By: Ben
Johnson
My girlfriend’s goddaughter is in the summer
between eighth and ninth grades right now, and so I’m in a position to see some
female-targeted
films based on young adult books. Okay? Is that okay with you? I’m not
going to these things alone or anything. I’m not some weird film guy who goes
to every film. I’m not seeing previews for these movies and saying “oh yeah,
that looks right up my alley, I’m definitely going to that.” But I’m also not
getting dragged kicking and screaming to these things. I’m flexible. I like to
be flexible. If my girlfriend and her mom and dad and her goddaughter are going
to go check out some soupy weeper about cancer teens, I can sit right down and
eat popcorn with the best of them.
Fault
In Our Stars
is pretty good. I would give it a “not a total waste of time” out of a possible
“two hours of your life that have just ended.” I thought I was going to hate it
but I did not hate it. On balance, I liked it.
Spoiler alert: children with terminal cancer
is a very sad topic. You know that going in, and you expect that. “Okay, this
main character is a child who has cancer,” you think, “okay, I’m sad now, and I
expect to remain sad until this thing is over.” And then the movie proceeds,
systematically, to make you cry.
You’re sitting there in a movie theater, next
to some people you know. You are crying and they are crying. Behind you, somewhere,
are strangers. They are also crying. You don’t need to turn around and look at
them to know this. You can hear them audibly sniffling. To the extent that the
theater is full, it is full of crying people. It is odd. It is an odd public
event. Public crying is just what you, “you” being anybody not diagnosed with a debilitating cognitive disorder, are signing up for with this
movie. You watch it and it makes you cry even though every single one of the
characters are upper middle class white people. They are cancer teens. They
are brave. They make you cry. The end.
If the question that arises from this basic
fact of what this movie is and does to people is “why would I sign up for that?”
then I don’t really have an answer. Maybe because your girlfriend’s goddaughter
is very cool for a person her age and wants to see it because she loves the
book? Maybe because crying about cancer teens is, in this case, at least as entertaining
a way to spend two hours as watching Tom Cruise save humanity from the threat
of extinction by high-concept space alien plot device? Maybe because everybody
dies and it’s nice to see some fictitious attractive Hollywood cancer teens handle
that fact with dignity and aplomb? I don’t have a clue why anybody would want
to see this movie.
I didn’t want to see it. I’m glad I did see
it, but there’s no way I’m going to watch it ever again. Why would I do that to
myself? It’s full of cancer teens. It’s sad. It makes me cry and then I’m
crying. Maybe I would watch it if I was already sad about something, like for
instance if I was dying of cancer. Or if I had some sort of tear duct issue and
needed to cry. Like medically.
It’s not a perfect movie. There are parts of
it where you’re like “enough with the trying to make me cry, I’m done, I’m not
crying again, no sir,” and there are parts where you’re like “I would like to
no longer be listening to this schmaltzy Mumfordesque ballad while the cancer
teen sadly looks at stuff, please.” There are parts where a cancer teen says
something and you’re like “there’s no way this cancer teen is that eloquent or capable
of manipulating syntax that exactingly in a conversation.” When I was a
teenager, my verbal communication consisted of “yeah but it’s like, no, you
know, like yeah, no, whatever; anyway” with NO ADDITIONAL WORDS involved. So
yeah, this movie suffers slightly from the ubiquitous movie phenomenon of
characters properly enunciating words no human would think to say. It’s a
movie. This movie is a movie.
But it’s not bad. It earns most of the crying
it asks you to do. It doesn’t often beat you over the head with sadness. It
sticks fairly close to reality. The cancer teens have sex. The cancer teens
drink alcohol. You can’t get too upset about it. They’re cancer teens. They’ve
earned it.
When the cancer teens do things that make you
cry, they’re self-aware. They say things like “I want you to be happy instead
of sad” even while they’re in the middle of being cancer teens, which makes you
cry because you’re like, “That’s so generous of you, cancer teen! You have
cancer!” And the cancer teen is like, “I know! I have cancer! Sucks, right?”
And you’re like “totally!” And then the character cries and you cry too. There’s
a character, an elaborate construction really, who is believably mean to the
cancer teens about having cancer. The cancer teens tell him to get bent. And
you’re like “yeah, get bent, shitty cancer teen villain character!” Really you
are telling yourself to get bent for not wanting to spend two of your weekend
hours watching some crying-ass cancer teens. It’s pretty ingenious, actually,
because from then on it’s like “okay, shit, I guess I’m gonna cry about these
cancer teens now. I don’t want to be like shitty guy.”
It falls apart a little at the end. Of
course. It’s a movie. In movies, you have to say these moralizing summation things
like “even though we’re cancer teens, we are glad we were alive, even if all we
ever got to be was cancer teens.” It’s like when hobbits go “I might only be
hobbit, but I sure had a big adventure” and then they look at a mountain for two full minutes in a way that indicates "this hobbit movie can't just be over, the hobbit would like to remind you that you felt feelings during it." You
see this and you think “OKAY I GET IT JESUS JUST END ALREADY.” But this cancer teen movie
only really does that like right real close to the end of the movie instead of
all the whole time of it.
It’s good. It’s a good crying movie about
cancer teens. You could do worse things than see it. I guess.
So yeah.
Some bonus jokes I did not mention:
We saw it in IMAX 3D, so the tears really squirted
out at our faces. HA HA HA.
My girlfriend came out of the lobby bathroom
crying and said “I can’t believe Godzilla died” and I actually went “HA HA HA”
but like laughing. I was laughing. It was funny.
It's like Twilight if vampirism was cancer, and werewolfism was a different kind of cancer.
It's like Twilight if vampirism was cancer, and werewolfism was a different kind of cancer.
Okay, that's all I got.
Go see the cancer teens. It's okay to cry about cancer teens.
Go see the cancer teens. It's okay to cry about cancer teens.
