The Fault in Our Stars

Okay, Hazel Grace? Moments of laughter, moments of tears – and the whole time with clenched fists, cheering for one miracle. The stars might not have been on Jim's side, but they were on ours. Because we could witness a captivating, intimate, and deeply personal love story. Personal not because Augustus has a Mass Effect poster at home or because he watches Buffy the Vampire Slayer with Hazel. Not even because I would definitely date a grenade of a girl. No, it's because until the very last breath, I admire how two people – despite illnesses, pain, and heart-wrenching disappointments looming every day – can give each other everything. And those who have loved before understand that a smile with tear-filled eyes is a constant state when it comes to these Stars. (12/06/2014)

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. (20/05/2015)

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. (25/09/2014)

I was getting ready to watch this movie with my girlfriend for quite some time. It is advisable to prepare some tissues and steel your nerves before watching this movie, which tells a story of people where you already know in advance what is awaiting them. And it is nothing pretty. All the more surprised I was by the natural and nice way the story was told in. I also like it when Americans travel to Europe, so I enjoyed that part of the movie as well. The finale is nerve-wrecking, depressing and so on, but what else could you expect from a film like this? Luckily, the ending did not make me as sad as I was worried it would, so I think the movie managed this part perfectly. (20/05/2015)

A self-aware mix of romance and drama (a classic trend of recent years), with just the right amount of both. Too bad about the drawn-out ending, though, which may be too sentimental, but understandable considering the catharsis and the film's tone, but it never descends into awkwardness or pathos. The chemistry of the two leads is excellent, with a great Shailene Woodley, who will significantly overshadow Jennifer Lawrence in the future. (13/07/2014)