  

But he also never won it on a slow learning curve, either. And "Wardaddy" takes the clerk under his wing...and beats him with it. It's survival out there (if you're lucky) and stragglers usually need to be buried. Or, as in one vivid image from the film, they're crushed into the mud until they're indistinguishable from just another stretch of bad road. If the kid doesn't learn—and learn fast—he'll be the weakest track in the tread and every member of the crew will die for his hesitancy. 

One thing that distinguishes Fury from most war-movies (and it checks off very very many of the tropes from the list) is its sense of history: there is none.   Nobody talks about home. Nobody talks about what they're going to do after the war. This is an existential war movie. These guys are living in the moment, because, for all their efforts to survive, they've enough experience to know it is unlikely. The only time "Wardaddy" reveals anything beyond the Here and the Now is when he pulls out a grenade container to reveal that it contains eggs that he has commandeered from a farm. There was enough fore-thought to think that he may use them someday.

But, that's it. There are very few war films that don't sentimentalize the state with the hope of a future. Fury is one of a handful that is pure nihilism and reflects the grunt's perspective of being there in a permanent temporary basis.

  

Noah (2014)

A World Cruise with Animal Double Occupancy (Except for a Single Crowe)
or
"How Long Can You Tread Water?"

The story of Noah has been filmed quite a bit: beyond the Bible study presentations, it played a part in Michael Curtiz's 1928 silent film, as well as figuring in films in 1998, 1999, and 2007. Both Yogi Bear (Yogi's Ark Lark) and Donald Duck (Fantasia 2000) have piloted arks, and the story was lampooned in Evan Almighty. 

The most famous depiction is probably John Huston's recreation in The Bible: In the Beginning in which Huston played Narrator, Noah and the voice of God—clearly the director was typecasting.

Now, Darren Aronofsky, who's made Pi, The Fountain, The Wrestler and 2010's Black Swan, has made a distinctly different version of the Old Testament tale, this time verging on a SCI-FI Testament.  

Noah tells the same old story, but in a visually arresting and decidedly bizarre kind of way, trying to satisfy literalists and Darwinists, while probably not doing either. It might, however, satisfy fans of "The Lord of the Rings" films, as Aronofsky has skewed the film slightly in that direction.

Adam and Eve pick the forbidden fruit
(They glow, and the fruit throbs)

It begins with the legend "In the beginning, there was nothing." Then, picks up the story in images of the Bible, but not from the Bible...or any depiction of the Bible known to man. We see the snake in the Garden of Eden first slithering at the screen (oh, yeah, that's right this is in 3-D), then we see Adam and Eve, glowing like the aliens in Cocoon (to get around their nakedness to secure a PG-13? or to advance the notion, like 2001, that they were "deposited" by a higher power—which is basically the story, right?). It's a little disconcerting, a little weird and more fantasy-skewed than "traditional" Bible stories,  The perspective is fresh, probably wanting to appeal to a new generation of movie-goers (who only know super-hero and other fantasy movies) who won't show up for something that smacks of the Bible.

Cain slays Abel, then things get complicated

Once the first murder happens (Cain 1, Abel 0), the world divides into camps—the children of Cain and of Seth.  Cain's descendants are rapacious and murderous, whereas Seth's descendants, like Methuselah (Anthony Hopkins) and his grandson Noah (Russell Crowe) "only take what we need and what we can use." Cain's descendants, led by Tubal-Cain (Ray Winstone), who has a murderous connection with Noah, have built a sort of primitive industrialized society, but they are draining the Earth (pictured with a Pangaea-like single continent) of resources (one of which is a glowing mineral that provides a long-sustained source of light). It is revealed to Noah (through a single rain-drop that instantaneously sprouts a flower) that The Creator has something on its omnipresent mind, which is expanded on in a dream that recaps Genesis, reveals Noah standing on a plain covered in blood and the world deluged with water. 

Now, that, dear readers, is a Darren Aronofsky shot

He takes his family, including wife Naameh (Jennifer Connelly) and sons Shem and Ham (note to parents: NEVER name your child "Ham") to grandfather Methuselah, who has been living—for a very long time—in a mountain guarded by The Watchers. The Watchers may be the most controversial aspect of Noah, but anyone familiar with fantasy films of the past few years will think nothing of them. Ostensibly, the are angels who came to Earth to help the humans cast out of the Garden of Eden, and who, for their defiance, are punished by the Creator to be forever shackled to the Earth. They're large rock-like giants, a cross between such pop-creatures as Transformers and Ents.  But, they are not in the Bible, and so they are controversial. So, is Noah's telling of the Creation, which sounds like Genesis, but looks like Cosmos, with creatures evolving out of the sea.  This is not your Father's (or your Minister's) Old Testament.

Noah's family wears pants, not robes.  That's different.

The most interesting part of Noah, though, is its transition (which is traditional) of the Creator as, initially, a vengeful destroyer, and the compassionate God who can promise "All secure" by coating the sky in a rainbow. Noah (the character) becomes convinced that The Creator has charged him with saving the innocents of the earth—the animals, and that's it. He will be a care-taker, but his family is all that will survive, and the children are all boys, and an adopted child (played by Emma Watson) who is barren. That's it for humans. No more generations. No more begatting.

A shot from God's perspective (or is it Wes Anderson's??)

The struggle of the story is that once Noah understands The Creator's intentions (as he understands them), he begins to resist any hope that maybe human beings just might be allowed to continue on after the deluge. Even in the face of miracles (as unusual and unexpected as that initial sprouting flower), he is convinced that The Creator's original intention should be carried out, no "if's," "and's" or "birth's," even at the cost of his own progeny. Noah has to learn what it means to "inherit the wind" and learn the spirit of the Word (or image in this case), rather than the letter of it.  

That also won't go down well with fundamentalists.

Not that they'll be missing all that much. It's an interesting interpretation and struggles mightily with themes from the Bible and with the way of Nature, as evidenced, trying to combine them, in word and visual. Anybody trying to do that is brave...and creative. But, Noah, for all its flashes of inspiration, feels a bit inert, an empty spectacle with lots of flash, but not a lot of life, a standard story of good versus evil, with lots of fantasy elements thrown in, the mystical elements being handled by God and his own way with pixels. In a sense, it feels like any other Hollywood block-buster, a disaster movie with a little Faith thrown in, but as false as 2012, with its Mayan miracles. It may be the end of the world as we know it, but I didn't feel fine at all.

All aboard!  Many creatures (many of them fanciful) ready for embarkation.