20. Why Paper Towns is Awesome
Good morning, John, how's it going? Just settin' up my shot here. I'm making this video without a script, which I usually don't do, so we're just gonna go right off the cuff here and see what happens.
I finally got to see Paper Towns. I feel bad that it took me so long to do it. It is a weird thing with your movie career, if you can call it that. We started off with The Fault in Our Stars, and boy, was that somethin', right, like, it -- number one movie in America, beating out a Tom Cruise movie that was really quite good, I saw it later even if I have a hard time figuring out what the title was, because they didn't seem to be sure themselves what the title was, whether it was Edge of Tomorrow or Live, Die, Repeat, and I late found out that that movie was also based on a book, and that book, a Japanese book, was called All You Need is Kill, which is just a way better name than either of the other names.
But Paper Towns has been, by most measures, less successful than The Fault in Our Stars, and that made me a little worried when I was going to go see it, because the thing you don't want to have happen is you know, somebody makes some movie based on your brother's book, it's a big deal, it's a big movie, and then you go see and you don't like it.
That's the thing that you really don't want to have happen. I mean, it's not the end of the world if that happens, I just probably would be quiet about, I'd be like, oh, congratulations on the movie, John.
So imagine my relief when the movie is good, it's quite good, I like it a lot. It's full of really great moments, I'm laughing out loud, I'm just like, clutching Katherine, and the people behind me in the theater are having a great time, too.
But the thing is, it's a movie full of normal people having normal but wonderful moments, and that's really kind of what the movie's about, it's about how life is full of these great moments that happen to us, but they aren't necessarily exceptional in any way, it's not Frodo going to Mordor, it's just people having a good time, having adventures, liking each other, hanging out, having relationships, coming to understand each other more fully.
So in a weird way, the sort of success trajectory of Paper Towns is very similar to the sort of story of Paper Towns, which is that things don't have to be exceptional for them to be good and for them to be lovely experiences for the people who make them and for the people who enjoy them.
And it's maybe gonna have a bigger impact on the people it does impact, even if it impacts a smaller number of people, because it really does have a lot of practical knowledge of how the world and relationships work, and maybe that's part of why it isn't so successful.
Maybe that means that, you know, how we measure "success" in general isn't super great. I know that it can be stressful when stuff doesn't go exactly as you want it to go, but as your brother and a fan of your work, I wanna say, John, you're great and you make really great stuff that people love and I'm really proud of you, so that's. Okay, moving – we gotta -- we've gotta change topics real fast! So VidCon happened, it was great, I'm really sort of buzzing with how interesting online video and internet culture is and what it means.
Thank you to everyone who made VidCon possible from our sponsors to the attendees to the creators to the whole team of people that works on it, so many wonderful people and our volunteers and we just had a great conference, and I had a great time and I was so freaked out beforehand, and I can't believe how well it went, so I'm just really happy.
I'm happy, and just, even though I have to get a colonoscopy tomorrow and I haven't been able to eat anything today, and I'm only drinking Gatorade and that's my whole calories for the day, I'm really happy.
So yeah, this was my unscripted vlogbrothers video, unscripted and unfed and a little bit unhappy 'cause I gotta have a camera put in my butt tomorrow, but other than that, things are going really great.
John, thank you for being a pretty cool brother and I'll see you on Tuesday.
