The Fault in Our Stars

For most of its run this film was surprisingly likeable because it wasn’t the self-serving and cheap emotional blackmail that I feared. And, even though in the end things eventually take the path of emotional blackmail, one it had skilfully crossed up that point, I still liked it. The strongest point is that both of the stars manage to play their roles in a very likeable way. I was actually looking forward to being sarcastically nasty at them, but I can’t. (08/19/2014)

And damn, how I was looking forward to getting that done. The posters, the trailers, the whole story (two barely-hairy people winning cancer and a heap of love), and the obligation to see this film sounded to me like the news announcing that a cacodemon has emerged from the depths of the earth and the country is in for a thousand years of agonizing tyranny. But hell isn't happening. While The Phallus in Our Stars mixes suburban teen melodrama with the gravity of terminal illness, and manages to wring just about everything out of the subject matter in a fairly merciless running time, the flip side of the film is a rather refreshing Reitman-esque comedy that thankfully allows the characters to do a lot more speaking and acting rather than letting themselves get dragged through the IV and stare at the wall in anticipation of the inevitable. The protagonists are not just tolerable, but instead likeable, intelligent, and self-deprecating. The tearful valley of the last half hour is survivable precisely because of the relationship we've made with them in the first hour and a half, where she cancer was still somehow all right and cool. Not to mention that it makes the immanent presence of death work, which in some places is pleasantly beyond the comfort zone. Faulty Stars has a lot of problematic scenes (the whole Anne Frank sequence, the eulogy, the letter ex machina) and a lot of very pleasantly atypical ones (Hazel's unsentimental father, the discussion with the writer in Amsterdam) and can be hated more or less just as easily as loved. It strikes me as ideal on a romantic level, especially as a counterpoint to Meyer's opuses, where everyone stares and sighs into the distance with a shattered soul at the curse of eternity, while here there is talk and jokes in a close encounter with the non-existence of life after death. If I were sixteen, I'd be all over this movie. (09/25/2014)

It's not the power of the premise or the media hype that makes this quality film a hit. What would The Shawshank Redemption be, with its potential for acting, plot and ideas, if it were filmed conventionally, aimed solely at reliable and convenient one-dimensional themes, and if it relied solely on all audiences having enough humanity and automatic empathy to appreciate it simply because it carries a laudable message? The Fault in Our Stars has a great cast and a commendable idea, but it's kitsch of the coarsest grain, which I have no need to see again in my life and which, despite all the cute faces and touching hugs, failed to tell me anything new. Both love and death are a given in life, and there are many other films that make me appreciate the former indescribably more and take the latter as a harmless, if unwelcome, companion. 65% (11/12/2015)

It's a shame that this film will find its place among my favorites, and yet I will probably never watch it again. Because Shailene Woodley and Ansel Elgort gave some of the most natural acting performances. That's why it's a shame, and why I won't be watching it again. Because if they hadn't been so great, I wouldn't be so taken with it. And I don't even have words for the story. (05/20/2015)

I had heard a lot of things about this film from various sources, but I delayed watching it for a long time, as I suspected that it would push a lot of emotions, since the main themes are young people suffering from serious illnesses, so it was to be expected that there would be a grim reaper hanging around. In the end, it's a kind of bittersweet film where on the one hand you watch the characters enjoying the time they have left, while on the other hand there is the presence of impending death, which unfortunately is not a choice. I probably wouldn't watch it again, but I can still recommend this film. In short, a film that shows the fact that serious illness and death are not a matter of the older generation alone, and that it is important to enjoy every day to the fullest. (06/29/2016)