Today we have nothing on so, wa-hey, a lie in. If we can remember
what they're all about.
Then late afternoon we head off to the cinema. I’ve seen the ‘Fault in Our Stars’ coming over the horizon
for quite a while, so when L says ‘what are the chances of you taking
me to see this?’ I’m ready for it. How bad can it be?
Quite bad. Based on a best selling book by John Greene, our ‘heroine’
is Hazel Grace Lancaster (Shailene Woodly), a teenager with terminal thyroid
cancer and part-time grenade. Her lungs no longer work and so she carries an
oxygen tank around with her in a handy backpack.
She’s also your typical surly teenage grenade, so she has to
be coerced into attending a cancer support group. You do feel for her though when
the group leader, a testicular cancer survivor, turns out to be religious nut
that rolls out a large rug of Jesus at the start of ever session.
At this group she meets Augustus Waters (Ansel Elgort), a
fellow teenager who has lost the lower part of his leg to cancer. Augustus, or
should I say Gus, is with his friend Isaac who has eye cancer. Everyone knows
that Isaac’s attractive big-chested girlfriend is going to dump him the minute
he goes blind but he doesn’t see it coming. Notwithstanding that, Isaac is by
far the best character in the film and is seriously underused.
Hazel and Gus immediately fall in love, they don’t know it
obviously but we do. Now in true romantic fiction style, we just have to wait a
couple of hours for them to get it together. Yes, it’s the same old format where
boy gets girl, eventually.
Gus is seriously odd. He carries around a pack of cigarettes
and occasionally puts one in his mouth saying ‘they don't kill you unless you
light them’. It's a metaphor apparently as well as being ridiculous. Surely most
girls would have dumped him on the spot.
She lends him her favourite book, he lends her his. We never
find out what she thought of his but we do launch off into a rather random sub-plot
where they track down the author of her book, which takes them all the way to Amsterdam
where the author breaks his reclusiveness just for them. This then allows for an
even more random visit to Anne Frank’s house where their first kiss is applauded
by the general public. Not that anyone would have dared clap or kiss in such a
sombre place.
This spurs them on to spend one night of passion together,
although of course if they both hadn’t prevaricated and lived life for the
minute they could have been at it for months. The message of the film seems to
be to value every minute but these two don’t.
Back in America, it is revealed that Gus’s cancer has
returned, his number is up and he asks Hazel to write a eulogy for him. Which
is sort of sweet.
When Gus dies he could have been hit by bus, choked on his beef
burger or even killed by aliens rather than dying of cancer. Any of these would
have only required a minor script rewrite. Sadly this is a film about romance
with a side portion of cancer as opposed to what it could have been, a film
about cancer with a bit of romance.
Hazel goes on about ‘pain deserves to be felt’
but I think she
means the pain of a teenage romance not the pain of cancer because the
film never gets into what it’s like to live with cancer and they both
look so damn
well throughout.
So it’s hard to buy into the constant sniffling in the
cinema which I at first put down to the high pollen count today but clearly it
moved some people. As you can perhaps tell, this film clearly wasn’t made with
me in mind.
I do occasionally shed a tear at films, well I did at Marley
and Me, but this film was seriously lacking in dog.
Of course Hazel could have perhaps saved the whole film if she’d
quoted Ade Edmondson in her eulogy. Poor Gus, now he's died for real. Without
me. Selfish bastard.
After eating at Broadway we have a few Old Peculiars in the Peacock
where Daughter joins us after a shift at her new job in a restaurant in
Ruddington.
(Saturday 28th June)