A movie about losers? As if.

I really wish I could get behind "Perks of Being a Wallflower" but in the end it's a preteen feelgood movie and not much more, and I should maybe just leave it at that. The movie covers really familiar ground: kid newly arrived in school feels at first like an outcast but gradually makes friends (primarily among other outcasts) and eventually proves his mettle - usually though some form of physical combat. We've seen it in among others My Bodyguard and History of Violence, each with its own variants. The goal, ultimately, is to be the touchstone feel-good movie of the decade, a la Clueless, as one good example. Perks falls short on many levels: like all, it has a bit of a twist, in this case the newly arrived outcast is actually a returning student who'd spent (part of?) the previous school year in some kind of psychiatric unit - we learn more about this in the big payoff at the end of the movie. So among other issues: the new kid, Charlie, a high-school freshman, is not just ignored on his first day in the new high school but picked on and bullied - I know there are mean kids at every school, but there's no way that he would enter as a pariah. He would clearly have had some friends and acquaintances from the past, and other kids would probably just ignore him. But, OK, it's a movie - and it doesn't take long for him to approach a cutup from his shop class, and then to meet the guy's stepsister, Sam - Emma Watson, terribly miscast. Charlie is immediately welcomed into Sam's crowd - which should probably be the end of the movie, he's found his friends - but they keep stressing that these kids are the misfits. As they said in Clueless: As if. Emma Watson is not a misfit loser, nor are any of the others - this is a Disney, sanitized idea of the social outsiders. (To see a much more powerful and realistic version of a similar theme, check out the recent Pariah.) There are many other missteps and misjudgments throughout - a few of note: Charlie's brother plays football for Penn State? Wouldn't this be a dominant theme in the family - going off to games, etc., and Charlie doesn't measure up, etc. - but it's barely mentioned. Charlie suddenly becomes tough enough to take on four varsity football players who are hitting his friend? Not likely outside of the world of superpowers. Perks also plays on the very familiar theme of the Portrait of the Artist as a Young Nerd: almost every writer (maybe not Paul Auster) has felt like an outsider, an observer rather than a participant (see Tonio Kroger), but it's a very tired theme here: the English teacher giving Charlie books and saying that someday he might write one himself. Nothing in the movie is evidence of that; the book Charlie should read, aside from the trite and obvious classics that his teacher hands him, would be The Idiot - Charlie's best and most endearing quality, like Prince Myshkin's, is his inability to say anything but the truth, which gets him into trouble in many ways. I don't mean to make the movie sound worse than it is - it's diverting and charming in a bland, vanilla way (the lack of diversity in Charlie's high school is quite astonishing), but at bottom, despite brush with social issues (homosexuality, child abuse) lite, it's a movie for kids, many of whom will spot it as a phony.