I just Tweeted nearly this exact phrase, but it’s still true: it’s nice, sometimes, to be able to deal with a piece of nonsense by just saying Bite me.  I kerfluffled yesterday a bit; this particular kerfluffle doesn’t specifically involve me but I’m seeing a lot of reaction to it:  Gee, a Slate piece says something plainly dumb and stupid (in this case, “adults should be ashamed to read Young Adult lit“) in order to act as bait for clicks.  What a surprise.

Real simple: bite me.  I could go longer, mostly along the line of you write about books for a living and I still read more in a month than you do in a year, or I’ll read what I want, but they all boil down to “Bite me,” so:  Bite me.

All that said, let’s talk about The Fault in Our Stars.

One of my students (an actual teenage girl) turned me onto John Green earlier this school year and I’ve read all of his major works, TFiOS first.  I had to specifically deny her a field trip (the fact that the book opened June 6th made that a bit easier) but I did make some comments to the effect of it’s possible that we might just somehow end up at the same showing at the same theater, somehow, because that happens.

I’m not seeing the movie.  I was into it for a while, but it turns out that the movie has ruined the book just from the trailers and I’m not super interested in giving it more chances.

Let me back up.

One of the interesting things about reading books is that you can create shit in your head.  Now, this allows you to selectively ignore certain details about books if you like; sometimes this ends up revealing things about you that you might not like– for example, all the outcry about Rue being black in The Hunger Games when Rue was, uh, black in The Hunger Games.  Now, I wasn’t bothered by Rue.  The movie I wanna talk about is The Green Mile.

You remember that one, right?  Stephen King released it in monthly installments, they ended up casting living enormity Michael Clarke Duncan as John Coffey, and he went on to have a fairly impressive Hollywood career until dying way too young a couple of years ago.

John Coffey was black, right?  There was never any doubt about that, and my reading comprehension ain’t bad enough that I managed to miss that detail.  It woulda been kinda hard.  But John Coffey lives in my brain.

The actual visual of Michael Clarke Duncan– enormous, bald, blaaaack Michael Clarke Duncan– dressed like an escaped convict, cradling two dead white girls, in 1932, completely killed my ability to watch the movie.  Because John Coffey doesn’t survive that scenario under any circumstances.  Period.  It took the visual to drive it home just how ridiculous it is that they find this dude with two dead, naked little white girls and they’re all just okay, let’s bring him in and find out what really happened.

In Louisiana.  In 1932.

Nope.  John Coffey is shot to pieces and lynched on the spot and the movie’s ten minutes long.  Him surviving arrest is less realistic than his magical healing powers.  And quite possibly less likely.

Didn’t catch on to how ridiculous it was until I saw it, though.

Okay.  Back to The Fault in Our Stars.  Here’s the trailer, give it a watch:

I’ve got some issues here, y’all.  They start with the casting and they sorta spread out from there.

First of all, I don’t know where they found this kid to play Gus or who the hell he is– and I refuse to look– but were they casting for creepy motherfucker when they found him?  Because this guy reminds me of no one in the world more than Dylan Klebold, and I’m pretty sure mass murderer wasn’t the vibe they were trying to go for.  He may as well have “date rapist” tattooed on his face.  He’s creepy.

And then, from this man who scans “creepy” from the jump, before he speaks, we get lines like:

“You trying to keep your distance from me in no way lessens my affection for you.”

and

“All your efforts to keep me from you are going to fail.”

This is supposed to sound… romantic?  I think?  And I think maybe when I was reading it in the book it… succeeded, somehow?  But holy shit does hearing a dude actually say that, especially a dude with this guy’s stalker-ass sociopath’s flat affect, turn the line into an incredibly clear signal that says run, run far, and run now, and do not stop running even when you think you are safe.  

That’s– God, especially that last line– what somebody says to you right before you file the restraining order, girls.

And suddenly I really don’t want to see a movie that is supposed to make me celebrate these characters’ love.  NO.  He’s creepy and the movie should be about how she runs away and he accidentally trips into Mr. Wu’s hog pen.

Now that’s a movie I’ll pay to see.