Alright, I think it’s time for us to have “the talk.”
As a proud cinema snob, this is tough for me to talk about openly, but we need to discuss the true implications of “the C word” – cliché. We critics have always assumed that it’s a Cinema Sin for a story to be cliché and/or stereotypical. Obviously, a film would ideally be entirely original, and would set itself apart from even its best imitators. On the other hand, while it might be disheartening to think that one of our favorite critiques to use against the mediocre could be a moot point, we may have to admit that rejecting the unoriginal can cheat a film that would be absolutely brilliant… had it only come out a few years earlier. Let’s really think about this: can an otherwise good movie be condemned solely for its inappropriate chronological placement?
Sometimes we do appreciate a film that reuses old ideas in better ways, and I think Doug and Rob Walker have extinguished Inside Out criticisms definitively on multiple occasions. The problem arises when a story is pleasant enough to be enjoyable, but it uses a stereotypical formula for its genre – without adding enough originality or twists to give it significance. For the “based on a book all the teenage girls and their mothers have read” genre, there is a trick to dodge this, namely built-in fill-in-the-blanks for unique character details, but is that enough to keep the audience from feeling like they’re watching the genre rather than a movie? In the case of Paper Towns, that is exactly the problem, and to drive the point home, I counted the number of clichés responsible for this effect that appear throughout the film.
It’s thirty five. That is scary.
To clarify the kind of clichés I’m talking about, I will further explain the concept of built-in fill-in-the-blanks. Please refer to the now infamous Tumblr post entitled “John Green’s writing process” by clicking here. This writing style, which seems rather common today, uses a Mad Lib formula to add bizarre little details and fun idiosyncrasies to each character, usually consisting of a curious mismatched adjective/noun pairing. This adds flavor to the story, but it can quickly grow stale, because one can only see so many combinations in the vein of Patrick’s cancerous balls in TFioS or Margo’s random capitalization in Paper Towns before it’s all the same. The most prominent combo of this nature in the film is the “black Santas,” which sounds so, so, so much like it comes from a Mad Lib that I’m starting to think John Green really does employ a dartboard in his writing process.
That being said, I’m limited in the extent to which I can criticize the film due to the other tricky dilemma that makes critics uncomfortable – adaptations have to stick to their source material, for better or for worse. Any problems I have with the film from a writing standpoint can really only take up about half of my review, and my problem with clichés should take up only a small portion of that, because I really don’t like shaming a film purely for its similarity to others in its genre (especially since the book came out a few years before all these clichés became so established). So, I guess the real question to ask about this movie is: did I have a good time experiencing it? I’d say I did. It’s a pleasant film that never fails to entertain with its lovable cast (particularly Jaz Sinclair, whose charm will take her far, I suspect) and its interesting plot, which was paced and stylized appropriately. The dynamic of the characters, particularly during the Pokémon scene, is enough to make the film quite pleasant to watch, and it leaves me wanting more… unless maybe I wanted more because the ending was anticlimactic, but let’s not think about that.
