Paper Towns concerns a cool girl who makes herself the high school gone girl. She intricately plots an escape-from-Orlando plan—and leaves clues of whereabouts in parental palaces, places of squalor, and the pages of Wikipedia—after committing a series of suburban breaking-and-entering crimes.
What’s cool about Paper Towns is that even though she’s seen through the eyes of a teenage boy, it does allow the cool girl, the manic pixie dream girl, the Suburban Pennsatucky, Margo (Cara Delevingne), to make choices for herself. But what’s coolest is the friendship between three high school boys: Quentin (Nat Wolff), Ben (Austin Abrams), and Radar (Justice Smith).
This trio of band kids embark on a road trip to find Margo after she’s run away, and it’s a road trip worth taking. Their prom dates (Halston Sage and Jaz Sinclair) are in tow, but Paper Towns is mostly about boys chasing paper-thin constructs of girls and discovering more texture. It’s the sweet-natured, non-jaded, middle class version of The Virgin Suicides, with the same lesson: you can’t ever know a girl if you’ve already constructed everything about them in your mind. And you can’t get upset when they don’t fulfill your own cool girl construct. Through Radar, it also acknowledges that these expectations unfairly creep into friendships, too. The larger lesson of Paper Towns is that you should allow people you love to be the people you love.
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What’s cool about Paper Towns is that even though she’s seen through the eyes of a teenage boy, it does allow the cool girl, the manic pixie dream girl, the Suburban Pennsatucky, Margo (Cara Delevingne), to make choices for herself. But what’s coolest is the friendship between three high school boys: Quentin (Nat Wolff), Ben (Austin Abrams), and Radar (Justice Smith).
This trio of band kids embark on a road trip to find Margo after she’s run away, and it’s a road trip worth taking. Their prom dates (Halston Sage and Jaz Sinclair) are in tow, but Paper Towns is mostly about boys chasing paper-thin constructs of girls and discovering more texture. It’s the sweet-natured, non-jaded, middle class version of The Virgin Suicides, with the same lesson: you can’t ever know a girl if you’ve already constructed everything about them in your mind. And you can’t get upset when they don’t fulfill your own cool girl construct. Through Radar, it also acknowledges that these expectations unfairly creep into friendships, too. The larger lesson of Paper Towns is that you should allow people you love to be the people you love.
Continue reading…
Continue reading...