The Fault in our Stars (Film)

It is no secret that I love John Green and his books. His last novel, The Fault In Our Stars is one of the best YA books I have read. I usually recommend the book to every reader I know. I love the book so much to the point that every time someone I know asked me what to read I will shoved to them my signed copy of the book to read. In fact, that copy is still with a friend, who I asked to read the book before seeing the film.

To be honest, I’m not sure what to expect for the movie adaptation. Yes, I am excited for the film, but at the same time unsure how will it goes. Movie adaptation is mostly miss than hit for me, especially for books I love dearly which makes me skeptical sometimes. But no matter what, I still make sure to see the films. So last night, I went with my sister to watch the movie during its first day of screening here in the Philippines.

The film is extremely faithful to the book which I really appreciate. It follows Hazel Grace Lancaster and Augustus Waters, two teenagers who meet in a cancer support group. Hazel has thyroid cancer. Her “lungs suck at being lungs” so she wear a nasal tubes in her nose and drag around an oxygen tank everywhere she went. Augustus aka “Gus” is a survivor of osteosarcoma. He lost his leg during his battle but apparently he is in remission. He is determined to live — not just a life but an extraordinary one. He is full of life for a cancer patient and he wants to share that with Hazel.

Shailene Woodley as Hazel Grace Lancaster is so fitting for the role. I admire how she can easily captures a very conflicting character like Hazel Grace. She carry her strength and weakness every time she is on screen, making Hazel’s character so alive. As a cancer patient Hazel has this wit, and hope in her even after all the pain she went through, and Shailene shows all that and more. The way she deliver her lines has pain and strength which makes John Green’s complex lines from the novel convincingly powerful. If you have read the book like me, for sure you understand how big and powerful those lines are. They aren’t easy to deliver especially from a mouth of a teenager, but Shailene managed to deliver them with ease that I’m surprise that I’m not rolling my eyes or rising my eyebrows.

As for Ansel Elgort, well he got me with his grin right the moment he first show himself on big screen. Honestly, when I first heard that he was cast for the role of Augustus, I don’t believe he can own the role. He is too sweet for my liking, and Augustus in my mind isn’t like that. Augustus is cocky, confident and even idealistic but also pretentious. He is a human metaphor himself, masking his vulnerability with his self-confident. It’s his way of living his sick life or more specifically his fighting mechanism. But after seeing the film last night, I’m convinced that Ansel is the perfect Gus. He successfully deliver a good portrayal for Augustus. It isn’t what I initially want but seeing Gus character in action is still utterly enjoying. Ansel not only own the role for Gus but also makes Gus’ character incredibly sweet by pulling his charms.

To those who are worried about Shailene and Ansel’s team-up after being siblings from the film Divergent, rest assured that they made a great love team in this film. They are very convincing as a couple. Their chemistry is undeniable and surprisingly believable. They easily own the sweet young romance that evolved in the most unexpected time of two teenagers.

The film didn’t make me weep unlike when I read the book a couple of times, but it still makes me feel all the emotions I undergo through while reading. I still ache for Gus and Hazel. I smile and laugh with them along with all the movie goers at the cinema last night. I swoon and feel their love for each other and for their family and friends. I hope even I know long ago how their story will end.

The Fault In Our Stars easily the best contemporary book adaptation I’ve seen. With all the quotable lines from John Green’s novel, it is a thought-provoking story that will make you question everything you think you know about life, love and sickness. I will definitely watch again this film soon.

Book to Movie: The Fault In Our Stars (Movie Trailer)

Here it is, the official movie trailer of The Fault In Our Stars, starring Shailene Woodley as Hazel Grace Lancaster and Ansel Elgor as Augustus “Gus” Waters. Directed by Josh Boone.

What do you think of the trailer? Me, honestly I get teary watching the trailer above. I love John Green‘s novel where this movie is based and seeing the characters, Hazel and Augustus on screen just makes me relieve the emotional roller coaster ride I experienced while reading the book. I can’t wait to watch the whole film on its released date.

Book to Movie: The Fault In Our Stars (Sneak Peek)

John Green recently uploaded a teaser trailer for the movie adaptation of his book, The Fault In Our Stars. The full trailer will hit the web tomorrow, and will be shown in theaters starting on Valentines Day! I know, we are all excited to see Hazel Grace Lancaster and Augustus “Gus” Waters on big screen but for now tease yourself with the sneak peak video below.

I’ve heard that there is a video of the movie trailer that already leaked online that’s why they are releasing the full trailer earlier than expected. I have no plans of checking the leaked version but I will surely watch the full trailer once the movie maker officially released it online. Can’t wait to see this film on the big screen!And maybe I do a reread of the novel  while waiting.

Book to Movie: TFioS Movie Poster

The Fault in our Stars is one big movie I am excitedly anticipating! The novel where this film is based is one of my favorite reads and I just love John Green!

As for the movie poster above, I think the film makers or whoever is in charge with that poster nailed it. I like that they make Hazel wear the breathing tube which simply emphasize her sickness without making her look too much  disable. I also like that they didn’t changed the font color (blue and white) of the title which is the same with what the publisher used in the first edition of the book.

On related news, there are fuzz circling online about the movie tagline, “One sick love story” criticizing the film makers or whoever think of the tagline for making joke out of two sick people’s love story, which is a dark topic discussed in the novel where the film is based.  John Green, author of the novel also said his opinion about the tagline through his Tumblr account.

I get it why some find “One sick love story”, tagline as offensive, but mostly because I assume that they haven’t read the book yet. Because if you have read John Green’s novel of the same title where this film is based you know how fitting that tagline is. “One sick love story” is something that characters would say. Possibly something Gus and Hazel would think of as their tagline for their own story. If not, they would certainly approved of it or they would laugh at it if they read the tagline themselves.

The Fault in our Stars  tells an honest and raw story of two cancer patients, Hazel Grace Lancaster and Augustus Waters, who find each other in a cancer support group. It is an heartbreaking novel that deals with sickness and death but also a humorous book. Trsut me, it’s so much more than a sad story! Okay? Okay.

As stated from the poster above, the film is due to released on June 6, 2014, which stars Shailene Woodley and Ansel Elgort as Hazel Grace and Agustus Waters respectively. I’m really excited to see this heartbreaking & heartwarming story on big screen! 

Quotes: The Fault in Our Star by John Green

Rainy nights make me want to cuddle up in bed and just read. And tonight I’m particularly incline revisiting the sweet and painful story of Hazel Grace Lancaster and Augustus Waters from John Green‘s The Fault in our Stars. When I first read the book on the day it was released, I am so full of emotions that I never tried reviewing the book. I accepted the fact that there is no way I’ll be able to write my thoughts and feelings about the story and my reading experience. There’s no way I can justify John Green’s greatness and The Fault in our Stars perfections. Not when I first read the book, not tonight and not in the near future. Though tonight I want to share some beautiful, poignant and emotional quotes from the book. Lines that makes me ponder, realize and feel.

LOVE

“I will not tell you our love story, because—like all real love stories—it will die with us, as it should.”

“I’m in love with you, and I’m not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things. I’m in love with you, and I know that love is just a shout into the void, and that oblivion is inevitable, and that we’re all doomed and that there will come a day when all our labor has been returned to dust, and I know the sun will swallow the only earth we’ll ever have, and I am in love with you.”

“Some people don’t understand the promises they’re making when they make them,” I said.

“Right, of course. But you keep the promise anyway. That’s what love is. Love is keeping the promise anyway.”

“There are infinite numbers between 0 and 1. There’s .1 and .12 and .112 and an infinite collection of others. Of course, there is a bigger infinite set of numbers between 0 and 2, or between 0 and a million. Some infinities are bigger than other infinities. A writer we used to like taught us that. There are days, many of them, when I resent the size of my unbounded set. I want more numbers than I’m likely to get, and God, I want more numbers for Augustus Waters than he got. But, Gus, my love, I cannot tell you how thankful I am for our little infinity. I wouldn’t trade it for the world. You gave me a forever within the numbered days, and I’m grateful.”

PAIN & DYING

“The marks humans leave are too often scars.”

“Pain is like fabric: The stronger it is, the more it’s worth.”

“That’s the thing about pain,” Augustus said, and then glanced back at me. “It demands to be felt.”

“You don’t get to choose if you get hurt in this world…but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices.”

“Without pain, how could we know joy?’ This is an old argument in the field of thinking about suffering and its stupidity and lack of sophistication could be plumbed for centuries but suffice it to say that the existence of broccoli does not, in any way, affect the taste of chocolate.”

“Grief does not change you, Hazel. It reveals you.”

“Whenever you read a cancer booklet or website or whatever, they always list depression among the side effects of cancer. But, in fact, depression is not a side effect of cancer. Depression is a side effect of dying.”

“You do not immortalize the lost by writing about them. Language buries, but does not resurrect.”

“We’re as likely to hurt the universe as we are to help it, and we’re not likely to do either.”

PLACES

“The world is not a wish-granting factory.”

“Some tourists think Amsterdam is a city of sin, but in truth it is a city of freedom. And in freedom, most people find sin.”

“The weird thing about houses is that they almost always look like nothing is happening inside of them, even though they contain most of our lives. I wondered if that was sort of the point of architecture.”

“I believe the universe wants to be noticed. I think the universe is improbably biased toward consciousness, that it rewards intelligence in part because the universe enjoys its elegance being observed. And who am I, living in the middle of history, to tell the universe that it – or my observation of it – is temporary.”

BOOKS

“Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.”

“And then there are books like An Imperial Affliction, which you can’t tell people about, books so special and rare and yours that advertising your affection feels like betrayal.”

LIFE & EVERYTHING ELSE

“There will come a time,” I said, “when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything. There will be no one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let alone you. Everything that we did and built and wrote and thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of this”—I gestured encompassingly—“will have been for naught. Maybe that time is coming soon and maybe it is millions of years away, but even if we survive the collapse of our sun, we will not survive forever. There was time before organisms experienced consciousness, and there will be time after. And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it. God knows that’s what everyone else does.”

“The real heroes anyways aren’t the people doing things; the real heroes are the people NOTICING things, paying attention.”

“There is no try,” I said. “There is only do.”

“You are so busy being you that you have no idea how utterly unprecedented you are.”

“My thoughts are stars I can’t fathom into constellations.”

“There is no shortage of fault to be found amid our stars.”

An Abundance of Katherines by John Green

“What matters to you defines your mattering.”

When it comes to relationships, Colin Singleton’s type is girls named Katherine. And when it comes to girls named Katherine, Colin is always getting dumped. Nineteen times, to be exact.

On a road trip miles from home, this anagram-happy, washed-up child prodigy has ten thousand dollars in his pocket, a bloodthirsty feral hog on his trail, and an overweight, Judge Judy-loving best friend riding shotgun but no Katherines. Colin is on a mission to prove The Theorem of Underlying Katherine Predictability, which he hopes will predict the future of any relationship, avenge Dumpees everywhere, and finally win him the girl.

Love, friendship, and a dead Austro-Hungarian archduke add up to surprising and heart-changing conclusions in this ingeniously layered comic novel about reinventing oneself by Printz medalist John Green, acclaimed author of Looking for Alaska.

Award: Printz Honor (2007)

Personal Thoughts:

Colin Singleton is a prodigy, yet he never considered himself as a genius. He loves to anagram and been looking for his own Eureka moment since young. He also dated nineteen girls with a name of “Katherine” and all of them have dumped him. The last Katherine, K-19 has left him heartbroken. Which leads him to a road trip with his best-and-only friend Hassan. While on their trip Colin’s concentrate in finishing his mathematical formula to predict relationships because he believe that by doing so he will leave something behind in this world.

“What is the point of being alive if you don’t at least try to do something remarkable?”

An Abundance Of Katherines gives me a different reading experience. The footnotes, mathematical equations, graphs and overflowing facts makes this book unforgettable for me. Each footnotes offers added information and funny details. The graphs and mathematical formulas excites me to read more. I want to know how the final formula will work. I want to see if Collin is smart enough to finish his formula and if it is really possible to predict a relationship using mathematics even the logical part of me tells otherwise.

But for those who doesn’t like mathematics as much as I do, don’t be frightened because this book is certainly beautiful even if you disregard the formulas and graphs. The story will still make sense and you don’t really need to prove or test each equations to understand what is happening to the characters or to the story. It doesn’t require a prodigy like Colins or a genius to appreciate this book.

“Books are the ultimate Dumpees: put them down and they’ll wait for you forever; pay attention to them and they always love you back.”

Like with any other book of John Green that I have read, his main characters never fail to surprise me. They are unique, quirky, multi-layered and has a captivating perspective in life. Colin Singleton is no exception. He won my heart right at the start of this novel. He is a proof that John Green really can create smart characters without making the reader feel dumb. Because even if you are not a prodigy like Colin you can still relate to him. His desires to stand out and leave an indelible mark in this world is simply inspiring. Truth is, everyone wants to be special or at least to be someone’s special. We all want to feel that we are important, that somehow we matter to someone if not in this world.

“How do you just stop being terrified of getting left behind and ending up by yourself forever and not meaning anything to the world?”

I also love Colin’s preoccupation with anagrams and how he can’t tell a single story without giving interesting facts that according to Hassan are not all that interesting. Personally I find those facts entertaining if not all interesting. It doesn’t feel that I’m actually reading facts from textbooks or dictionary but more on encountering and understanding Colin’s head and exploring his interesting perspective.

Hassan is ridiculously funny. He had crazy ideas and dialogues that can make any reader laugh. But more than his witty side what I really like about Hassan is his loyalty to Colin. I like the friendship between them. They are total opposite and they even drive each other crazy but they still have each others back no matter what. They are honest and open with each other, pointing their weaknesses but stand by for each other regardless.

“Because you’re only thinking they-might-not-like-me-they-might-not-like-me, and guess what? When you act like that, no one likes you.”

I also enjoy their cool tandem, like when they speak arabic to each other or having a made up stories pretending to be someone else. They are simply hilarious and they complement each others craziness.

Lindsay, a girl who Colin and Hassan met during their road trip is also an interesting character. Her struggle to find her own identity is perfectly portrayed. How she was lost in all her roles that she forgot to really choose what she really want to be is something we can all understand. Sometimes it is easy to be lost like her. It is easy for us to be what other people expect us to be, to the point that we forgot to be what we really are or what we really want to be. Lindsay journey to find what she really is in this world is something we can all relate to.

Besides the characters and unique format of this book, An Abundance of Katherines also deals with different profound issues, like how we value ourselves, the importance of having goals and to be mattered. Our individuality sometimes are lost like Lindsay who always try her best to be perfect for others even her goals doesn’t really focus with them. And Colin’s obsession with Katherines proves that we can never find the person we lose to other person because everyone is different. No matter how identical their name or appearance is, they will never be the same person and we all need to move on.

“I don’t think you can ever fill the empty space with the thing you lost.”

An Abundance of Katherines is an intelligent novel written by an intelligent writer. John Green‘s creativity flaws fluently in this book. It is unique, smart and witty. I can list more adjectives to describe how beautiful this book is, but to make it short this book is brilliant like its main character, Colin Singleton. Definitely my favorite of John Green so far.