Great photography, super performance from Laura Dern, and a cute love duet between Gus and Hazel, interminably shot from favorable angles to highlight their good looks. Facial expressions are repeated ad nauseum, not to reveal anything about their personalities but because they are such darlings (get your hankies out - quick!)

In between, you see a fellow who loses his girlfriend because he is about to become blind as a result of cancer in the retina, and who takes revenge by pelting her car with rotten eggs.

And you get Willem Defoe as a do gooder who pays Gus and Hazel a trip to Amsterdam but is really nasty at heart. Incidentally, the touristy shots of lovely Amsterdam probably paid for this flick - in fact, under the veneer of a sensitive, romantic love story, you have the hard reality of Hazel's parents who can't afford to take their terminally ill daughter abroad but then do so with great abandon and at obviously great financial cost. Financial tightness does not stop anyone taking rooms at the most expensive hotel in Amsterdam and drinking the best champagne.

The syrupy eulogies at the end add a further dimension to the falsehood at the heart of this movie. No one suffering from the fatal diseases affecting the characters in this movie should be under any illusion that this is a pic designed to make money under the pretense of making people feel better about the always difficult subject of death.

I suppose I'm too cynical and I've lived and loved too much to be conned by this copout.