If you lop off one letter from the back of the adjective "cute" . . .

Rating: 8/10 (9 June 2014)

. . . you transform a user-friendly term for sweetness and light into an ugly, truncated verb, as in "they CUT short my basketball career when they CUT off my leg," or "the film would have made more sense if they hadn't CUT it to just 126 minutes." THE FAULT IN OUR STARS teaches us that, "There's no "I" in cancer," at least when it strikes youths of a certain age. These sufferers spend most of their time kissing each other because, unlike adult victims of the disease, they never have "cancer breath." The constant sniffling from the young audience surrounding me prove that it is very sad when young Americans glowing with the pink of health actually are dying of cancer, even though they get to go to Disney World AND Amsterdam. Of course, for every ONE fatally stricken U.S. cancer youth there must be a hundred or a thousand more youthful Africans and Asian lives snuffed out (by Ebola, AIDS, war, and starvation) with a degree of "oblivion" unimaginable to FAULT lovers Gus and Hazel. Tragically, they--and we--never get to hear Willem Dafoe's trolley tale.