How I learned to stop worrying and disregard the flaws...

Rating: 7/10 (23 February 2016)

I really like the idea of 'fixing' a film's average rating by kicking it with a 0 or 10 and I make use of it deliberately, but since this has been happening here extensively enough, I will rather try to offer you a biiit of a mediating evaluation, really because I think that this is not a film which you necessarily have to love OR hate. Apart from that, I am actually still trying to figure out myself what made me like it in the first place - because i did.
In fact if you are, like me, prone to readily dislike a film for being all to cheesy, predictable and like this one bourgeois (as hell!) - you will be struggling trying to watch more than the first two scenes featuring the pretentious, smart-arse make-believe stereotype Gus... some acting is bad, while sometimes character concepts are just the painful thing - and they usually do not coincide here. An in itself very good but in this configuration maybe sometimes very series-like popish soundtrack and suboptimal camera settings are just things I want to have mentioned. It has some lengthy moments and awkward scenes (yep, the Anne Frank house clapping scene is unbearable) and aspects of questionable directing.
...In the end you may still accept the film as a whole - while it has to rely mostly on the few following things: (1) the simple inherent tragedy, that works however rich and white the characters may be and their well-depicted inner conflicts. (2) the great character of Hazel Grace, beautifully represented by Shailene Woodley, who evolves despite some script-related clichéising (...she is also kind of unapproachable...so what?) and (3) its emotional power, because in their moments of genuine weakness (or strength!), the characters are believable and they function.
I think TFIOS really encourages us to see the romanticism, in all its frailty and 'vanity', as a refuge and a beautiful, joyful thing while it is strongest; this innocent and so temporary romantic love as a momentary prospect against oblivion. It is macabre and wondrous at the same time that the two lovers might only have enjoyed the purest form of romantic love in the face of death - but does that change so much about it in general? Anyway, it is a story about teenagers, teenage worlds of thought and maybe ideals - if you do not care about that, you won't enjoy the film either.
Cheers!