Confessions of A Crazed Fan (Part 1): The Night Before Our Stars Review

Smash Cut Review already published a wonderful review of The Fault In Our Stars which pretty much says everything about why the film not only didn’t disappoint, but also exceeded expectations. But as someone who attended The Night Before Our Stars event, I feel I have a unique perspective on the film which I hope to bring you with this review thing. I say “review thing” because I’m pretty sure this will end up being more the ramblings of a crazed madman/fan of the movie, partially in list form, than an actual review. But I promise if it is anything, it will be entertaining- just like The Fault in Our Stars was.

THIS SERVES AS A WARNING- SINCE THIS IS A COLLECTION OF MY THOUGHTS AND RAMBLINGS AFTER HAVING JUST SEEN THE FILM, IT WILL CONTAIN MANY, MANY SPOILERS ABOUT THE PLOT AND ENDING OF THE FILM. YOU HAVE BEEN DULY WARNED:

I’d like to start off by giving quick review of my The Night Before Our Stars event experience. First things first, I was delighted to receive the poster below (along with a pendant I will almost assuredly never use).

Entering the theater, I knew I would be one of the older audience members in attendance, but I was not nearly prepared for the sheer amount of teenage girls in attendance wearing “Okay, Okay” shirts and sporting arms with DFTBA written in permanent marker. This is definitely a film with audience skewed much younger and probably primarily female- so take that as a warning for your ears (more on that later). But once the film started, I was mostly able to tune that all out (except the occasional sobbing).

Once the film was done, there was a short break and then the livestream session began. The livestream ran into a number of technical difficulties in my theater at least, with a few frame-rate buffering issues and a few heavy blasts of feedback being played through the theater’s speakers. But it was mostly a decent quality broadcast.

Overall, the Q+A with the cast, director Josh Boone, producer Wyck Godfried, and author John Green was somewhat interesting, with the host, whose name I cannot remember bouncing back and forth between questions from the live theater audience in Georgia and questions from twitter. However, some of the questions asked were pointless or just downright stupid- like for example one person asking the cast if they felt “connected to the characters they played,” or another person asking, “Why wasn’t Sisyphus the Hamster in the movie” (which, by the way, a reference to Sisyphus the Hamster was in the movie) that the whole thing just seemed sort of like a waste of time. For a long while, the thing the people in my audience found most interesting about it was that one of the twitter questions they took was from a user named “ConWhore,” which elicited giggles from the fifteen year olds in the audience who believed the word “whore” to be taboo.

The saving grace for the 45 minute livestream was the musical performances. Birdy, an eighteen year old British singer talented beyond her years, played two songs, starting off with her wonderful “Not About Angels” from the Original Soundtrack, and then following it up with her stunning cover of Bon Iver’s “Skinny Love,” which prompted me to ask on twitter: “What was more devastating: The Fault in Our Stars, or watching Birdy cover “Skinny Love” live?” The performance actually led to Shailene Woodley being in tears for the first twenty minutes of the Q+A, as she noted that Birdy’s performance was “beautiful.” After the Q+A, a performance from Nat and Alex Wolff that was enjoyable but not up to Birdy’s level, and a showing of the deleted scene involving a John Green cameo closed out the livestream (thank God the cameo was cut from the finished film as not only would it have been a distracting fourth-wall nod at the audience, but his performance was also particularly wooden). Overall, it was a fun experience, but I’m not sure the livestream itself was worth the time and money I spent on it.

Now to my general thoughts on the film itself, in list form: CHECK OUT PART TWO!