Wonderful Movie

Simply Perfect

A waste of 90 minutes of my life

One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

The movie was amazing! I love Cara! You must see this movie!

You've seen this movie before. It's been called "I Love You, Beth Cooper" among many other names. It's where the high school loser pines for the most popular girl in school and, through a turn of events and adventure, either wins her heart or otherwise gains her attention and respect. This is pretty much the same.In this case, the high school loser lives across the street from his crush. They don't interact very much; they have different friends. But the girl asks his help in dissing some of her friends through adolescent pranks and vandalism. Then the next day the girl disappears. The high school loser recruits his friends to try to find her.This movie really tanks because the plot isn't believable and because of the cast. The girl playing the crush, Cara Delevigne, isn't very breathtaking or interesting. And the characters, none of whom seem to have jobs, seem to have an endless supply of money. The girl who disappeared just went to another town and spends her days reading books. The methods through which food and lodging are procured is not explained.The one high point is Halston Sage. She's the only reason I watched the movie in the first place. Her character was a popular girl, almost a mean girl, but she joins in the search for the missing princess and befriends one of the high school loser's friends. At the end they went to the prom together. The breathtakingly beautiful popular girl hanging out with a loser/outcast reminded me of a good friend so it was a sentimental moment for me.

Released in July 2015 and based on the novel by John Green, Paper Towns (2015) is a coming of age story centered on Quentin "Q" Jacobsen and Margo Roth Spiegelman, childhood friends who drift apart while growing up in a nondescript Orlando, Florida subdivision. I enjoyed this film. It weaves urban exploration, road tripping, and geography/cartography around deeper themes involving free will, expectations vs. reality, friendship, and how we confront our own mortality.The title of the film, Paper Towns, comes from a type of fictitious entry that cartographers sometimes use to discourage plagiarism or copyright infringement. This becomes important when Margo Roth Spiegelman refers to Orlando as a "paper town" before she mysteriously disappears. Her friends attempt to track her down near a famous fictitious entry, Agloe, New York.To briefly summarize the plot, as a young boy Quentin Jacobsen, played by Nat Wolff, is immediately smitten with Margo Roth Spiegelman, played by Cara Delevingne (a discount Emma Watson), after her family moves into the house across the street. They become inseparable, until one day they discover the body of a man who committed suicide in a park. Margo wants to investigate the man's death, but Quentin chickens out. After that, the two drift apart. Quentin becomes a band geek who always follows the rules, while Margo constantly lives in the moment and falls in with the popular crowd.One night, in their senior year of high school, Margo asks Quentin to help get revenge on her boyfriend and her friends, who betrayed her. After sharing this moment together, Margo mysteriously vanishes. Quentin begins to break out of his shell, and enlists the aid of his friends in a lengthy search for his missing soulmate.Being confronted by death at a young age affects the two main characters very differently. While Quentin emotionally suppresses the incident, it profoundly alters Margo's perception on life. She realizes that every moment is precious, and that she can choose to live outside convention and try to be whatever she wants to be. This, of course, leads to numerous clashes with her parents and her ultimate dissatisfaction with life in Orlando. Her friends' betrayal is the catalyst to finally leave everything behind.Quentin, on the other hand, takes Margo's sudden reappearance in his life as a sign that she wants a more meaningful relationship with him. Following clues she left behind, he throws convention to the wind and pursues her to her hiding place in rural New York. Along the way, his friends also begin to break out of their shells and develop their own relationships. Margo's do-as-she-feels philosophy is the catalyst that inspires this group of shy introverts to take risks and live life to the fullest.While Quentin and friends ultimately must settle back into their previous life goals and routines, there is no such happy ending for Margo. Once shaken out of the herd mentality by her early confrontation with death, she can never settle down and live a "normal life." This is a profound point that most moviegoers are likely to overlook because she is introduced as being a member of the "popular crowd." How many "popular girls," however, are introspective loners, read literature, study old maps, hang out in abandoned buildings, and run away from home to pursue their artistic interests? The passion to have a richer life experience, a deeper understanding of things, and to escape the average and everyday is one response to human mortality. When confronted with the limits of human existence–the realization that we all have an "expiration date"–most people will seek comfort in convention, structure, and predictability.Some individuals, however, will disregard convention and take risks in an effort to get the most out of their existence. These individuals will remain perpetual outsiders, a sentiment expressed by Margo when she stares out a window of the SunTrust Center down onto Orlando and describes it as a "paper town" filled with fake people, "not even hard enough to be made of plastic." At this moment, she reveals how alone she feels despite her apparently carefree, spontaneous life.Inevitably, you end up asking yourself, am I Quentin or Margo? I can safely say I have been both at various times in my life, and the ability to identify with both characters added to the enjoyment of the film. Its refusal to tie up neatly at the end also appealed to me. After all, sometimes the guy doesn't get the girl, and often times our expectations fall far short of reality. But the desire to find meaning in life in the face of death is something we can all identify with. Life and death is, after all, the ultimate mystery.

I didn't really want to write a review - I wanted to write a comment on the discussion boards, but they're gone, so here we are.I watched this on Canadian Netflix because the availability of non-B movies on that site is not great. I hadn't read the book, because I know it's one of those coming-of-age stories I hate. When I saw the scene in which one of the guys looks up the bio of that folk singer on his phone, I was sure I knew where the movie was going - the article on the folk singer had said he'd died of Huntington's, which I knew was a genetic condition that often appears in the person's 30s and inevitably results in a slow and terrible death. So I thought, oh, that's why Margo is so reckless and apt to give advice about how other people should be living their lives, she knows she has this condition and is going to have a short time to live. So the whole time, I was expecting Q to search and search for her only to find that she'd lived it up madly and then killed herself to prevent slow deterioration, or that Q would never find her but would learn years later that at the onset of symptoms she'd jumped off a mountainside or something. She seemed like the type of person who would do that. And then Q, instead of becoming an oncologist, would become a researcher in neurological diseases and this would be the legacy she left him.Instead, she turned out to be an ordinary brat who ran away in order to "find" herself, not having graduated high school. Boring. Which leads me to my second point of irritation with this movie, which is that, either the author has completely forgotten what it was like to be 17, or he was also a spoiled brat. These teens all have cars, no jobs, unlimited cash, and their parents are perfectly fine with them ditching school without notice and driving across the country. They all have way more independence and disposable income than seems likely. Margo is living by herself in some hick town. What happens after the money runs out and all her former friends have finished high school, and she doesn't have a degree and can't get a job? I hate the rosy picture of the three friends heading their separate ways to new adventures at the end of the movie. What would the average life course of real people be? Yes, some would become oncologists and spend 80 hours a week working and rarely get to see their fancy houses, some would become journalists for CNN and travel the world, but most will be ordinary and get married, get an uninteresting job to pay the bills, and spend their weekends trying to get their squealing infants to stop crying long enough to pick up diapers at Walmart. And then get divorced. I'm just being realistic here.The movie has a typical upper-middle-class American "follow your muse, discover your true self" underlying message that is very unoriginal and very uninspiring.