PAPER HEART (2009)

If one were to assign a crack team of sociologists, professional actors, and expert filmmakers to make the most cloying, insulting and twee love story that they could, they still couldn't match the level of irritation created by "Paper Heart". The film, which purports to be a documentary about finding the true meaning of love, is instead a pointless and extremely creepy narrative about the feeble, imagined romance flowering between Charlene Yi and Michael Cera, as recorded by "documentary filmmaker" Nicholas Jasenovec(Jake Johnson, playing the film's actual director).

The problems start at the get-go, as "Jasenovec" immediately begins taking a disturbingly profound interest in Yi's social life (or lack thereof), as established at an opening sequence set at a depressing, acoustic guitar-drenched LA house party. "Jasenovec" coerces Yi, who is collaborating with him on the aforementioned love documentary, into letting him document all the interactions between the prudish, spineless Yi and the puppydog-like, personality-free Cera. Between brief interludes of couples explaining their perceptions of what true love is and cutesy paper figure sequences, "Jasenovec" begins adopting increasingly stalker-inspired means of capturing of every tedious moment between Cera and Yi, whose concept of courtship apparently extends to eating pizza together whilst perhaps (*gasp*)...dare I say it? ... holding hands. Potential for cooties? High. High indeed.

The narrative nadir arrives when "Jasenovec" purchases tickets for Yi and an increasingly uncomfortable Cera to make a trip to Paris on the film's dime, with an aim of generating some kind of limp-dick coda francais. How he paid for the tickets (much less the reels and reels of film he purchased to capture the couple dramatically traversing every single aisle of the grocery store) is never fully explained and thus it is at the audience's discretion to guess whether it was: a large withdrawal from a trust fund; the hefty settlement resultant from "Jasenovec"'s lucrative tort against the doctor who left him mentally handicapped; or, quite simply, a grant from his wealthy father. The just-totally-sick-of-it-man! Cera finally bolts on the production, perhaps worried about the damage it would do his cred with alt-comedy or Year One fans. I would be hard-pressed to imagine a more self-congratulatory ending than Yi and "Jasenovec" travelling to Cera's native Toronto to invade his parents' home, with "Jasenovec" smugly patting himself on the back for not invading with camera and microphone on the pair's reunion.

There are so many things wrong with this movie that it's simply not worth cataloging any but the most heinously offensive of them, that being: why did ANYONE think that this story should be told as a pseudo-documentary? Did the real Jasenovec think he was one-upping Charlie Kaufman by creating an irritating, obsessively self-important character like "Jasenovec" in order to tell a trifling tale that says absolutely nothing novel about a well-worn subject, a subject which has been cinematically examined in much more interesting ways by the likes of Jon Favreau and Jennifer Aniston?

Sadly, this movie probably has enough box office (largely thanks to the inchoate Cera performance) that this maroon is going to be able to toot out another offensive, wretched pellet of a film. The true tragedy of "Paper Heart" is that while the real Jasenovec surely believes himself to be standing on the shoulders of giants, he is actually swimming through the sewage from Rob Reiner and Steeve Coogan's pipes.