I’m not sure what part made us laugh hardest. 

The bright orange and red leaves on the ground and the bare trees on what was supposed to be a late spring day in the Catskill?

The reference to Rockland as a town right beside Roscoe?

Was it the lead character’s insistence that his friends drive home from a location more than 2 miles outside Roscoe because he would “take a bus”? 

Or perhaps it was the moment the same character walked into a building labeled the Roscoe Bus Station and booked a trip back to Florida. 

I knew when we turned on Paper Towns, the 2015 movie based on a young adult novel of the same name, that we were not exactly gearing up for a night of highbrow cinema. But on a Friday night after a long week of work, highbrow cinema is the last thing we needed. 

Still, I knew the premise of the film – a group of teens travel from their Florida hometown to the “paper town” of Agloe, New York – meant our neck of the woods would feature heavily, and I was curious. 

For those unfamiliar, Agloe is one of a list of fake towns labeled on maps throughout the years as a form of copyright protection by the mapmakers. The idea was that if a competing mapmaker were to include this fictional town on its own map, it would prove they had copied the original. 

Similar paper towns “exist” in Colorado and Ohio, among other places, but Agloe – located just outside Roscoe – has gained international fame in part because of its place of prominence in the young adult novel by popular YA author John Green, as well as the subsequent movie adaptation. 

Having read the book several years ago and groaning at a list of Roscoe-related inaccuracies, I didn’t hold out high hopes for the film. And yet, I hoped that perhaps the filmmakers had done a wee bit more homework than the author. 

After all, you don’t even have to take a road trip to check out most towns anymore. All you have to do is pull up Google Earth, and you can pan over all of Roscoe, from the Roscoe Diner to the Rockland House and everything in between. 

Switch to Google Maps, and you get street views of Stewart Avenue, the firehouse and plenty more. Needless to say, there’s no bus station to be found. 

So yes, the filmmakers failed on research for Paper Towns.

But if it’s Friday night after a long week, and you’re in the mood to roll your eyes and just how wrong a major feature film can be about a town you know awfully well, by all means, add this one to your streaming queue!