The Fault in Our Stars Movie Review

From the writers of (500) Days of Summer I expected much better in a romance film involving two teenage cancer patients. The Fault in Our Stars, directed by Josh Boone, is not cloying or mawkish, but it is oh so precious – relentlessly so. It is constantly aware of how perfect a movie it’s so desperately trying to be. I can even sort of tell from this movie that the source novel is likely similarly insistent on its sense of perfection in its characters and plotting.

The story is narrated by Hazel (Shailene Woodley), a seventeen-year old with stage four cancer that has left her with a lung ailment that demands twenty-four hour attention from an oxygen tank. Woodley is a talented actress whom I have greatly admired and here she really holds the movie together. Without her performance, exuding youth along with naturalism and a realistic outlook on her situation that you wouldn’t expect from a girl her age, the movie doesn’t work. But Marc Webb’s and Scott Neustadter’s screenplay pushes too hard on those buttons that make Hazel seem too intelligent, too over it, too cynical to go in for the platitudes and clichés associated with her disease.

The Spectacular Now Movie Review

James Ponsoldt’s The Spectacular Now is a refreshing depiction of teenage life, friendship, romantic relationships, and angst. Its main character, Sutter (Miles Teller), is the school’s life of the party. He’s fun and funny, popular among the ‘right’ people, and has an on again-off again beautiful girlfriend, who looks like the all-American Homecoming Queen. Like The Perks of Being a Wallflower, this is as close to the spirit of John Hughes as we’ve seen, in the sense of a writer who gets the voice and troubles of the American teenager.

(500) Days of Summer Movie Review

First published at American Madness on 23 November 2009.

Reposted here without changes.

(500) Days of Summer rests solidly on the strengths of its charismatic leads Joseph Gordon Levitt and Zooey Deschanel, who play Tom Hansen and Summer Finn, co-workers at a greeting card company who find, and then lose, romance. Written by Scott Neustadter and Michael Weber and directed by Marc Webb (known primarily for music videos, but making his feature debut here), it is the perfect, and often honest, answer to the contrived and sappy romantic comedies we see produced far too often in Hollywood.

“This is not a love story,” we’re told at the outset by an omniscient narrator. Although a love story is most certainly what it is. The film begins with the recounting of the happy couple’s breakup. That line is designed to set us up for the fact that the couple will not get back together. Armed with the knowledge of what is ultimately to come on Day 280 (or something) of the titular 500, the story then jumps back to Day 1 and then soldiers on ahead depicting the burgeoning romance between Tom, the romantic who believes in love at first sight and soul mates, and Summer, who doesn’t believe in love (perhaps because she’s never experienced it) and refuses for several months to even admit she is his girlfriend.