Full of Life Despite Being About Cancer Patients

Rating: 8/10 (23 June 2015)

After reading the novel for a summer class (the same reason I watched the movie) I was fairly surprised at the movie's fast pace, its good cinematography, and that each character was written to be as accurate to their representation in the novel as possible (besides Hazel's Dad, I was promised a crying Dad, not a perfectly secure Dad). However, I am not going to compare the movie to the novel now as I will mostly be doing that for the class since the class focuses on adaptation.
The casting for Hazel (Grace) Lancaster is near perfect in my opinion even though I had not heard of the actress before viewing the film. Shailene Woodley taps into the lead character's mind with great skill, able to depict Hazel's personality filled with sass and sarcasm as well as being able to cry on many occasions within the film without exaggerating how sad the character is supposed to be, which is usually how actors handle crying: it either doesn't happen at all, or it happens with ridiculous intensity. Woodley is able to be more subtle, handling the character near perfection. All other actors give mediocre performances, including Laura Dern (who I have never loved as an actress anyway). I wanted to like Willem Dafoe's character, but his performance seemed as though it was heavily directed and did not require any creativity from Dafoe himself.
To lift the mood and ignore we are focusing on dying teenagers in this movie, it is surprisingly funny at certain points, such as when Augustus nonchalantly gives his near-blind friend Isaac permission to break his basketball trophies while maintaining a serious conversation with Hazel - his love interest, which no moment of the film lets us forget.
For me, moments of this film are extremely cheesy or do not explain things well. Some terms relating to cancer which average viewers would not understand are used once or twice in the film with little explanation, and the dialogue is trying way too hard to be teenager dialogue. "Listen douchepants," sassy comebacks, and corny statements like "Okay will be our always" (you probably won't understand this one out of context) are abundant in this film, exaggerating how ridiculous teenagers are or even giving them too much intelligence at times - especially Gus.
This movie was surprisingly entertaining to me, and I have to admit it is a "chick flick" which I would actually watch again without cringing in disappointment. You may not be able to handle yourself as well as I did for this story, so maybe have some tissue in the room if you're going to watch this one.