I am not in love! You’re in love!: Paper Heart
I’ve sort of wanted to be BFFs with comedian/actor/woman-about-town Charlyne Yi for awhile now. You might remember her one-episode stint as Grace Park, Kenneth’s Jerry Maguire-misquoting love, on an old episode of 30 Rock (I tried to find an embeddable video of this, as it’s one of my favorite 30R moments ever, but was foiled by the weak-but-apparently-not-that-weak copyright law on the internets); she also pals around with Judd Apatow’s pack (”Apatown,” apparently) and turns up in the odd movie. Now her own movie, Paper Heart, has won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at Sundance, and is due out in August. It’s almost too coyly cute to be believed:
Doesn’t it look adorable, and yet also infuriatingly cute? The question here may be phrased in terms of another hipster touchstone movie: will Paper Hearts be like the first ten minutes of Juno (i.e. unwatchably twee) or like the last hour and a half (honest and funny and kind of a heartbreaker)? Alternatively, which will wear out first: Michael Cera’s charm or his penchant for playing awkwardly lovable young men? (You’d think we’d be getting towards the end of that particular rope, but the facts indicate otherwise.) I bet it also has a killer soundtrack.
Paper Heart is a “hybrid documentary”—not a mockumentary, but a mix of fiction and documentary. One assumes that the road-trip footage, and maybe the parts with her friends/crew, are the unscripted part, and that the Yi/Cera storyline (they play themselves) came with at least some forethought, though it’s hard to tell where that particular line sits—which is probably the point. Either way, I’m excited to see more of Yi’s work out there. And, hey, I still want to hang out. Even if you don’t like hair-braiding and boy-story-telling, I’m always up for a good script-polishing session! Call me!
Charlyne Yi, Paper Heart, Michael Cera, Sundance, Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award, hipster movies, Juno
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