Filed under: Reviews | Tags: 2015, alfonso gomez-rejon, me and earl and the dying girl
Director: Alfonso Gomez-Rejon
In the early-goings, the unreliable voiceover narration heard in Me and Earl and the Dying Girl insists that it isn’t the typical sentimental teen romance, nor is the telling simply a ploy to extract the audience’s tears. As the film progresses, that turns out to be something of a lie. The game of misdirection might be handled well in different hands–that is, one can very easily find narrative reason for a teenage boy to deny the extent of his emotions–but in this case it doesn’t lend itself towards any greater narrative purpose. It’s a sappy, terminally-ill story that insists at every turn that it’s not. Director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon, as well as cinematographer Chung-hoon Chung (Oldboy, Stoker), have tremendous fun in calling up various aesthetics that reflect the young boy’s fascination with classic foreign cinema, but the self-conscious artifice similarly feels like more of a gimmick than something that adds to one’s understanding of the characters or relationships.
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