Song of herself

Paper Towns

Crit

Golly! Not good golly, distinctly bad golly. I would not have believed that I could be left so unmoved, so thoroughly uninvolved, by a film with a screenplay by the guys who wrote (500) Days of Summer, The Spectacular Now, and The Fault in Our Stars and based on a book by the YA novelist responsible for the last of those.

I would like to claim that the problem is a generational one, that having reached my seventh decade, I can no longer relate to infatuation that conflates beauty with depth of intellect and/or character, but that's just silly: I know I'm still capable of convincing myself that a beautiful woman is more interesting and more worthy of admiration than she really is.

Maybe the problem is simply that I don't find Cara Delevingne, who is, I gather, generally considered to be the most beautiful woman in the universe, to be all that. Her Margo I found just selfish and spoiled and annoying--and one moment when the film gave me some hope of connection came when other characters suggest the same. But protagonist Quentin (Nat Wolff) never really gets that, and thus I don't get him or the film. His ostensibly charming sidekicks failed to charm me, either. It was simply 109 minutes plus blogtime that I'll never get back.

Trailers

• Goosebumps--How bad can a flick starring Jack Black and Amy Ryan be? This may be the test.
• The Fantastic Four--Reboot with a brand-new (excellent) cast, and I desperately want it to be good, but geez, I don't think there was a line of dialogue in the trailer that wasn't clichéd.
• The Visit--Tip to grandparents: don't let your kids see this.