Fault In Our Stars is more than just a teen weepie
It’d be a privilege to have my heart broken by you,’ says Augustus Waters (Ansel Elgort) to his new girlfriend Hazel (Shailene Woodley) in the teen romance The Fault In Our Stars. Yes, it sounds adolescent, but Augustus isn’t being mopey and melodramatic about love.
Hazel has thyroid cancer and not long to live. He, meanwhile, has lost a leg to osteosarcoma – and though he’s now in the clear, he has learned while terrifyingly young what all of us must: nothing lasts for ever.
Certainly some things in The Fault In Our Stars go on too long. There’s a scene in Amsterdam, for instance, when Hazel gets to meet Peter Van Houten (Willem Dafoe on fiery form), an author she’s worshipped from afar, that labours point--- less points over and over again. As for the sequence in which our heroes visit the Anne Frank House and, after tastelessly paralleling Hazel’s suffering with the Holocaust, share a long, passionate kiss, well, let’s just say that not even the cancerstricken are allowed to be that self-obsessed.
Still, that’s the only miscalculation in an otherwise magnificent movie. Yes, The
Fault In Our Stars is a tearjerker, but most of the time it’s so finely judged that the weeping doesn’t leave you feeling like a jerk. It’s a privilege to have your heart broken by it.
You’ll need cheering up afterwards, though, which is where 22 Jump Street comes in. This comedy sequel about two young, dumbo cops – Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum – pretending to be undergraduates to uncover a drugs racket at a preppy university is inanely funny from first to last. (Really: the movie’s end credits are a joke themselves.) But not all sequels work. In X-Men: Days
Of Future Past the X-es have to go back in time and change the course of history.
If only they’d wiped out the origins of this diminishingly amusing series while they were at it.