PAPER HEART - This One's Shredded

The girlfriend and I went to go see PAPER HEART. I like Michael Cera, she's in love with him. I appreciate quirky, unconventional narratives. She's a fan of talky, meandering films that are light on plot. We should've both gotten paper arrows through our paper hearts for this film. But we didn't.

CUPID SHOOTS SOME SPOILER ARROWS BELOW




















The film's an odd blend of documentary and narrative/fiction. But this isn't used in an interesting way like REAL LIFE (where Albert Brooks plays a documentarian named Albert Brooks), instead, it's used in a confusing way. The film has "Written by" credits. And the real life director is played by an actor. So did Michael Cera and Charlyne Yi have an actual relationship? Or is that all bullshit concocted for the sake of the film? Wondering about those questions is actually the most interesting part of the movie. Which makes the film fascinating, but only in a meta sense.

Nothing really drives the story. We learn that Charlyne doesn't believe in love (through a phone call with a friend and some dialogue with her parents and actor friends), but we don't see anything about her past relationships to better set this up. She travels around the country, interviewing various people -- high school sweethearts, old married couples, bikers, scientists, a divorcee -- about love and relationships. And there are occasionally amusing puppet recreations of key moments in the interviewees lives. And then Charlyne starts to fall for Michael and vice-versa. Michael becomes uncomfortable having his entire relationship play out under the eyes of a film crew. Will she come to love him? Or is she incapable of it? Will he get fed up with always being watched?

Well, we get a tiny bit of her not being able to say she loves Michael. But in terms of an overall plot structure, it basically boils down to one line of dialogue in the film, when an interviewee (a romance novelist) says that it always comes down to love being that one person makes a sacrifice for the other, showing s/he loves them. And then in the end, Charlyne tells the crew to shut down the cameras. And then we get a puppet recreation of a fake, bigger ending. Which is just strange, because it has nothing do with the film and isn't particularly funny.

Another part of the film that's wearying is that after a while, all the alt-comic quirkiness tends to wear a bit thin. Between the two leads painting pictures of each other, the puppet show recreations, the playing goofy songs for each other, and shooting BB guns and setting off fireworks for no reason, it's too much twee crap. A little quirk goes a long way.

At the end of the day, in choosing to blend reality and fiction, the film fails on both counts. It's not a particularly great documentary about love because there's so much falseness. And it's not a particularly great romantic comedy, because that part of the film's underwritten and doesn't amount to much.

AMERICAN TEEN – The Documentary Is All Growns Up

While not a narrative feature, AMERICAN TEEN can provide a lot of insight into what to do right to feature writers.

SPOILER TANTRUM

The film follows a group of high school seniors as they navigate their way through their last year of high school and the beginnings of adulthood. Each kid has one issue – Hannah trying to find her place as an alternakid with big aspirations in a close-minded, small town, Colin hoping to land a basketball scholarship so he can go to school, Megan wrestling with getting into Notre Dame like the rest of her family, or Jake trying to get a girlfriend. By focusing on one storyline per kid, the film has a chance to develop a character arc – for example, Hannah getting dumped, dating a popular kid, and deciding to move away to San Francisco over her parent’s objections – for each of the major characters. It also chooses a wide variety of different social strata to pick the characters from, from the most popular kids in school to an attractive weirdo to a friendless loner.

There are some moments of real humor as well, made even more funny by the fact that they’re unscripted. These come out in interesting places, like when Jake gets dumped, and help leaven the pathos a bit.

Ultimately, the film feels so universal because if you weren’t one of these kids in high school, you knew them. And in retrospect, you’ve gone through all of the things these kids are going through, things that felt so important at the time but you later realized weren’t so pressing.
Watching the film, I realized that I still do and feel a lot of the same ways that these kids do. I may have grown up, gotten a job and my own place, but emotionally, my life hasn’t changed that much since high school. Only I get laid a lot more.