Rants on The Perks of Being a Wallflower

The long awaited film adaptation of The Perks of Being a Wallflower--written and directed by the novel's author Stephen Chbosky--is a lot like an ABBA greatest hits collection. Sure, you're getting all the highlights of a fantastic career which includes the massive moments like "Dancing Queen" and "The Winner Takes It All" that made them the best pop group of all time. With a greatest hits package, however, you're only getting brief snippets of what made them so special in the first place. The highs may indeed be high, but you're missing all the subtleties and so-called "minor" moments ("As Good As New" or "Disillusion" in ABBA's case) that complete the portrait.

This is the problem that plagues Perks (and most adaptations of beloved books, actually). How do you condense a great novel into 100 minutes while retaining the tone and idiosyncrasies that made the novel work in the first place? Perks introduces a lot of the novel's various subplots but they fail to cohere, sometimes landing with a thud but mostly reeking with the feeling that it could have been handled better. One of my favorite scenes in the book is the Christmas party where the group finds out who their Secret Santas are. Charlie has bought additional gifts for everyone, gifts so thoughtful and spot on, the others realize just how much Charlie absorbs and understands about them. It's a moving moment in a book, one that deepens and solidifies what they all saw in Charlie in the first place. In the movie, though, the moment makes an appearance but doesn't hit the emotional level it could have. A lot of what is ultimately transferred from the novel are the typical, almost pandering, themes that fill most high school dramas ("Why don't I fit in?", "Who am I really?", "I can't wait to live life in the real world," "What is love?", etc.), encapsulated in almost infuriatingly simplistic catchphrases about the sadness and pain of falling in and out of love.

Thanks heavens, then, for Logan Lerman in the role of Charlie. I have heard a lot about Lerman over the past few years, but I've never had the occasion to see him in anything. Obviously, I've been missing out. First of all, his voice sounds exactly like my beloved Zac Efron's, so that was a wonderfully superficial introduction to him. Unlike Zefron in a superficially similar film like Charlie St. Cloud, however, Lerman pushes hard to make his Charlie an awkward kid with genuine social issues instead of a lovable misfit who just can't seem to connect with people. He colors in the broadly-drawn lines of the film with an emotional depth and clarity the rest of Perks lacks. Lerman's warm, expressive face has the ability to suggest both emotional tragedy and comedic lightness, often times simultaneously, without overselling either of them. He captures the opposite-sounding warm melancholic tone that is the film's strongest selling point, only punctuating the fact that 95 percent of the time Charlie is a regular fourteen year old kid with sharp pain.

Without Lerman, I suspect that the emotional impact of Perks of Being a Wallflower would lessen exponentially. One has to wonder if allowing Chbosky to write the screenplay and direct his own property worked against the film. A third party who hasn't lived with this story for nearly two decades might have brought something new to the proceedings instead of relying on voiceovers which, I'm sure, were adapted word-for-word from the novel. Chbosky's vision isn't terrible, and he does manage to make a fine, above-average film. Yet I can't help feeling that this film should have been something more than "above average." B

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

A precocious young boy, Oskar, loses his father in 9/11. Two years later, still trying to come to terms with the loss, he finds a key in his father's closet. Oskar doesn't know what they key actually unlocks, so, with the word "Black" written on the envelope the key was in as his only clue, he begins a journey to discover what the key is for. Given its grave subject matter, it's surprising just how quick of a read Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close is. I was immediately hooked by Foer's prose, even if the novel's structure is a touch too precious and overworked at times (A second story emerges about the failed marriage between Oskar's grandparents; he writes in run-on sentences, her sentences are short, almost like lines of poetry. It's not complicated to understand but it does get to be a bit much in parts). He captures grief and loss extremely well, almost as well as Michael Chabon did with The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.

For all its strengths, though, never have I been in love with a book and simultaneously hated it as much as I did with Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. The character of Oskar is one of the most awful, unbearable protagonists I've encountered in ages. I understand that he's in pain and doesn't know how to process his father's death properly, but he's incredibly self-centered (just before his death, his father left recordings on the answering machine but Oskar refuses to share these recordings with his mother, primarily because she has found comfort with a new guy) and almost impossible to relate to. Oskar is a know-it-all and if you think they are bad in real life, try spending 300 pages with one. Obviously, I don't mean to suggest that we must "like" every protagonist in order for a book to be successful. But, in a story like this, we have to like Oskar, otherwise his journey means absolutely nothing to the reader. His revelations at the end would have been far more impactful if we could relate to Oskar. I was almost on the verge of tears as it was; if I had cared, it would have been waterworks. But it's a small complaint in the grand scheme of things, as Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close remains a very good novel.

With a film this good and this timely, it's not surprising that we're getting a film adaptation later this year from director Stephen Daldry. A lot of people think this will be a slam dunk, but I remain pessimistic. I'm assuming the film will rest firmly on the shoulders of Thomas Horn, the young actor playing Oskar. Here's the problem: there is absolutely no way an actor his age can appropriately navigate the emotional journey Oskar goes through in the novel. Sure, he'll be coached and directed and it will most likely look halfway decent, but it will lack the power someone older could pull off. And I'm not saying this simply because I generally dislike child actors. I doubt that even my two favorites, Jean-Pierre Léaud and Phillip Alford (of To Kill a Mockingbird fame), could do it (although I'd be the first to admit that I would have loved to see Alford's attempt). I'm ready for you to prove me wrong, Thomas, but until then, I remain unconvinced. 

At least we'll get to see Sandy Bullock, presumably as Oskar's mother, in a meaty role. Will I need to dust off my Team Sandy martini glass to celebrate a second Oscar nomination? I certainly hope so!

7 Things About Miley Cyrus' Autobiography Miles to Go

01. Miles to Go only covers four years in the life of Miley: from the time she first auditioned for Hannah Montana at 12 to the time of the book's publication at 16. Given that microscopic period of time, the book is 260 goddamn pages! Granted, the type is enormous and I'm pretty sure it's triple-spaced, but still. I couldn't even fill 50 pages about those four years. And it's not like much happened to her. Sure, she's the Queen of Disney, but she devotes most of the book to her homespun wisdom about being yourself, Christian values and quality family time. Bitch please. We don't want to read that. We wanna hear about all of your celebrity exploits and run-ins with tween celebrities.

02. The notes on the side are cute at first. But by page 70, they're kinda annoying.

03. I love that she openly admits to not liking Emily Osment during the course of the first two seasons of Hannah Montana. Of course, they somehow overcome their differences and are now BFFs, but the moments she describes of tension between them are some of the only genuine, unfiltered moments in the entire book.

04. Miley, gurl, there's no point giving your former boyfriend that you ended up writing '7 Things' about the nickname "Prince Charming." We all know it's Nick Jonas. And where's the dirt?! Come on, pull a Taylor Swift and give us some juicy details.

05. "During the TV series, I'd become more and more of a Method actor. In Method acting you use experiences from real life to summon emotions for your character." I literally cannot believe she had the balls to say this. According to Miley, she should be considered along with her peers like Brando, Clift and Dean. And to think that before this I considered Brenda Song as one of her acting contemporaries.

06. Very briefly, Miley mentions her friend Lesley. As in, "My best friend Lesley said, 'Oh, she's just being Miley.'" I'm such a nerd I nearly did the gay inhale.

07. I'm glad that she's so close with her family and that they tried their damnedest to live a "normal" life. But after awhile they come off not as mere mortals but as Saint Billy Ray and Tish. It's so annoying listening to her go on and on about how great they are, how they are always there for her, how they always put the family before any of the fame stuff, etc. We get it, they're better than my parents. Let's move on.

So, overall, the book is a C-. Not horrible for this type of book and definitely not as bad as you'd expect with Miley as a co-author. Also, it wasn't nearly as difficult to get through as either of the Twilight books I bothered to read. I wish she was more revealing but I also understand why she can't. Still, I can't wait for another 10 years, after she's gone completely slutty, when we get a tell-all book about our beloved tween stars. Maybe she can title it Miley: Still Not Tamed, Motherfucker.

Bad Mommies

On Mother's Day 2007, I wrote this post "honoring" the ten worst mothers in film, TV and even a book. This was a couple months after I started Rants of a Diva and I'm not ashamed to admit that it's not one of the shining moments of my blogging career. I remember at the time having a difficult time trying to come up with ten and that shows in some of the weak choices (why the hell didn't I think of the ultimate bad mommy, Julianne Moore, in any of her numerous roles in this vein?). On top of that, the writing is just horrid, horrid, horrid. If anything, I'd like to forget that this post exists.

But some people out there won't let me. For some reason, this post is constantly the most viewed page on my blog and every three months or so, some anonymous twit makes a stupid comment about the fact that I picked the fabulous Joan Crawford over Catherine Roerva, the psychotic real-life mommy in Dave Pelzer's A Child Called It. Now, listen, by now I hope that anyone who reads this blog regularly knows my general likes and preferences. So, given these two options, which of them am I more likely to pick? Dave Pelzer's books were popular in my junior high and I, of course, read them so I remember all the horrific things she put that poor guy through. I realize that there is just no comparison between locking a child in a non-ventilated bathroom with obnoxious amounts of ammonia and forcing your child to eat a raw steak. If I was Oprah, I'd be shouting, "I get it, peopleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!" But, anonymous commenters, if you had taken ten seconds to look around my site and notice it's name (Diva is in the f-ing title), my sexuality (I post about Zac Efron nearly every week) and my obvious love of Faye Dunaway (see this post), you would see that there is absolutely no way Roerva could beat the unstoppable force of nature that is Dunaway's Joan Crawford. It's not a definitive list of worst mothers ever in order of offenses; it's just a silly list ranked in an somewhat arbitrary order by my silly preferences. So, in summary, please stop e-mailing and commenting about this dumbass post. It's stupid and barely worth defending at this point when I've done other posts I'm so much more proud of.

Casting The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

Although it took me close to three months to finally complete, Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay was not a boring or difficult-to-read book by any means. It was just my rotten luck that I decided to read the 600+ page novel right in the middle of the school year when I had little to no time for pleasure reading. Anyways, to say that I loved the book would be an understatement. The fact that Chabon made a novel about the Golden Age of comic books--a subject I know/care very little about--this absorbing is a feat in itself. As soon as I finished it, I couldn't get the characters, their complex relationships with each other and the interesting directions Chabon took the plot (the Antarctica section, for one, as well as the whole "Death of the American Dream" section at the end) out of my head. I kept thinking about this book so much that I finally decided to buy myself a copy with some of my birthday money and for the past month I have been re-reading my favorite bits over again.

As I often do while I'm reading a novel, I picture the movie version in my head and I had a ball doing this with Kavalier and Clay. Apparently, a film adaptation was in the works for awhile with Chabon as the screenwriter and Stephen Daldry as the director. This project was abandoned soon after the script was finished and now seems dead in the water. I'm not sure how I feel about this. On one hand, I'm bummed out that it seems we'll never get to see this readily adaptable book make it onto the screen. On the other hand, however, you know that there's no way they can squeeze everything in a 2 hour so something has to be cut. But what in the hell do you cut from Kavalier and Clay? Everything is so perfectly realized and important to the story that I shudder to think what ends up on the cutting room floor. What this film needs is the mini-series treatment so that we can have six or so hours of amazingness and lots of material can be left in. HBO, can you get on this please? Meanwhile, while this fantasy movie plays in my movie, I thought I'd share what actors I would like to play the main characters. I actually put quite a bit of thought into this and really think that this would be the perfect cast (although I would love to hear input from other Kavalier and Clay fanatics).

Jamie Bell
as Joe Kavalier

When the film was in pre-production, the three main roles already had starts attached to them and the only one I kept was Jamie because, let's face it, he's perfect for the role. I know I'm not the most up-to-date on his filmography, but if he managed Billy Elliot at like 14, I'm pretty sure he can successfully tackle Joe Kavalier--the most dynamic and probably most difficult character in the novel. His character goes through so many transitions in the first half of the book--wealthy young Czech gentleman before Hitler's invasion, a refugee leaving his home and family for safety in America, angry up-and-coming comic book illustrator exacting his own revenge against the Nazis for tearing his family apart, young American who just wants to go out with his girl--it will be difficult to hold him together among these disparate threads. Then there's the Antarctica sequence which relies solely on him and his attempts to maintain his sanity after an accident at the station kills everyone and one other guy. I have complete faith in Jamie that he will get this character perfect should he be given the chance to play him.

Anton Yelchin
as Sam Clay

Without a doubt, Sam Clay is the hardest character to cast. When the film was in pre-production, Tobey Maguire was attached to play Sam. If you've read the novel, I hope you can agree with me that that would have been a horrid, horrid idea. Sam Clay is a casting director's nightmare; you have to find an actor who is young, talented, short and kinda attractive (this is a movie after all- who wants to look at an ugly person for two hours?) but not too attractive (the character is repeatedly described as kind of shlubby and not exactly the most beautiful person around). I was stuck for awhile until I came up with Ashton Holmes a few weeks ago (it must have been after his appearance on the season finale of House). After that, Anton Yelchin came to mind and he immediately seemed absolutely perfect. After Charlie Bartlett, I feel pretty confident that he can handle the parts of the story where he has to be an energetic salesman, constantly trying to convince the powers in charge his and Joe's comic book ideas are worth taking a chance on. I'm not so sure about the quieter, more desperate moments, especially during the last section of the book, but it could be interesting seeing him take a big chance like this and hopefully rising to the challenge.

Anne Hathaway
as Rosa Saks

Natalie Portman was the woman originally conceived for the role Joe's slightly eccentric but ever warm and loving girlfriend Rosa. I can totally see where they were going with Portman and I have no doubts that she would also be great in the role, but Annie is where it's at these days. I also briefly considered Leighton Meester (needs more experience) and Kristen Stewart (too young--she'd never get away with the post-war section--and her goddess-like stone face doesn't seem appropriate for Rosa) but, ultimately, I kept coming back to Anne Hathaway. She can work the bits of humor and lightness that pepper Rosa throughout the novel, but the image I had with me during the course of the book, and the one that ultimately made me believe she was the best choice, is that final phone call in Brokeback Mountain between Anne and Heath. There's so much emotion in that scene but it's fabulously understated and that's exactly where Rosa needs to be played.

Kellan Lutz
as Tracy Bacon

Okay, so I'm going to admit that I'm basing the casting of Kellan Lutz in the Tracy Bacon role solely on physical appearance. The only thing I've seen him in is Twilight (and possibly an episode of 90210 but most likely not) and he had, what, two lines in that? I hear he's quite good in Lisa Kudrow's The Comeback but, unfortunately, I haven't seen that yet. The way I see Tracy is as this large, broad shouldered guy who probably looks intimidating but is really just a big teddy bear and when he puts his arms around you, the problems of the world just melt away. I don't know about anyone else, but this is what I think when I see pictures of Kellan on the internet. I don't know if he has the chops, but it's not as if this role is as difficult as Joe Kavalier, right?

Susan Sarandon
as Ethel Klayman

Like most of the unimaginative film executives in Hollywood, I automatically cast Meryl Streep as Sammy's mother in my mind while reading the book. The thought became even more inescapable during the scene where Sam brings Tracy to his mother's house for dinner and Chabon describes this look ("'Will he?' she said, and, lifting the wrapped dish, she looked him in the eye for the first time all evening. Though it would recur often enough in his memory in later years, he would never know exactly what she meant by that look.") that I knew she would just nail. The way I see it, the whole performance relies on that look and if you can't get it right, the character will fall apart. After thinking it over, however, I decided that I needed to think outside the box a bit and come up with another actress besides Streep. Dianne Wiest came to mind since I've been kinda obsessed with her after her immaculate work in Synechdoche, New York, but, somehow, she didn't seem perfect for the part; no doubt she would have been great (has she ever been less than stellar?) but there had to be someone just right. Finally, someone suggested Susan Sarandon and it was like a choir of angels singing. Ethel has to be feared, loved, respected and funny, all done subtly and often at the same time. I think after her long and varied career and especially after Igby Goes Down, Sarandon can pull this off without a hitch. Plus, she'll be able to get that look without a problem.

Rants on Anna Karenina (1948)

I've never read Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. I realize it's a classic and all that jazz, but who the Christ has the time to wade through 800 pages of a critique on 19th century Russian society and mores? I certainly don't. I tried to be intelligent in high school and checked it out from the library once; I got exactly three pages in before I, not understanding a damn word of what was going on, returned it a few weeks later. Instead, I relied on the two Greta Garbo versions of the story (1927's Love and 1935's Anna Karenina). While neither of them particularly blew me away, they were fine melodramas that cut right through Tolstoy's apparent social commentary and focused on the tragic love affair (and who's going to deny that Garbo was absolutely fantastic in both of them).

Now, this brings us to the 1948 version of Anna Karenina (Julien Duvivier, 1948) starring Vivien Leigh as the tragic Anna. The story remains the same- Anna breaks society's "rules of the game" by leaving her husband and son to live in sin, unmarried, with a dashing young count- but Duvivier sticks closer to the book, I presume, by focusing more on the societal impact of Anna's decision than on the physical attraction between her and Vronsky. This is all well and good, and I'm sure that in the book it makes for deep, thought provoking material, but when done this coldly and impassionately, it doesn't exactly make for the most fascinating film, you know? Countless scenes go by in which some character (usually either Anna or Ralph Richardson's Alexander) lament about how cruel society is and that they really want to act in one way but can't because it isn't "proper"; instead of feeling for these characters, all I kept thinking was, "Get on with it, damnit!"

Even the romantic scenes between Anna and Count Vronsky- which positively smoldered in the Garbo versions- feel flat and detached. I suppose you can blame that on the fact that this is a British production- they have always been more of a "stiff upper lip" sort of people- but it shouldn't have felt this off. There's really no chemistry between Leigh and Kieron Moore to speak of. So, if the social commentary is boring and the romance is a dud, what is there to even be excited about in this version of Anna Karenina? To be honest, nothing. Julien Duvivier's direction is so plain Jane and passionless that it's honestly quite to hard to even get invested into the story. For the most part, the film looks like it was shot in the manner of a stage play with it's poor script and shoddy camerawork. Perhaps the most disappointing thing about Anna Karenina is, however, Vivien Leigh's performance. I know it's unfair to place the expectation on an actress that every performance has to be her greatest ever, but I honestly never foresaw a time when Leigh would ever be less than perfect. She's not bad here by any means; she's just very underwhelming. A lot of the time, it felt like she was recycling leftover bits of Scarlett O'Hara, only minus the charm, sophistication and wit of that epic performance. Leigh was good at the very the end when she's wandering around the train station, driven mad by her lover's betrayal, but it doesn't make up for the last 110 minutes of mediocrity. If only Duvivier had gotten this level of risk and bravura from Leigh earlier, he just may have saved her performance and this dreary film. C

Book Suggestions

Okay, so I've been a bit of a nerd lately and it seems that I can't go more than a day or two without some type of non-school related book to read. The problem is, I can't think of any books I want to read that badly, so it's up to you, dear readers, to suggest some books that I should be reading. What have you read recently that peaked your interest? What are some of the classics I should be taking a look at? And, most importantly, what are your favorites that you've read over and over? Please let me know, I'm very curious to hear what I should be reading.

Sidney Poitier and the Role of Actors

I just finished Mark Harris' impressive and well-researched Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood about a week ago and I urge anyone who's interested in the history of cinema or the Academy Awards to read this book. You will seriously not be able to put it down. From Rex Harrison and wife Rachel Roberts's drunken antics on the set of Doctor Dolittle to the critical bitchfight between Bosley Crowther and Pauline Kael, Andrew Sarris and company over Bonnie and Clyde (why don't critics ever have fights like this anymore? this seemed to happen every other week in the 1960's and 70's) to Stanley Kramer's failed college campus trip to speak with students about the "progressiveness" of Guess Who's Coming to Dinner there is not one wasted sentence in the entire book.

The parts that really got me thinking, however, where the sections discussing Sidney Poitier and the growing frustration from the black community that he was taking on the same roles over and over again: a desexualized black man who helps the white people not be racist. People wanted Poitier to use his fame to play roles that idealized the new politicized black man that was beginning to come into vogue in the mid-60's.

1967 was, arguably, the last big year for Sidney Poitier as a movie star. And when I mean big, I mean big. Not only did he star in two of the eventual Best Picture nominees (the winner, In the Heat of the Night, and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner) but he was also cast in a third (Doctor Dolittle- his character was eventually dropped due to length issues) and starred in the enormously popular To Sir, With Love.


I personally love Sidney Poitier. He radiated movie star charisma at a time when it was starting to go out of fashion. I feel really bad that he was constantly degraded for something that was out of his control. People wanted him to take on more politicized roles, but that wasn't part of his charm and appeal. As one author pointed out (I can't recall his name), who wrote a negative article about Poitier during this time period that was discussed at length in Pictures at a Revolution, at the time he wanted Poitier to be Humphrey Bogart but he was really more like Cary Grant. It would be equivalent to the gays telling Neil Patrick Harris to stop doing "frivolous fluff" like How I Met Your Mother and only choose roles that show gay men as not taking shit anyone's shit and to start marching in every gay pride parade between Australia and New York. It's not exactly fair, is it?

When will people realize that it is an actor's job to perform and not to be forced to give opinions about global (or domestic) matters that concern them. It's all fine and dandy if you can do both, but some people just can't take that burden. It is a total shame that the people of 1967 couldn't realize this and started considering Poitier as past his time and a relic just when he was starting to come into his own as an actor.

Books? Never Heard of 'Em...

I've been tagged by DL over at The Cellar Door to do this meme, so I guess I'll oblige since he asked so nicely.

1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open to page 123.
3. Locate the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences on your blog and in so doing...
5. Tag five people, and acknowledge who tagged me.

Right now I'm reading Charlotte Chandler's Not the Girl Next Door, a biography of Joan Crawford. It's not very good so far and since a lot of it is taken from Crawford herself, I keep imagining her voice when reading and it is fucking creepy. I looked on page 123 and the fifth sentence is nothing more than a boring plot synopsis so I'll move on to another book.

John Welter's Begin to Exit Here is a book I randomly picked up from the bookstore a few years ago and as soon as I read it, I fell in love. The main character, Kurt Clausen, is a sarcastic ass with a dry wit that many would kill for. He works as a journalist for a small town newspaper, but he loathes his job. He is at a low point when he meets Janice, a woman who finally gets him and an editor who lets him write whatever he wants.

"The century was changing things. When lovers looked up at the burning hydrogen at night, it wasn't as romantic. And carnal love had changed, too, Janice said."

Ever since I've read it, I keep hoping someone important will pick it up and make it into a movie. Maybe one day I will write a screenplay for it myself, but I doubt I could ever do it justice.

I'm supposed to tag 5 people, but I'm always the last to get these and everyone else has done this one, so I won't tag anyone.