Director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon
Staring Thomas Mann, RJ Cyler, Olivia Cooke
Rated M
Score 2/6

High schooler Greg, who spends most of his time making parodies of classic movies with his co-worker Earl, finds his outlook forever altered after befriending a classmate who has just been diagnosed with cancer.

The theatrical release of this one was met with my usual degree of procrastination, and having seen it promoted on one of the late night American talk shows that I watch so at the very least the movie’s title was familiar to me. However, with any procrastination comes the attitude that anything else is always better even if that ‘anything’ is actually nothing. So I ended up missing this one at the friendly neighbourhood cinema and forced myself to wait until it was released on DVD.
Now maybe it could be because I am slowly turning into a cranky bastard (and perhaps I should indeed just give up on watching these teen movies and if I am actually turning into a cranky bastard I’ll be sure to own it) but I could have sworn that upon its release this movie fell out of the pretentious tree and hit every branch on its way down to the general public. Now I am of an age where characters in teen movies and sitcoms came across as if they had swallowed a thesaurus, in some cases maybe two. Now it seems that we have entered an age where the authors of teen (young adult, I’m going to try to be politically correct at least once in this review) novels who ultimately sell the rights to their novels have upped the ante, leaving us wondering, where have all the fart jokes gone?
Now I suppose there is enough there for the right audience and I suppose on some level I identified with the character of Greg (not completely) but I really think that I could have used my time and money elsewhere.