The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012)

This movie is not like my high school experience. I did not have a bad high school experience. I did not have a hard time making friends. I was not the brightest kid in my class. I was not a wallflower. But, I wasn't the opposite of these things either. I was awfully angsty as I recall. I also was sad a lot for no reason, and it would be a few more years before I realized that I was suffering from depression. I was a writer then, but not as I am now. I didnt' have my own voice then, and I like to at least pretend that I do now.
Reading and writing have always been my friend even when I didn't know that I needed them to be my friend. Music was always there, too. Music was in some ways less personal than reading and writing because when performing in a band, you are necessarily with other people, but you can perform your own music by yourself, and sing along with the music that you knew mattered even if no one else understood it.

I wasn't one of the popular kids growing up, but neither was I unpopular or one of the loners. It's easy to flashback now all of these decades later and think how I felt in third grade was how I felt in seventh grade was how I felt in eleventh grade. Except, I still remember, the only difference is that now I have a context to put my life into and a vocabulary better suited to explain how it really was.
I made friends easy enough and even when I ddin't feel comfortable in my own skin I still had a voice and a brain just barely nimble enough so that I would always have something to say, no matter to whom I was talking. I thought all friendships were equal because all friends were equal because all people were equal. I don't mean in a political or philosophical sense, I mean in a naive way. I was 17 before I figured out that some people really were stupid, I remember the class I was sitting in and the person I thought it about. I remember that I felt guilty that night for thinking she was stupid. It was that situation that made me realize that to someone else I was likely stupid and wondered for the first time what it would be like to be more than myself.
Revelations about others cruelty both intentional and unintentional had already occurred but they did not spark the personal epiphany. I had already learned that physical appearance could determine your social standing as much as how well-off financially your family was and that the two were often tied together, but I was still naive enough to think that a wit could compensate for looks or money. I thought little thoughts about little things and tried to jam my head as full of the other that wasn't my life in my town as I could so that one day down the road I would think slightly less little thoughts about slightly less little things.
I was so naive about what friends really were and was a horrible judge of character. I thought that once you became a friend to someone, you were true blue and would have their back to the very end and I don't think I was wrong about that, I was just wrong that other people would value our friendship the same way. This is by no means a declaration that all or even most of my friends did not feel the same way. I was not sophisticated enough in high school to realize that some people would sell you down the river and others would just stop talking to you all together and never give you a reason why. And then I look and try to see if I did this to anyone. Through high school I didn't, it wouldn't be until college that I started to unravel some of my friendships, but not frivolously and not without a great amount of fore-thought.
I never slept much. Not as a child or as an adolescent. Even now it's the rare night that I sleep more than six hours. But when I was younger it was much worse. From first through twelfth grade I slept about five hours a night on average and there was at least one day every month for those twelve years where I didn't sleep at all. It seems somewhat ironic to me now that with all of this extra time for reflecting that I didn't do very much of it. If you want to know what I thought about, just imagine something banal from your childhood and I was likely thinking about something similar. I did spend most of sixth grade worrying about nuclear annihilation. You know how it goes, go to school, come home and maybe hang out with friends for a little while, eat dinner, watch television or read a book and when everyone else goes to bed and to sleep you lie in your bed thinking that the President might have just given the order to launch a peremptory nuclear strike at the Soviet Union of China and that I wouldn't know until I actually hear the explosion of the first missile hitting in retaliation, which would come approximately 15 minutes after the initial launch. I lamented that I lived far enough away from a primary target (15 miles from the state capital) that I wouldn't die in the blast but would likely succumb to radiation poisoning or starvation or frostbite which would inevitably come after a couple of days of the nuclear night. I would play this game, and game is such a cruel mockery of a real game, that if the launch just happened, I would have to stay awake another 15 minutes to verify if it had or not. It didn't? Okay, what if it started now? Repeat until time to get up and get ready for school. At least by the time I was in eighth grade I had stopped obsessing about nuclear war and had switched my focus to the 8 minute gap between the time the sun would be extinguished and that we would know about it.
A side effect of these sleepless nights was listening to am radio to try and find confirmations of my worst fears. As you might have guessed, I never got those confirmations, but I did get exposed to a lot of interesting music. The part of me that wants to come off as a musical hipster thinks I should start dropping the names of cool bands that you've never heard of. Some of that actually did occur, but mostly I heard pop hits and classic pop hits and classic rock hits. And the part that really disavows my hipsterosity is that I loved all of it. The kids in this movie really are musical hipsters. I was so there with them when they first hear the David Bowie song, "Heroes" and don't know what it's called or who it's by and then go looking for it. Other songs in the film that I'm rather fond of - "No New Tale to Tell" by Love and Rockets (a band which I was so in love with in high school), "Dear God" by XTC whom I really got into my senior year of high school, and "Low" by Cracker which I got into in college right towards the end.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower on IMDb

The Three Musketeers (2011)

I'm not sure that Alexander Dumas would recognize this version of France or his tale. The last time I watched a film based on this story it stored Keifer Sutherland and Charlie Sheen...did I make that up? It was like such a bad nightmare, barely passable American actors in frilly clothes and handling swords like they were fighting with sticks. I must ahve dreamt that, I'm sure.
I had made up my mind going into this version that I wasn't going to like it because it was going to try and be accurate, but be all in English which really bothers me for some reason - not that all the characters would speak English, but that the French would all speak English and the English would all speak English, and they would all have the same accent, and in the case of this movie, the Italians also speak English. I would then spend two hours finding little nitpicky things wrong with it and remind myself that American made movies about this period in European history are always crap because Hollywood doesn't understand how to do the period piece right.
That never happened though. Oh sure, all the nationalities of Europe speak English with the same accents in this film, but right from the beginning Athos is all Steampunk scuba diver guy, what a hundred, hundred fifty years before there would have been the steam power to hitch the punk up to? I know this movie played in theaters as a 3D film, and right from the get-go the action plays like that. What it really plays like is the Matrix - slow motion slides under a hail of spiked balls, using the chains that one is bound with to beat the enemies at hand. This is not your father's or grandfather's interpretation of the classic story.
Right at the beginning we meet Athos, so ably played by one of my favorite actors, Matthew MacFadyen. I loved him in Spooks, he was even okay in that version of Robin Hood with Russel Crowe (which was also surprisingly better than I thought it would be, but in a completely different way that this film). I even watched him in the abysmal Pillars of the Earth, which was a period piece and was very authentic, but had just a horrid and convoluted story.
And there kissing Athos is "Milady" played by Milla Jovovich. She has never let me down. Ok, I haven't seen that movie where she's on a honeymoon on Hawaii on some hike and there is a killer about, Dang, now I'm going to have to watch that, and pretty sure that will suck, but I am willing to put up with that to watch her. I don't think there is a better female action star out there, and I strongly encourage Kate Beckinsale, Michelle Yeoh, Zhang Zhi, or Charlize Theron to come to my house and set me straight. I am the proud owner of all the Resident Evil movies, and I'm not afraid to say that I think UltraViolet is best non-traditional vampire movie. So there.
This Three Musketeers is not historical as much as it is whimsical, very visually stylized that I may look back on 20 years from now and make fun of. but honestly most of the films I do that with now I made fun of when they came out, or at least when I got to see them for the first time. Take Army of Darkness for example, brilliantly funny movie - Bruce Campbell at his absolute best - and yet I am willing to admit that Bridgette Fonda's hair-do has become a hair-don't in the last 25 years. I thought it was cute then, just like I thought the cute girls I went to high school with had cute hair, but now looking back at old yearbooks, I can see how silly their hair looked.
Lately, I've been kind of down on Orlando Bloom - you may recall that I compared his portrayal of Paris with his portrayal of Legolas, and there was very little to contrast. But, he totally rocks the bad-ass bad-boy who may be opposed to the heroes but does it with style.
The weak point for me was D'Artagnon. This is not the first thing I've seen Logan Lerman in and he does a fine job, it's just that he's too damn young. Not his fault, I blame the director. I just don't buy that a 16 or 17 year old kid is pretty much the best sword fighter in Europe. Sure, I'll buy airships and hidden vaults of Da Vinci's secrets, but this is too much.
One thing I always think about every time I watch a Three Musketeers movie, any Three Musketeers movie, is what cool names Dumas came up with: Athos, Porthos, Aramis and even D'Artagnon. I salute you M. Dumas and will strive to come up with better names for the characters I write about.

The Three Musketeers at IMDB