Reel Review Roundup

The Perks Of Being A Wallflower

Directed by: Stephen Chbosky

Starring: Logan Lerman, Ezra Miller, Emma Watson

Three and a half stars

Review by: Julian Wright

Imagine the struggle of being a shy teenage outsider with no friends, never been kissed and having to start your first day at high school where you are the target of ridicule from the “cool” kids. Now imagine you have a mental illness on top of all that teen angst. Mental illness is not an untouched topic in feature films but it is usually limited to the struggles that adults have with it. Not since Donnie Darko has there been a potent expose on how teenagers deal with it. This refreshing twist, which doesn’t come into full play until the shattering final moments, is the driving force behind what is otherwise a painfully self-consciously hip look at high school life.

Charlie (Logan Lerman) is an awkward and quiet teenager that shows up to high school on his first day with no friends. He soon befriends kooky, free-spirited step siblings and high school seniors Patrick (Ezra Miller) and Sam (Emma Watson) and is welcomed into their group of friends with their own individual flair. Throughout the school year, the trio become inseparable and they and their friends deal with a plethora of coming of age issues.

Charlie deals with his first love (he falls for Sam, who doesn’t seem to return the same feelings), his first relationship with vegan Buddhist Mary Elizabeth (Mae Whitman), Patrick must keep his relationship with jock Brad (Johnny Simmons) a secret and Sam has a promiscuous past and worries that she won’t be accepted into her preferred college. Meanwhile bits of Charlies past are constantly haunting him and he tries to keep up  a facade of “normal.” And all of this plays out to the soundtrack of a few mix tapes.

There is a lot to like here. The performances are spot on; Watson provides the charm in a role that doesn’t really let her stretch beyond her Harry Potter films character and Miller provides the laughs – something he was not able to do as the evil, psychopathic child in We Need To Talk About Kevin. But Lerman knocks it out of the park, balancing an appearance of awkwardness and genuine distress at his own creeping thoughts.

Audiences may get a kick out of the cassettes, mix-tapes, records and typewriters that feature heavily in this early 1990s-set story, but its over-reliance on them to connect with audiences is distracting and grows tiresome. Trying even harder to secure a hipster audience, the film (which is based on the book of the same name) has its characters work in a theatre that screens The Rocky Horror Picture Show sing-a-longs, which, for me, incited more eye rolling than giddy nostalgia.

This is a super sweet film that wears its heart on its sleeve while hinting at a much darker undertone. The issues dealt with make this more than just a John Hughes teen movie knock off. But the dramatic moments, while packing an emotional punch, feel more like punctuation points throughout the film, creating an unevenness in the storytelling. An often achingly relatable look at high school life with a few surprises up its sleeve should be see but taken with a grain of salt. Like its lead characters – it has problems.

End Of Watch (MA)

Directed by: David Ayer

Starring: Jake Gyllenhaal, Michael Pena, Anna Kendrick, America Ferrera

Two and a half stars

Review by: Julian Wright

What happens when found footage and buddy cop films start to show signs of wear and tear? They get stitched together of course. Like any sewing enthusiast that wants to give their scraps of material a new life by piecing them together to make a new throw rug, End of Watch takes the two sub genres and runs them under a needle and thread. Hoping that this fresh but simple mash-up will disguise the overused and frayed story templates is not enough to justify its existence. Like that patched together throw rug, many that have seen it will soon forget it is there.

A sort-of day in the life of a LA cop, End of Watch is the story of young officers Brian Taylor (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Mike Zavala (Michael Pena) as they patrol the mean streets of southern Los Angeles. Our access to their work routine is through a video camera and a couple of clip-on lenses that Brian brings along for a film project he is working on. A quick throwaway explanation in the establishing minutes of the movie, but never fleshed out and only ever briefly mentioned later when he is told to turn the camera of by his superiors. But who ever demands logic and consistency in a movie, right?

The pair spend most of their time patrolling, talking about sex and relationships, having a laugh. We witness some mundane house checks that lead to gruesome discoveries and a couple of car chases. Not only do we have access to their work lives, but also their personal lives as Brian’s cameras are switched on at home to capture his girlfriend Janet (Anna Kendrick) and is taken to Mike’s wedding, where he marries his sweetheart Gabby (Natalie Martinez) and the birth of their child. But when they pull over a member of a drug cartel for hanging a CD on his rear vision mirror, they find an abundance of drugs and guns, which gets the attention of the gang that owns them. Luckily that gang is also recording their exploits, so we know that they have targeted our heroes.

End of Watch wants to educate us that policing is tough work, the LA ghetto is a dangerous hell hole and having a family raises the stakes. But we already know, we have been told all of this before. There is little here to justify the found footage set up, other than to put a novel spin on some ordinary buddy cop plotting. But even the found footage technique is constantly betrayed, with shots seemingly coming from cameras or recording devices that no one in the film is carrying.

Punctuated with some tense sequences and graphic imagery, these work on the beat vignettes are mostly boring, driven by alarmingly dull conversations and unimaginative plotting. The chemistry between Gyllenhaal and Pena is the highlight; their bright screen presence makes up for their repetitive dialogue. This stitched together film is barely a patch on other, better cop and found footage films.