#wallofcow

[whynowwhytoday]

Paper Towns Movie Thoughts

Pretty fucking great

Could have done with more Walt Whitman

Not enough Black Santa footage

Loved the fact that Ben and Radar’s World’s Best Grandma and Heritage Not Hate shirts were worked into the script

Fairly certain that the guys were naked under their grad gowns at the end which was great

The soundtrack was brilliant

John’s ‘cameo’ was kinda hilarious.

(Also I wore my pizza john shirt and a lady asked me which pizza place I worked at...!)

[shurtletark-blog]

Paper Towns article

I feel very happy when a movie review actually does a decent job of getting to the point :-) So I translated this article from the German Newspaper ‘Süddeutsche Zeitung’ so you, my english speaking friends, could read it and rejoice. Yay! 

(original article by Benedikt Frank: http://www.sueddeutsche.de/kultur/film-ein-maedchen-verschwindet-1.2592143) 

Paper Towns in Theatres

Everybody can be awesome

She’s your typical girl to fall for, but Margo is more complicated than the picture we first get to see in the Teenage romance movie ‘Margos Spuren’.

It sounds like a spell when Quentin says the girl’s name, the girl he instantly falls in love with: ‘Margo Roth Spiegelmann’. She walks in slow motion, like all girls you fall in love with in movies. She lives across the street now and she’s so cool, she doesn’t even get scared when the two kids find a dead body one day. Instead, she looks at it up close: strange, she thought dead peoples’ eyes were always closed.

But Quentin is shy, a scaredy cat, not one to sneak out the window at night like Margo to experience adventures, but rather one who clings to rules to deal with his insecurity. So he quietly admires her from a distance until the last year of high school.

If you’ve ever seen one teen movie, you’re guessing: Everything changes in the last year of high school and of all the years, it is the best one.

And that is the way it is in Jake Schreier’s movie based on John Green's novel. But 'Margos Spuren’ is not only a coming of age story and Margo doesn’t just fill the character of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, the lively girl who appears and allows a guy to truly flourish.

Just when the movie gets going, Margo disappears. At first, that’s not a reason to be concerned, she’s been known to do these things. But Quentin, the one who saw her last, believes he can find her, believes Margo left him clues because she wants to be found by him. And suddenly the movie is more of a detective story than teenage romance.

The clues almost seem like John Greens personal advice to the viewers. In Margo’s room there’s a poster of Woody Guthrie with his trademark guitar and the writing on it ‘This machine kills fascists’. That sentence is also on the back of Green’s laptop which he sits behind when he explains literature and history to millions of viewers on YouTube. The clues lead to the poet Walt Whitman and from there to the paper towns, cities that only exist on paper maps to allow publishers to recognize copies of their maps.

Paper Towns is also the original title of the novel. It remains a mystery why the German translation talks about ‘plastic cities’.

A map is not the same thing as the scenery it represents. Slowly it becomes clear that Margo is also more complex than the idea about her that Quentin has in his head and the picture of her the movie shows at the beginning. Another genre-switch later (detective story turns road trip) many secure looking things start to falter.

Margos Spuren switches between euphoria and melancholy and still has a thoroughly positive message. John Green signs off in his videos with the sentence ‘Don’t forget to be awesome’. And the movie reminds us as well to be awesome and further, that everybody can be awesome: the loser, the dream girl, the shy ones and the runaway- because they are more than the idea that others have of them. 

[kelseyridge13]

'Oh, it’s a quote,' she said, a little disappointed.

John Green (Paper Towns)

[jesse-is-inarguably-purple]

Yeah im just gonna talk about the Paper Towns movie for a second sorry

Sorry I just have to. I mean, a lot of people who I trust told me it was amazing, so I went in with pretty high expectations, but still... dAMN. (Spoilers below)

Firstly, I thought the movie was extremely true to the book. It might help that it’s been a year or so since I’ve read the book, but still. Of course, it’s a movie so some things had to be different: the clues went by a lot faster, it was prom instead of graduation, Angela comes with them on the road trip (but quite honestly I have negative 500 problems with that, angela is the best), and my favorite quote, “It is so hard to leave—until you leave. And then it is the easiest goddamned thing in the world,” wasn’t in there... But in this movie, like in tfios, it was okay that not everything was there, because the movie captured the themes and emotions of the book so well that I could easily imagine that all of the omitted scenes had been there (if that makes any sense). For example, my other favorite quote: “As long as we don't die, this is gonna be one hell of a story,” wasn’t included either, but you could veritably FEEL it in just about every one of the road trip scenes.

One thing that did strike me as a little different (and I think might be why a few people have been not understanding the movie) is the plot arch of the ‘imagining people complexly’ theme. In the book, as Q follows Margo’s clues, he starts seeing all these little new sides to her life that he had no idea existed. Also, the Whitman helped point a little to this theme. (Right there was a lot less Whitman in the movie, which makes sense because it’s a movie and John always says that was the most boring part of the book anyway. I kind of liked the Whitman, but then again, I’m a huge nerd.) In any event, by the time Q gets to Agloe in the book, he’s already starting to realize that Margo isn’t the girl he’d always dreamed her up to be. However, it can be hard to incorporate subtle changes like this in movies, so in the movie, Q arrives in Agloe and still has no idea. There’s a lot of cringe-worthy awkwardness of Q genuinely thinking he’s ‘in love’ with Margo and just agh jesus get over yourself. So, if you fail to understand what happens next, I guess I could see how you could walk away from this movie thinking that Q is a ‘greasy white boy madly chasing after his dream girl’ or whatever. (I still don’t understand why you think it’s okay to attack John about this. but that’s a rant for another time.)

HOWEVER. Paper Towns becomes the first movie adaption ever which actually GAVE ME NEW INSIGHTS ON THE BOOK (seriously 5 million awards to you guys this is absolutely stunning), because as opposed to the subtle realizations, Q’s very sudden being proved wrong about his image of Margo spells things out a lot clearer than they were in the book. Paper Towns has always been my favorite John Green book (besides WG, WG), but I’ve always felt a little let down by the end because while Q acknowledges that Margo is human, she still doesn’t seem human to us: the reader. I mean, who just skips college and runs off to travel the U.S. with no money at eighteen years old??? She just disappears into the smoke, and has always felt more like a symbol than a character to me. But, I think I realized last night that (and I may still be wrong) that’s sort of the point: we can’t ever fully understand Margo because, as Q put so perfectly in the movie (I swear that line was not in the book- did I just miss it?): this isn’t her story. Paper Towns is without any doubt Q’s story. Margo’s perspective isn’t one we’re ever going to be able to fully understand because she isn’t given a chance to show us her perspective. We can speculate, but in the end, that’s just defying the point of the book. Of course then, the scene ends with a kiss, which is something I could have done without in both the movie and the book, but that might be more about pleasing viewers than anything else (romance movie is nOT aCTUaLy abOut rOmANCE??? i doNt understANd??? guy muSt kisS the girL that is hOW thIs woRK yEs??) And also, movie kisses are made out by movie watchers to be much more meaningful than they are. Like in real life, kiss does NOT equal AND THEYRE MARRIED YAY HAPPILY EVER AFTER people kiss each other all the time (not that I’d know HAHA.. ha ... ha... ha. ha. ... ... ... ah.)

My only minor complaint would be that my favorite, Lacy, never got to have her final word with Margo (not that it was a particularly healthy ending in the book, but as her best friend who drove all the way to NY bc she was genuinely worried about Margo, it feels unfair that the guy who was unhealthily obsessed over her is the only one who actually gets to talk to Margo.)

As Hank so beautifully put, the movie is about real, relatable people. There are so many laughing-so-hard-you-cry or else cringing-with-so-much-second-hand-embarrassment moments that wouldn’t be half as meaningful if it wasn’t because every single person in the movie theatre was picturing themselves and their friends doing the exact same thing. In fact, on this note, let me just get a little personal for a second (apologies).

So I’m about to go off to high school this fall, which, for me, is 5% oh my god and 95% aaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHH Yeah. I went to see the movie with my sister, who just graduated from the high school I’ll be going to, and has lots of nostalgia so thus is very excited for me to attend. And, by coincidence (ok not really, our town is tiny), we happened to drive by that very high school on our way home (with a very fitting song playing, too). I’ve always been able to relate to Q a lot, because I’m definitely the type who equates skipping school with C E R T A I N   D E A T H, even failing one quiz in one class probably won’t have any affect on my GPA. I’m a perfectionist and I stress out way to much, but it’s likely that cutting just a little of that stress is not going to put an end to my straight As. So, even though I’m still not exactly looking forward to it, and I’m sure I’m still going to stress too much, hopefully I’ll remember that, when I look back on it, the memories that I made with my friends, and the times that I paused and allowed myself to actually be interested and excited in what I was doing are going to mean much more to me than the grades I got in my classes.

In any event, if you haven’t yet, everyone go see Paper Towns; it’s one of the best movies that I’ve seen in a long time, and without a doubt the best movie adaption of a novel that I’ve ever seen.

[randombookguy]

Paper Towns - my reaction

I finally went to see Paper Towns today - unfortunately I was only able to see it in German dub. Margo´s voice was strangely smoky, which was rather alienating since she doesn´t seem like someone who´d smoke to me, but that´s just a sidenote. And (spoiler alert) it´s doubly unfair because now I didn´t even have the CHANCE to catch John Green´s voice!

Overally, the movie was good. It stayed true to the book and especially the ending was fantastic. There were several great moments along the way too, like Q, Radar and Ben singing the Pokémon Theme song, Ben being super embarrassing and the roadtrip in general.

However, there were times when I felt like some things were cut out that shouldn´t have been - I greatly hope we´ll get a ‘directors cut’ of this movie. For example, 8-year-old-Margo says ‘all his strings ripped’ (or something along those lines, german dub, remember?) refering to the dead man at the beginning of the movie, but that metaphor is never mentioned again. This way, it just seemed out of place. Besides that, the scene where Q, Radar and Ben are playing a video game and Ben won´t stop talking about how he´s totally not a virgin seemed a bit too stretched out, though it was somewhat funny. Other than that, the only thing I really missed was the scene where Q got the van from his parents. It was in the trailer, why cut it out? It just seemed kinda strange that Margo needed the car of Q´s parents in the beginning, but they used ‘Q´s car’ for the road trip if you hadn´t read the book.

Okay - enough with the criticism! The movie was good and I´ll definitely get it on Blu-Ray xD

Edit: After re-reading the end of the Paper Towns book, I must conclude that the movie is very much dumbed down compared to the book and therefore can´t truly compete with it. However, I do not think that all the wisdom and philosophy that makes Paper Town my second favorite book could have been fit into one movie. Therefore, I don´t hold this against the movie.

[em-j14]

And it’s only in that time that we can see one another, because we see out of ourselves through our cracks and into others through theirs. When did we see each other face-to-face? Not until you saw into my cracks and I saw into yours. Before that, we were just looking at ideas of each other, like looking at your window shade but never seeing inside. But once the vessel cracks, the light can get in. The light can get out.