- #THE FAULT IN OUR STARS MOVIE PERSONAL THOUGHTS MOVIE#
- #THE FAULT IN OUR STARS MOVIE PERSONAL THOUGHTS FREE#
Making the fans feel involved is the mission of Twentieth Century Fox’s marketing campaign, which has borrowed the elements that are now standard in the promotion of wildly popular YA-inspired cinema (embracing the book's fans, providing early sneak peeks, hosting cast Q&As) and taken them to an even more social media-obsessed level. As fans, it made us feel really involved." "For us as bloggers, it was amazing because we had content to put up on our blog. "It's never been like this, where the author is tweeting and saying, 'I just cried for the fourth time,'" says Cruz, 21, who reports every tweet, Instagram, press conference video, interview, and any other fleeting mention of the film on the TFIOS fan site that she administers with three friends flung across the globe in Boston, Austria, and Switzerland.
#THE FAULT IN OUR STARS MOVIE PERSONAL THOUGHTS FREE#
The all-hands-on-mobile-devices operation has involved, among other things: flooding Instagram, Tumblr, and other social media feeds with set photos galvanizing fans to dictate the schedule for a recent publicity tour and giving Green free reign to blast out updates and video clips. Most of these young adult (YA) franchise launches came with enormous efforts to rally their YA bases, but Cruz says she has seen nothing like the PR push for The Fault in Our Stars, the adaptation of John Green's best-selling YA page-turner about two cancer-stricken teens in love, starring Shailene Woodley and Ansel Elgort and opening June 6. She devoured every photo that leaked online during the production of the Twilight movies, and she was among the hordes at shopping mall hypefests staged prior to the releases of The Hunger Games, The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones, and Divergent.
#THE FAULT IN OUR STARS MOVIE PERSONAL THOUGHTS MOVIE#
They stir emotions and spark thoughts in a manner all their own, and I’m convinced that the shattered world has less hope for repair if reading becomes an ever smaller part of it.Sarai Cruz, a blogger and University of Florida senior, is a connoisseur of young adult novels and their movie adaptations. That observation brought to mind a moment in “The Fault in Our Stars” when one of the protagonists says that 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.”īooks are personal, passionate. Both have written fiction in the young adult genre, whose current robustness is cause to rejoice, and they rightly noted that the intensity of the connection that a person feels to a favorite novel, with which he or she spends eight or 10 or 20 hours, is unlike any response to a movie. He told me that it can demonstrate to kids that there’s payoff in “doing something taxing, in delayed gratification.” A new book of his, “Raising Kids Who Read,” will be published later this year.īefore talking with him, I arranged a conference call with David Levithan and Amanda Maciel. Doesn’t reading do the same?ĭaniel Willingham, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia, framed it as a potentially crucial corrective to the rapid metabolism and sensory overload of digital technology. At Success Academy Charter Schools in New York City, whose students significantly outperform most peers statewide, the youngest kids all learn and play chess, in part because it hones “the ability to focus and concentrate,” said Sean O’Hanlon, who supervises the program. Maybe that’s about the quiet of reading, the pace of it. Reading has bequeathed what meditation promises. If we spend our last hours or minutes of the night reading rather than watching television, we wake the next morning with thoughts less jumbled, moods less jangled. Some experts have doubts about that experiment’s methodology, but I’m struck by how its findings track something that my friends and I often discuss. In terms of smarts and success, is reading causative or merely correlated? Which comes first, “The Hardy Boys” or the hardy mind? That’s difficult to unravel, but several studies have suggested that people who read fiction, reveling in its analysis of character and motivation, are more adept at reading people, too: at sizing up the social whirl around them. There’s research on this, and it’s cited in a recent article in The Guardian by Dan Hurley, who wrote that after “three years interviewing psychologists and neuroscientists around the world,” he’d concluded that “reading and intelligence have a relationship so close as to be symbiotic.” We’re panhandlers with a better vocabulary.īut I’m coming at this differently, as someone persuaded that reading does things - to the brain, heart and spirit - that movies, television, video games and the rest of it cannot. Professional writers arguing for vigorous reading are dinosaurs begging for a last breath. I know, I know: This sounds like a fogy’s crotchety lament.