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Get to Know Lisa Rosman Through Her Various Works

‘The Fault in Our Stars’ Delivers

June 5, 2014 in Book Matters, Film Matters, Reviews

The following is a review originally published in Word and Film.

The movie does justice to the book. I’ll start there, since that’s the most important news about The Fault in Our Stars for the multitudes already in love with John Green’s book. For those unfamiliar with this best-selling young adult novel about a romance between two teens with cancer, there’s also good news: To dig this movie, we don’t need to be in love with the book.

But let’s pull back, shall we?

Sixteen-year-old Hazel (Shailene Woodley) is depressed. The Stage IV thyroid cancer that has “colonized her lungs” may have stabilized but she could relapse at any moment. Not to mention that it’s hard to lead a typical adolescent existence when she has to lug an oxygen tank everywhere and has been staring down death since the age of thirteen. So Hazel holes up in her bedroom rereading An Imperial Affliction, a story (within this story) about a child with cancer, while her parents (Laura Dern and Sam Trammell) worry.

Things change when Hazel’s mom forces her to attend a support group for kids with cancer (led by a Jesus freak played by comedian Mike Birbiglia). There, she meets the irrepressible Gus (Ansel Elgort), a seventeen-year-old former basketball star who’s lost a leg to a sarcoma now in remission. Gus announces he “fears oblivion,” which sparks sharp words from the pragmatically philosophical Hazel. (There was time before organisms experienced consciousness, and there will be time after. And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it.) “Sparks” being the relevant word, the two commence a courtship and travel together to Amsterdam to track down Peter Van Houten (Willem Dafoe), the author of Affliction. Then the Big C makes a rude reentry. Continue Reading →

My Day With the (Fault in Our) Stars

June 4, 2014 in Book Matters, Film Matters, Listing

The following is a report I originally published in Word and Film.

Ordinarily I avoid any occasion at which people are likely to shriek but I caught myself requesting – nay, begging – to attend a recent The Fault in Our Stars event. This, despite the fact that it promised to be a veritable shriekfest. Like so many others, I am absolutely in love with the book from which it’s adapted.

The good news: The movie does justice to the book. Without disclosing any spoilers, it’s safe to say Shailene Woodley is an ideal Hazel and Ansel Elgort an ideal Gus. Also on point: Nat Wolff as Isaac, Gus’s best friend, and Laura Dern and Sam Trammell as Hazel’s parents. Along with director Josh Boone and author Green, they were all in attendance for a post-screening Q&A as well as a press conference the next day. Here are six things to know about this event. Continue Reading →

When ’70s Babies Trust the Force

June 1, 2014 in Film Matters, Spirit Matters

I was speeding north to Hawthorne today from Brooklyn when my GPS abruptly punked out. Totally flatlined. Since I’m still not iPhoney (they’ll have to pry my Blackberry out of dead fingers), I was plum out of luck; I’d only driven to my destination once before, and had given my car atlas to a friend’s kid as an artifact of the primitive 20th century. So how did I find my destination? I used the Force, of course. Seriously, it was as if I were hurtling toward the Death Star in my tiny Rebel X-wing with a recently deceased Obi Wan Kenobi whispering in my ear, and, in a trance, I had finally pushed away my targeting device. Only the spacecraft in this case was Sadie, my increasingly compromised 2001 Hyundai, and the Imperial Death Star littered with murderous storm troopers was the Saw Mill Parkway littered with murderous Sunday drivers. Whatever, man, it worked. I arrived just in time to tackle the complicated French lesbian movie du jour with the delightful Westchester Cinema Club and afterward celebrated in the Mos Eisley Cantina aka Enchantments. Mawing french fries proffered by the brilliant ladywitch Michelle, I kept one eye peeled on the door lest Han Solo cross the threshold. Appear he did not but I think Yoda would have approved of my imperfect journey. It’s like I used to warble as a little girl climbing into her Star Wars sleeping bag: “Say la veeee.” At that, I’m off to braid my hair into two perfectly coiled puffs, Princess Lisa style.

"All, everything I understand, I understand only because I love."
― Leo Tolstoy