Americans really need to improve their education system

Rating: 4/10 (3 May 2013)

... if the current high school system really is so traumatic to most of their citizens. The Perks of being a Wallflower is yet another movie about a traumatic period of American kids' life called "high school". As if we did not have enough of these already.
If you can get over this trope, the story itself is on the border of OK/boring. None of the characters are really that interesting and the events depicted in the movie are more or less meaningless: gay characters have troubles, kids experiment with drugs and endanger their lives in traffic, relationships fail... To be fair, the traumas are not all caused by high school, but have their roots in the earlier lives of some of the characters. But these seem rather tagged on to make the characters more dramatic and the cases are slightly too numerous to make them believable.