Paper Heart

Your enjoyment of the paper-thin faux-doc Paper Heart depends entirely on whether you find the incessant mugging of star Charlyne Yi to be charming or intolerable. Personally, I felt like I was being forced to watch a stranger’s child perform during playtime. Actress Yi doesn’t “believe in love,” so her director friend Nicholas Jasenovec makes her the centerpiece of a documentary on the subject. A baldly fake story line, in which Yi starts falling for actor Michael Cera, is sandwiched between real interviews (Jasenovec is actually played by Jake M. Johnson), but the film isn’t written or directed well enough to pull off its meta-lite concept. Jasenovec and Yi get credit for taking a different approach to a tired genre, but Paper Heart ends up no less dreadful and solipsistic than your average Hollywood romantic comedy.