Saw Paper Heart. It was a quirky comedy/documentary. This comedian Charlyne Yi feels like she's incapable of feeling love. So she interviews several characters on the subject (a quicky-marriage Elvis, a married pair of divorce attorneys, kids, some dude who's singing a song about love in a night-club, etc.) Some of the interviews are animated via hand-made puppets. It's very cute and whimsical. It's hard not to let your heart melt when adorable old couples wax rhapsodic about their love, or when children give adorably nonsense answers to her questions (what's a perfect date? "You need to take somebody to Applebee's and get them hot wings." Right on, little girl. Right on.)
Eventually Charlyne meets and falls in love with Michael Cera, the actor. Things now take a strange turn. Enjoyed purely on the surface, their romance is cute and indie-quirky in a not-totally-cliched way, but how much can we trust what we're seeing? Are we meant to believe Michael Cera allowed some romance of his to be filmed, edited, and nationally distributed? We cannot trust or believe in their love, just as Charlyne cannot trust or believe in love in general. This is very clever and meta. The two levels of the film (taken as fact, and taken as an elaborate hall of mirrors) never really collide or harmonize (except in the ending, which is pretty great) and I think they may actually distract from each other. I enjoyed the film but kept schizophrenically swapping back and forth the way I was watching it.
Cute and adorable, the film is an interesting blur of reality and fiction with people burbling about love mixed in. It's a bit saccharine but I think the meta-level (which pokes through here and there) is a nod at self-awareness that saves the film from being easily dismissed. Slightly arch but very sincere, I think it's one of the better indie quirk-fests I've seen. I liked it.
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