Hank: 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 later 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.
