05 August 2009

Paper Heart

Directed by: Nicholas Jasenovec
Written by: Nicholas Jasenovec & Charlyne Yi
Full credits from IMDb

What is love? Ask a stupid question and you get a stupid movie. Paper Heart, a "50 percent documentary" for tweens and by (people with the mental capacity of) tweens, stars Charlyne Yi, a button-cheeked grinner best known hitherto for a brief but memorable appearance as a stoner chick in Knocked Up; she makes a poor narrator — she's not particularly charming or smart — and the film's thesis smacks of disingenuous gimmickry: Yi believes that love doesn't exist, or at least that she can't feel it. She wishes she were so sociopathic! Instead, she comes off as a college-aged kid who thinks she's smarter than everyone else — or, boo hoo, just doesn't fit in to a love-rife society. She and her director Jasenovec (played on-screen by Jake Johnson) travel the country (including a quick trip to NYC so they can find some gays), interviewing Ordinary People — high school sweethearts, musicians, bikers, romance novelists, divorce professionals, biochemists, kids at a playground — on the subject of love, true and otherwise.

Those interviews are stunningly banal, full of pat insights followed by stories both cautionary and optimistic about love lost and found.

Keep reading at The L Magazine


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