Restless

A teenager with a penchant for crashing funerals (Henry Hopper), whose best friend is the ghost of a Kamikaze pilot (Ryo Kase), meets a girl with terminal brain cancer (Mia Wasikowska). Jason Lew’s jejune and derivative script, coming on the heels of the remarkable 50/50, another movie about a too-young-to-die cancer victim, looks even more banal and clichéd than it would otherwise, but bad timing is the least of its problems. Where 50/50 rose out of personal experience, Lew’s script seems to rise more out of seeing other movies: Harold and Maude (1971), The Sterile Cuckoo (1969) and Love and Pain and the Whole Damn Thing (1972), to name only a few. Hopper fails to make his bore of a character likeable, but the versatile Wasikowska injects some life. Gus Van Sant’s direction is a bit half-hearted.