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The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012) -vs- The Breakfast Club (1985)

September 20, 2012 Caroline Levich 2

Just in time for fall, we are reminded, thanks to Hollywood, of everything we loved and hated about high school. Twenty-seven years after The Breakfast Club, the coming-of-age story of five students locked together in high school detention, The Perks of Being a Wallflower introduces us to Charlie, a freshman boy in dire need of friends. Both films use humor to examine the pain of being a high school misfit, an immutable movie (and real-life) trope since before James Dean played chicken in Rebel Without a Cause.

Charlie’s group, like the various Breakfast Club miscreants before them, break through seemingly impossible barriers to get to know each other and themselves, without even having to worry so much about being dateless for prom or being given a “swirly” — having their heads shoved into a flushing toilet — by the school bully. What is this madness! […]

Mirror Mirror (2012) -vs- Ever After: A Cinderella Story (1998)

March 30, 2012 Eric Volkman 10

Which is the fairest movie review site of them all? We at Movie Smackdown like to think it’s ours, and to further our conviction, we’re bringing you a contest between two modern live-action versions of classic fairy tales. Mirror Mirror is a light-hearted adaptation of the Snow White story, with Julia Roberts as the evil Queen making a concentrated attempt to keep the pretty Snow (Lily Collins) a virtual prisoner in her family’s castle. […]