EDIT: 3.5 stars, but only if you like movies about children dying from cancer !
halfway through the movie …
so far … they post a craigslist ad for a set of child swings titled " vaguely pedophilic swings looking for child butts " and laugh …
and then they go to … holocaust museum.
so they think pedophilia is funny … but “holocaust” is serious …
well well …
EDIT: finished watching … 3.5 stars
i mean they had to promote pedophilia and plug the holocaust we know that i mean it’s hollywood …
but ultimately i just like the subject of this movie ( children dying from cancer ) and i’m a huge fan of Willem Dafoe …
there is a point in the movie where it starts to get so banal ( they dress up in fancy clothes and go to a fancy restaurant ) that the temptation to stop watching is strong … but it’s sort of a calm before the storm type of deal and the movie recovers from it in a dramatic fashion
the essential theme of the movie is how to deal with death, how we want to be remembered, what is a life worth living and so on …
yes it’s also a love story between two teenagers but death is more important in the movie than love …
if the movie has any answers then i have missed them but in real life there are no answers either …
as Nietzsche said life is about finding meaning in suffering …
ultimately i respect this movie because whether or not it succeeded in whatever it was trying to do at least it attempted to deal with a subject that most people just want to avoid …
i am not a fan of avoiding difficult subjects …
it reminds me of another movie called “never let me go”
which is also about children dying … except “never let me go” is a sci-fi dystopia in which children are grown for their organs whereas “the fault in our stars” is simply about children with cancer …
between the two of them i think “the fault in our stars” is better, because “never let me go” is trying to be some kind of social critique about how society doesn’t care about children … which is frankly too obvious to need spelling out … whereas “the fault in our stars” isn’t a critique of anything, it’s just PAIN.
i respect this movie because it’s the opposite of escapist superhero action garbage that everybody watches. instead of dealing with fantasies about superpowers, immortality and other shit this movie tackles the one subject nobody wants to think about - the inevitability of their death.
on the other hand i don’t understand the choice of keeping it PG-13. what teenagers are going to watch a movie about terminal cancer ? if they made it a proper R-rated horror movie and got rid of the holocaust museum scene it could have been great.
instead it’s just an OK movie which is remarkable only for its willingness to deal with the subject in the first place.
i would rather watch an average movie about a serious subject like this than a great movie about superheroes, shoot ups, car chases, bar fights etc …