And that’s why I don’t have a hamster.

The Fault in Our Stars

(2014)

(SPOILERS) Big C chic for teens, The Fault in Our Stars at least begins with admirable intentions. Perhaps setting out its store so forthrightly, that this is not your classic chocolate box movie romance where everything turns out alright in the end, was unwise. Inevitably the picture pitches headlong into another renowned variant on the genre, the doomed love story, where it becomes difficult to distinguish from its bedfellows.

If John Hughes had tackled terminal illness, it would probably have ended up resembling this adaption of John Green’s young adult novel. That is, the John Hughes who was just past his-teen nostalgia faze and trying his hand at more meaningful ruminations (see She’s Having a Baby). Obviously, I’m not the target audience for Josh Boone’s picture, and I have studiously avoided the annual arrival of a new Nicholas Sparks adaptation. I was curious about this one, though, mostly due to its part Shailene Woodley’s arrival as the next J-Law. She hasn’t yet ascended to such heights, but she’s probably the better actress (certainly, she made Divergence watchable, while Lawrence only really has to show up and Hunger Games works like clockwork around her). True to form, Woodley’s the best thing here.

I can’t speak to the book, but there’s an overwritten broadness to Scott Neustadter and Michael H Weber’s screenplay that works in the overwrought world of, say, The Breakfast Club (where kids’ conflations of a harsh world of harsh parents and harsh teachers and bullying peers seem appropriate to their notion that they are centre of the universe), but here is frequently in danger of appearing too much like smug cleverness (which makes sense, given they also penned 500 Days One Summer). The movie so consciously pushes buttons, be it in set pieces, music montages (and Hazel has the cheek to call out the use of Peter Gabriel songs in the romantic slush of yesteryear!), shocking twists of fate, or simply smart-mouthed exchanges, that its notional attempt to serve the reality of terminal illness ends up wrapped in cotton wool. Or rather, in cinematographer Ben Richardson’s cosseting capturing of suffering.

Woodley is also splendidly aided by the various production departments. Every teen girl dreamer will be hoping that, should the writing be on the wall, they will look as adorable as she does. With a stylish cannula ever in place and the most desirable of this season’s haircuts, Hazel Grace is the thyroid cancer sufferer du jour. She is certainly a worthy usurper to Debra Winger’s unassailable throne.

If Hazel starts off being a little overtly witty and knowing, she’s thrown into sharp relief when Ansel Elgort’s Gus (Augustus) arrives at her support group. He’s lost a leg to bone cancer, or the special effects department, but otherwise looks as robustly healthy as only an ex school sports star can be. He’s also possessed with the kind of cocky dream guy confidence that only exists in the movies. When he turns up in a limo to whisk Hazel away to Amsterdam, it’s clearly a rather lame homage to John Cusack with his ghetto blaster.

And, of course, a formulaic romance needs a third wheel, the geeky guy (see Anthony Michael Hall and Jon Cryer in Hughes’ movies), Nat Wolff’s Isaac is on the verge of blindness and replete with “hilarious” anger management issues. Laura Dern (can she be that old now?) is immensely winning as the over-protective mum (True Blood’s Sam Trammell is less persuasive as dad). The soundtrack is precisely tailored, and exactly the kind of thing Hughes would pick were he still alive and making movies (M83, but of course).

The film can’t just be about one, or both, of them dying (and of course it’s not the one we expected, except that as this is fiction for girls, it is really), there has to be a goal in mind. So Hazel dreams of meeting the author who wrote her favourite cancer lit, An Imperial Affliction. Which means travelling to Amsterdam.

Even the great Willem Dafoe cannot salvage the avalanche of clichés that is scribe Peter van Houten. Perhaps Green intends van Houten to be a toxic version of himself, but that’s no excuse (there are parallels to the inspiration for the novel, and they share extremely self-important titles).He’s an abrasive, reclusive drunk. Isn’t that how all authors are? The one saving grace of the character, I thought (or hoped), was that we were going to be left without an explanation of why he was so negative and twisted. It would have given the movie a smidgeon of credibility in not spoon-feeding its audience. Instead, van Houten only goes and rocks up at the end – at Gus’s funeral no less - full of explanations. The character is only as unsubtle as the movie generally, but this displays particularly overt cynicism.

And the movie in general is much more involving before the Amsterdam jaunt. It’s in Amsterdam that the forced dramatics take over. There’s a bizarre and wholly inappropriate scene where the Hazel and Gus kiss for the first time – in Anne Frank’s house. Even the weird endorsement of applauding onlookers can’t banish the conviction that this really wasn’t the time or the place for such shenanigans.

Later, there are the “cute” capsule scenes. Such as egging Isaacs’ ex’s auto, which we’re supposed to get behind but actually shows that cancer victims can be arseholes too. And the pre-demise eulogies, so the ill-fated can listen to what’s in store for them. The latter particularly preys on teen wish fulfilment, and credit to John Green as he has clearly tapped a vein of teen angst to winning effect. But an actual attitude, rather than a skin deep one, might have been more fitting. The early scenes at the support group suggested the picture might have a caustic Fight Club-lite attitude to the manufactured apparatus that surrounds sufferers of terminal illnesses. Instead, it indulges Romeo and Juliet star-crossed fantasies. That’s fair play, of course. This is a teen romance, and it would be self-defeating to turn off the readership with gruesome details and unfettered despair. But it also means The Fault in Our Stars is nothing special, aside from Woodley’s tremendous performance.

Comments

I just hope my death makes more cents than my life.

Joker (2019)
(SPOILERS) So the murder sprees didn’t happen, and a thousand puff pieces desperate to fan the flames of such events and then told-ya-so have fallen flat on their faces. The biggest takeaway from Joker is not that the movie is an event, when once that seemed plausible but not a given, but that any mainstream press perspective on the picture appears unable to divorce its quality from its alleged or actual politics. Joker may be zeitgeisty, but isn’t another Taxi Driver in terms of cultural import, in the sense that Taxi Driver didn’t have a Taxi Driver in mind when Paul Schrader wrote it. It is, if you like, faux-incendiary, and can only ever play out on that level. It might be more accurately described as a grubbier, grimier (but still polished and glossy) The Talented Ripley, the tale of developing psychopathy, only tailored for a cinemagoing audience with few options left outside of comic book fare.

Poor Easy Breezy.

Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood (2019)
(SPOILERS) My initial reaction to Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood was mild disbelief that Tarantino managed to hoodwink studios into coming begging to make it, so wilfully perverse is it in disregarding any standard expectations of narrative or plotting. Then I remembered that studios, or studios that aren’t Disney, are desperate for product, and more especially, product that might guarantee them a hit. Quentin’s latest appears to be that, but whether it’s a sufficient one to justify the expense of his absurd vanity project remains to be seen.

So you want me to be half-monk, half-hitman.

Casino Royale (2006)
(SPOILERS) Despite the doubts and trepidation from devotees (too blonde, uncouth etc.) that greeted Daniel Craig’s casting as Bond, and the highly cynical and low-inspiration route taken by Eon in looking to Jason Bourne's example to reboot a series that had reached a nadir with Die Another Day, Casino Royale ends up getting an enormous amount right. If anything, its failure is that it doesn’t push far enough, so successful is it in disarming itself of the overblown set pieces and perfunctory plotting that characterise the series (even at its best), elements that would resurge with unabated gusto in subsequent Craig excursions.

For the majority of its first two hours, Casino Royale is top-flight entertainment, with returning director Martin Campbell managing to exceed his excellent work reformatting Bond for the ‘90s. That the weakest sequence (still good, mind) prior to the finale is a traditional “big” (but not too big) action set piece involving an attempt to…

She writes Twilight fan fiction.

Vampire Academy (2014)
My willingness to give writer Daniel Waters some slack on the grounds of early glories sometimes pays off (Sex and Death 101) and sometimes, as with this messy and indistinct Young Adult adaptation, it doesn’t. If Vampire Academy plods along as a less than innovative smart-mouthed Buffy rip-off that might be because, if you added vampires to Heathers, you would probably get something not so far from the world of Joss Whedon. Unfortunately inspiration is a low ebb throughout, not helped any by tepid direction from Daniel’s sometimes-reliable brother Mark and a couple of hopelessly plankish leads who do their best to dampen down any wit that occasionally attempts to surface.

I can only presume there’s a never-ending pile of Young Adult fiction poised for big screen failure, all of it comprising multi-novel storylines just begging for a moment in the Sun. Every time an adaptation crashes and burns (and the odds are that they will) another one rises, hydra-like, hoping…

Welcome to the future. Life is good. But it can be better.

20 to See in 2020
Not all of these movies may find a release date in 2020, given Hollywood’s propensity for shunting around in the schedules along with the vagaries of post-production. Of my 21 to See in 2019, there’s still Fonzo, Benedetta, You Should Have Left, Boss Level and the scared-from-its-alloted-date The Hunt yet to see the light of day. I’ve re-included The French Dispatch here, however. I've yet to see Serenity and The Dead Don’t Die. Of the rest, none were wholly rewarding. Netflix gave us some disappointments, both low profile (Velvet Buzzsaw, In the Shadow of the Moon) and high (The Irishman), and a number of blockbusters underwhelmed to a greater or lesser extent (Captain Marvel, Spider-Man: Far From Home, Terminator: Dark Fate, Gemini Man, Star Wars: The Rise of the Skywalker). Others (Knives Out, Once Upon a Time in… Hollywood, John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum) were interesting but flawed. Even the more potentially out there (Joker, Us, Glass, Rocketman) couldn…

It’s like an angry white man’s basement in here.

Bad Boys for Life (2020)
(SPOILERS) The reviews for Bad Boys for Life have, perhaps surprisingly, skewed positive, given that it seemed exactly the kind of beleaguered sequel to get slaughtered by critics. Particularly so since, while it’s a pleasure to see Will Smith and Martin Lawrence back together as Mike and Marcus, the attempts to validate this third outing as a more mature, reflective take on their buddy cops is somewhat overstated. Indeed, those moments of reflection or taking stock arguably tend to make the movie as a whole that much glibber, swiftly succeeded as they are by lashings of gleeful ultra-violence or humorous shtick. Under Michael Bay, who didn’t know the definition of a lull, these pictures scorned any opportunity to pause long enough to assess the damage, and were healthier, so to speak, for that. Without him, Bad Boys for Life’s beats often skew closer to standard 90s action fare.

To defeat the darkness out there, you must defeat the darkness inside yourself.

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (2010)
Easily the best of the Narnia films, which is maybe damning it with faint praise.

Michael Apted does a competent job directing (certainly compared to his Bond film - maybe he talked to his second unit this time), Dante Spinotti's cinematography is stunning and the CGI mostly well-integrated with the action.

Performance-wise, Will Poulter is a stand-out as a tremendously obnoxious little toff, so charismatic you're almost rooting for him. Simon Pegg replaces Eddie Izzard as the voice of Reepicheep and delivers a touching performance.
***

How many galoshes died to make that little number?

Looney Tunes: Back in Action (2003)
(SPOILERS) Looney Tunes: Back in Action proved a far from joyful experience for director Joe Dante, who referred to the production as the longest year-and-a-half of his life. He had to deal with a studio that – insanely – didn’t know their most beloved characters and didn’t know what they wanted, except that they didn’t like what they saw. Nevertheless, despite Dante’s personal dissatisfaction with the finished picture, there’s much to enjoy in his “anti-Space Jam”. Undoubtedly, at times his criticism that it’s “the kind of movie that I don’t like” is valid, moving as it does so hyperactively that its already gone on to the next thing by the time you’ve realised you don’t like what you’re seeing at any given moment. But the flipside of this downside is, there’s more than enough of the movie Dante was trying to make, where you do like what you’re seeing.

Dante commented of Larry Doyle’s screenplay (as interviewed in Joe Dante, edited by Nil Baskar and G…

Our lives are not our own. From womb to tomb, we are bound to others. Past and present. And by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.

I think World War II was my favourite war.

Small Soldiers (1998)
An off-peak Joe Dante movie is still one chock-a-block full of satirical nuggets and comic inspiration, far beyond the facility of most filmmakers. Small Soldiers finds him back after a six-year big screen absence, taking delirious swipes at the veneration of the military, war movies, the toy industry, conglomerates and privatised defence forces. Dante’s take is so gleefully skewed, he even has big business win! The only problem with the picture (aside from an indistinct lead, surprising from a director with a strong track record for casting juveniles) is that this is all very familiar.

Dante acknowledged Small Soldiers was basically a riff on Gremlins, and it is. Something innocuous and playful turns mad, bad and dangerous. On one level it has something in common with Gremlins 2: The New Batch, in that the asides carry the picture. But Gremlins 2 was all about the asides, happy to wander off in any direction that suited it oblivious to whether the audience was on …

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

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