Review of Paper Heart (2009) by Mike C — 11 Jan 2011

Here is my love story: whilst hanging with a girl I liked, I only needed two Rolaids over the course of one week. I normally eat about five a day. As stupid and sad as my story is (one day to be played out on the bigscreen), maybe it is better than this?

It didn't have to be. I avoided this for a long time, but Yi is usually pretty funny on talk shows, and I saw a bit with Cera so decided to watch. The beginning is pretty good. It's really when Cera is introduced as a romantic interest that the movie takes a fatal flaw. It loses all sense of being genuine and becomes one of the most contrived movies I've seen. I think. I cannot be certain it's all fake, but from what I watched and what I've read, it does seem like a lot of this "documentary" is fake, which by the rules of documentary, seems like a rip-off.

Some of the love stories are pretty decent. They were a little extraordinary and I hope they were real. Even better were the little paper marionettes yes to show those stories. Those were actually pretty impressive and comical. But here is this girl...maybe adorable, maybe completely undatable and she's fine with that...who falls for Michael Cera. Oh what timing that we're filming this docu about love? Let's film everything and show the drawbacks of putting every private moment on film! I didn't really believe the relationship, but I believed even less how it played out on film.

The underlying brilliance of the film is another theory. Evidently, the director in the movie is actually an actor playing the director. Either way, it is he who seems to be in love with Yi. So while she is supposedly trying her hand in the game in a movie about love, here is this guy who gets to be with the girl he loves but cannot get as close as he wants. The marionettes were a nice touch, but this subtle love story and the fact that, if it actually existed, did not end up being overly exploited, would be the top feature of the movie.