Sentimental and miserable wallow in cancer & death

Rating: 2/10 (6 May 2017)

This romantic drama film is about a teenage couple in the Midwest who are both dying of cancer.
This sentimental film is very disappointing - I don't know why it's so popular. It was misleadingly promoted as a film in which the main characters enjoy fulfilling, happy lives in spite of their bad health. It's actually a feel-bad film about cancer and death.
Why did they cast a plain girl as Hazel? It would have been much more powerful if they'd cast a beautiful girl, who loses her looks as she becomes more seriously ill. I can see that the makers of the film were aiming it at teenage girls by having a plain protagonist get a tall, handsome, older boy who's out of her league. However, by doing so they've made the relationship unrealistic and the film unappealing to the rest of the population. They also made the mistake of having her no more or less ill at the end of the film than she is at the beginning of it.
Eighteen-year-old Gus tells Hazel that he's a virgin. It's highly unlikely that a lad who's tall and of significantly above-average looks would reach 18 without having intercourse, even if he has a false leg. Even if he were that unfortunate, he wouldn't admit it to a girl whom he's sexually attracted to - because she'd laugh at him and never want anything more to do with him. Hazel is surprised, but not bothered. They have sex together once, but we don't find out whether or not she'd previously had sex with anyone else.
The Amsterdam portion of the film is very disappointing. Hazel is inexplicably angrily disappointed about a novel ending abruptly and travels to Amsterdam (four thousand miles away), to meet the author. They go for three days - who makes an eight thousand mile return trip for such a short time?! This reclusive author pays for these two strangers to him to have dinner in an upmarket restaurant and then welcomes them into his house. However, he then angrily rebukes Hazel for criticising the end of the novel in question. In the restaurant, the teen couple pretend to the staff that they're married. This is totally unnecessary in present day Amsterdam - a very sexually liberal city! In any case, very few teens in the Western World are married. They're only in Amsterdam for two or three days, during which they choose to go to the Anne Frank House - but don't even suggest going to the red-light district! Are these the most boring teens in the world?!
At Gus' funeral, Hazel is introduced as his "special friend". Who the hell uses that term in modern America when referring to young, heterosexuals who are in a sexual relationship?! The usual term used - even by prudes - is girlfriend.
We never find out anything about the two main characters lives before they had cancer. The film would have been better with some flashbacks to that, to give us more context and background of what their lives were like then.