text: Viewers who luxuriated in a good cry after “The Fault in Our Stars” may be gratified to know that it’s not time to stop sobbing. The perfect bookend to a tear-stained summer, “If I Stay” has arrived in theaters with the same good taste, modest cool factor and shameless tear-jerking that made its predecessor such a multi-hankie hit. 
   
   “If I Stay,” which was adapted by R.J. Cutler (“A Perfect Candidate,” “The September Issue”) from Gayle Forman’s novel, hews largely to the same formula as “The Fault in Our Stars”: An attractive young couple grapples with first love and looming mortality against a scenic backdrop, the mechanics of sexual awakenings safely couched in soft-focus ellipses (“Adam, I’ve never . . . ”). As in “The Fault in Our Stars,” this story is told from the point of view of an exceptionally self-aware young woman staring down impending death. Here, though, she’s anxiously watching over herself as she lies in a coma, trying to decide whether life is still worth living after nearly losing it and everything else in a horrifying car crash. 
   
   It’s a maudlin, potentially mawkish setup, but first-time feature director Cutler and his screenwriter, Shauna Cross, put an amber glow on even the toughest aspects of a story in which everything is just about perfect (until it most decidedly isn’t). Chloe Grace Moretz plays Mia Hall, a 17-year-old cello prodigy whose happy, laid-back life with her former punk-rocker parents is upended when she meets a handsome guitarist named Adam (Jamie Blackley). Their mildly piquant romance — she idolizes Yo-Yo Ma, he’s more of a Ramones guy — is of the classic opposites-attract variety, spiced by dashes of O. Henry’s lyrical irony. At a Halloween party, eager to please each other, she dons a platinum wig as Debbie Harry and he comes dressed as Beethoven. 
   
   It’s all played for minimum dramatic tension and maximum aestheticized wish fulfillment, heightened by Cutler’s tendency to film everything slightly out of focus and Cross’s to write fuzzy-wuzzy dialogue like “Adam, that song was great.” Even more idealized is Mia’s family, headed by a mom and dad who clearly trained at the Pitchfork School for Cool Hipster Parenting. Played with warmth and easy understatement by Mireille Enos and Joshua Leonard, Mia’s ’rents casually name-check Iggy Pop and Kim Gordon as they roam around their brightly painted Portland bungalow, bedecked with the requisite number of cred-signifying posters and musical detritus. It’s all too flawless to be believed — we never see Mia argue with her parents, much less with her Alice Cooper-quoting little brother — but the colorful, cozy domestic portrait makes it that much more unsettling when, on a snowy road one day, it all comes to a shatteringly violent end. 
   
   “If I Stay” toggles between two worlds: Mia’s desperate, barefooted sojourn at the hospital and flashbacks to the life she may or may not decide to leave behind. Although the emotionalism begins to drag the narrative down as her anguished vigil goes on and on and on, Cutler smoothly navigates Mia’s double-sided experience, albeit in a way that recalls the “Nashville” episodes he has directed more than the ethereal otherworldliness of, say, “The Lovely Bones.” 
   
   Moretz, best known for her spiky, moodily effective turns in such tough films as “Kick-Ass” and “Let Me In,” submerges her most interesting contours in service to a blandly edge-free character. Blackley is slightly more convincing as the sweaty, discreetly pierced frontman of an on-the-rise, safely pseudo hard-rockin’ band. 
   
   Granted, the group isn’t channeling Joey Ramone as much as Clear Channel’s pop heartthrob du jour. But the musical sequences — including an impromptu Smashing Pumpkins jam in Mia’s back yard — bring some welcome verve to talky scenes of soulful heart-to-hearts and teary hand-wringing. Rest assured, there’s plenty of that, too, in “If I Stay.” But even at its most wrenchingly painful, the film readily delivers generous dollops of pleasure. 
   
   ★ ★ ½ 
   
   PG-13. At area theaters. Contains thematic elements, some sexual material and mild profanity. 106 minutes. ||||| Watch a clip from the film "If I Stay," starring Chloë Grace Moretz, Mireille Enos, and Jamie Blackley. Photo/Video: Warner Bros. 
   
   The dairy industry doesn't have a monopoly on milking machines. "If I Stay" tries to squeeze every last drop of feeling from the plight of its teenage heroine. A gifted musician with nurturing parents, Mia (Chloë Grace Moretz) finds herself caught in limbo between life and death after surviving, although barely, a terrible crash on a snow-covered Oregon highway during a family outing. Surveying the accident scene as an ethereal wraith, she can see the loved ones she has lost. She can also see her own shattered body, first by the side of the road and then in a coma in the intensive-care unit of a Portland hospital. What she must decide now, in the face of her loss, is whether to stay among the living. What young audiences will decide soon is whether the movie's many moments of genuine sweetness and affecting tenderness can survive the persistent silliness of Mia's out-of-body excursions. 
   
   She is a busybody wraith, chasing around the hospital to keep tabs on herself, her friends and her extended family while the narrative suffers frequent, spasmodic flashbacks to the life she may be leaving. The supernatural element came straight from the book, the popular young-adult novel of the same name by Gayle Forman, and disembodied heroes or heroines have figured in successful screen entertainments from "Topper" through "Beetlejuice" to "Ghost." But serious drama is trickier, as witness the unlovely fate of Peter Jackson's "The Lovely Bones." What works for readers, left free to produce their own versions of fantasy devices, can be gigglesome for audiences confronted with a film's prefab literalism. 
   
   At its best, "If I Stay" evokes the primacy of friendship, the warmth of family—Mireille Enos and Joshua Leonard play Mia's lively ex-hippie parents—and the urgency of adolescent love: Jamie Blackley as Adam, Mia's boyfriend, has some of the film's stronger scenes. (The strongest may be a heartfelt speech by that old pro Stacy Keach, who plays Mia's grandfather.) But the production as a whole is awfully clumsy, and Ms. Moretz, who is only 17, needs more help than she gets from the first-time feature director, R.J. Cutler. So does Mia stay or go? Let's just say that she's a child of her generation, with an unshakable sense of empowerment. Never mind what God or random chance may have in store for her. "I'm running the show," she declares toward the end. Deathless words from a near-death decider. 
   
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   'Spirited Away' (2001) 
   
   Hayao Miyazaki's animated masterpiece certainly qualifies as a ghost story, but it's also a coming-of-age story in which a girl takes refuge in her fantasies and emerges from them a stronger person. The 10-year-old heroine, Chihiro, finds herself alone after her parents make memorable pigs of themselves at an abandoned restaurant, and forges a new life for herself in a glittering, steaming hot-springs resort where spirits of every shape, disposition and composition—good and evil, opaque and transparent—come to refresh themselves. A must-see for film lovers of all ages. ||||| These crawls are part of an effort to archive pages as they are created and archive the pages that they refer to. That way, as the pages that are referenced are changed or taken from the web, a link to the version that was live when the page was written will be preserved.Then the Internet Archive hopes that references to these archived pages will be put in place of a link that would be otherwise be broken, or a companion link to allow people to see what was originally intended by a page's authors.The goal is to fix all broken links on the web . Crawls of supported "No More 404" sites.
target: – If I Stay tells the story of a teen girl with a big future who's nearly killed in a car crash. Informed by out-of-body experiences, she must decide whether to stick around on Earth or head to Heaven. It'll make you cry, but it doesn't offer much otherwise, critics say. (Audiences, however, seem to disagree: 80% like it at Rotten Tomatoes, twice the figure for critics). Some examples: It's up to audiences "whether the movie's many moments of genuine sweetness and affecting tenderness can survive the persistent silliness of Mia's out-of-body excursions," writes Joe Morgenstern at the Wall Street Journal. "At its best, If I Stay evokes the primacy of friendship, the warmth of family … and the urgency of adolescent love. But the production as a whole is awfully clumsy." "Full disclosure: I went through half a pack of Kleenex watching If I Stay," writes Elizabeth Weitzman in the New York Daily News. "But know this: Those tears are no more honestly earned than if director RJ Cutler had merely been chopping onions in front of me. … The movie is designed not to explore the experience of illness, or first love, or adolescence, but merely to make us swoon, sigh, and sob." The movie "hews largely to the same formula as The Fault in Our Stars," another book-based film dealing with teens facing death, notes Ann Hornaday in the Washington Post. But If I Stay offers "the perfect bookend to a tear-stained summer": "Even at its most wrenchingly painful, the film readily delivers generous dollops of pleasure." In the Los Angeles Times, Kenneth Turan calls the film "a flat-out, all-in fantasy romance, an unashamed tear-jerker that is unafraid of glossy emotions." Sure, "every moment in If I Stay is not all that it might be"—but when its leads "are looking into each other's eyes, you are not going to care."