The Fault in Our Stars (Boone)

[dreamdead]

http://www.lumberjacklounge.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/the_fault_in_our_stars_movie_p oster.png

Have at it.

[dreamdead]

A mild yay. When it works, such as the final act--essentially once Hazel Grace prepares to give her eulogy--the film admirably gets at very universal feelings of fear, distrust, and community both within the romantic relationship, with Isaac, and with her parents. Some of the choices in streamlining the adaptation, though, work against the film. Isaac's relationship with Hazel is much flatter and there seems to be little familiarity between those two in the opening, which cuts a lot of the community that Green more successfully situated as central. And the basic streamlining of Augustus's parents, showing up with a limo, cutting his back-history with his former girlfriend, and jumping over his breakdown after the "last good day" stuff all cut the complexity of his arc. And that last point is especially what allows Green to be more twee in other spots and get away with it; with the film cutting those more human reactions, Augustus becomes much more flat.

Still, generally well acted throughout. The M83 song cue is good, too. And I do rather love that it's killing an imagined action blockbuster at the box office. It's much better than many of the teen adaptations in terms of access to good material, but the film erroneously chooses to center on the cutesy moments (nothing is worse than the Anne Frank kiss sequence) and fails to buttress them against the realer, more mature ideas that Green's text considers.

[Pop Trash]

The first fifteen minutes of this are insufferable. Couldn't go on...

[Watashi]

This is one of those cases of "if you like the book, you'll like the movie."

I couldn't stand Augustus in the book, and I couldn't stand him here. The movie works because of Woodley and what she brings to her character. Also, the Amsterdam scenes were my favorite part of the book (Anne Frank scene included) and I thought it was translated really well.

[Pop Trash]

I'm thinking I would hate the book too if it is written in that same 'clever' voice. I couldn't stand how they treated the low hanging fruit of the middle aged Christian guy with testicular cancer. I don't like it when films (or books presumably) set-up these thin peripheral characters just to have some conflict. 50/50 did the same thing with the girlfriend who was so poorly written. I kept wondering what the Dardennes or James Gray would do with a cancer movie. I also can't stand that thing where there is a cut to a close-up where we hear exactly what the character is thinking in voice-over. So lazy.

[number8]

I was dreading the Birbiglia character, too. Thankfully he disappears from the movie completely after the first 15 min.