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Paper Heart Is Beguiling, Enigmatic

'Quasi-documentary' blends fact, fiction

By Matt Cantor,  Newser Staff

Posted Aug 7, 2009 3:02 PM CDT

(Newser) – One's enjoyment of Paper Heart, a hard-to-pin-down fictional love story wrapped inside a real-life documentary about love, “will hinge almost entirely” on how the viewer feels about writer and star Charlyne Yi, writes Jeannette Catsoulis in the New York Times. Yi and co-star Michael Cera have been linked romantically in real life. Reviews are mixed:

  • “Enjoying this wondrous wisp of a something is easy, describing it is hard,” writes Peter Travers in Rolling Stone. “Luckily, Charlyne Yi is an enchantress. I'd follow her anywhere.”

  • The film is “sweet, true, and perhaps a little deceptive,” writes Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times, calling it “a very well-made film indeed.” Yi and Cera “ have such enveloping personas that little they do is quite acting.”
  • But Catsoulis finds that the actors’ “ extreme lack of sophistication is faintly disturbing,” she notes in the Times. Theirs is “an attachment so tentative and pathologically gawky that it’s almost painful to watch.”

In this film publicity image released by Overture Films, Michael Cera, second right, and Charlyne Yi, right, are shown in a scene from Paper Heart.
In this film publicity image released by Overture Films, Michael Cera, second right, and Charlyne Yi, right, are shown in a scene from "Paper Heart."   (AP Photo/Overture Films, Justina Mintz)
In this film publicity image released by Overture Films, Michael Cera and Charlyne Yi, right, are shown in a scene from Paper Heart.
In this film publicity image released by Overture Films, Michael Cera and Charlyne Yi, right, are shown in a scene from "Paper Heart."   (AP Photo/Overture Films, Justina Mintz)
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COMMENTS
Showing 3 of 4 comments
cognitivefilter
Aug 8, 2009 4:13 AM CDT
and kind of frumpy
cognitivefilter
Aug 8, 2009 4:13 AM CDT
charlene yi is just so odd
kokuaguy
Aug 7, 2009 10:55 AM CDT
Normal is a setting on your clothes dryer. : ^)

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