Some people fall out of the third floor of a building and end up with nothing more than a black-and-blue mark on their backside. While others take one wrong step on their way down the stairs and end up with a cast.
She and David were of the second kind.
—Etgar Keret - Black and Blue (a short from Suddenly a Knock on the Door)
—Emma Donoghue - Room
In the first half or so, I could not see where this musical-film was headed.
By the end of it, though, everything fell right into place & made perfect sense.
Only the best of movies are able to do that.
i shall attempt to get started on this space again.
let’s start with a quote from one of my (now ex-) favourite movies, which i just re-watched & decided is a tad too self-absorbed for the most part. there are certainly magical bits & lots of great conversation in the film, but suddenly i don’t like it that much no more. funny how things change at different stages of your life.
“…but just this little space in between. If there’s any kind of magic in this world it must be in the attempt of understanding someone sharing something. I know, it’s almost impossible to succeed but who cares really? The answer must be in the attempt.”
- Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise
With all the hype that the film has generated, I re-read the beginning and ending of The Perks of Being a Wallflower, before catching it. I concluded that this paragraph in the epilogue is my favourite bit:
“I think that if I ever have kids, and they are upset, I won’t tell them that people are starving in China or anything like that because it wouldn’t change the fact that they were upset. And even if somebody else has it much worse, that doesn’t really change the fact that you have what you have. Good and bad. Just like what my sister said when I had been in the hospital for a while. She said that she was really worried about going to college, and considering what I was going through, she felt really dumb about it. But I don’t know why she would feel dumb. I’d be worried, too. And really, I don’t think I have it any better or any worse than she does. I don’t know. It’s just different. Maybe it’s good to put things in perspective, but sometimes, I think that the only perspective is to really be there. Like Sam said. Because it’s okay to feel things. And be who you are about them.”
- Stephen Chbosky - The Perks of Being a Wallflower
I wish everyone genuinely believed this.
