Wake up, people!

Rating: 3/10 (25 June 2016)

I consider myself a woman of taste. If intelligent people tend to like a certain thing, I'm likely to give it a chance. Sadly, I find the praises heaped upon this movie and its source material not only baffling, but frightening. In the first place, I found Augustus obnoxious; not the sort of guy I'd be into at any point in my life. That kept me from buying into the emotions the story is meant to elicit. Shailene Woodley makes for an unpleasant heroine, namely with her chain-smoker voice. John Green has said that the main characters are obnoxious navel-gazers on purpose, but that doesn't redeem them in my eyes. No one ever calls them out on it, and their personalities don't change, so they remain irritating the whole movie long. I'd be willing to spend time with characters like this if they got some sort of comeuppance or maturation.
Furthermore, what about the part where they have their first kiss in the Anne Frank House?! Someone else out there must find it not so romantic. In fact, I've never seen something so flagrantly disrespectful! Is being a middle-class teen with cancer anything like living in danger of the Holocaust? NO! How did John Green not know better? Yes, I am holding him responsible for the movie because, as this page will tell you, he was closely involved in its making.
Green once tweeted "Why did I have to make TFIOS so sad?" That is a sign of insincerity. It suggests that TFIOS was written not out of the author's experience but manufactured in the name of True Art. Charlotte Brontë would never ask that about Villette, her best novel. She put the misery and depression she knew too well into Villette so that her story could be heard. John Green is not the sort of person who would have any sad story to tell because he knew what it was like. He can only fail at speaking for others.