The Useless Critic 2.0

A few quick additions before diving into this (this being the actual post, which was written and copied from MS Word, so fingers crossed the formatting doesn't get mangled in transition): since writing this, the The Fault in Our Stars movie has come out, and is doing pretty well at the box office. There were plenty of details omitted, but that's a focus for another post entirely. Moving along...             It’s May 26 th , and I’m finally getting around to checking out The Fault in Our Stars . Partially because the movie will be out in June, which is practically here already. I’m mostly giving it a chance, however, because I’ve developed a semi-strong bias against it. I don’t really feel that’s fair, as all I have to go off of are quotes and Tumblr posts by John Green fans (neither of which are a particularly strong basis for an overall assessment of anything ever). This will be a (relatively short, I should hope) chronicle of ...

Yo! So it’s feels like forever since I posted on the Before She Was Bella series, but tonight the drought ends and the Kristen Stewart insight shall monsoon down upon us all. The Kristen Stewart moment of the moment is her film “Speak,” based on the novel of the same name. I read about 50 pages of the novel on a family trip, and already I could guess the mystery of the premise. Even from watching the first 10 minutes of the flick, you can figure out everything. This film was very predictable, but it does have its strong moments. Kristen plays the depressed teenager, Melinda Sordino who calls the police during a summer party, and aggravates her fellow classmates before her first year of high school. And you learn the hidden parts of the story as the film goes onward, but it’s fairly easy to guess. I was surprised that it actually had some good art direction and cinematography, which were things I did not expect to see. So props to those guys and gals. During the film I actually laughed ...