My first Sundance was 2008. Before going I was talking to Drew McWeeny about it, and I told him that I planned to mostly drink and hit parties. ‘Don’t do that,’ he advised. ‘See as many movies as you can, and you’ll have half your work for the next year done.’
He was so right. So many amazing (or terrible, but let’s focus on the amazing) movies begin their journeys at Sundance. This year one of those films was Paper Heart, a mockumentary by Nicholas Jasenovec, starring comedian Charlene Yi. The concept is that Charlene doesn’t believe in love, so she goes on a road trip to make a film about what love even is. Along the way she meets Michael Cera (her real life boyfriend) and she learns a lot about love. That sounds like it could be cloying or shitty (and I didn’t even tell you about the sequences with crude cut out puppets), but it really is not. Jasenovec has directed a kind of a miracle movie, one that manages a high wire act above a gaping pit of sentiment and mawkishness. You can read my original Sundance review right here.
Now the film has been picked up by Overture and it has a release date – August 7th limited, August 14th wider. And it has a trailer – a really great one, in fact – that might just sell you on the movie. It includes a snippet of what is possibly the funniest scene in the movie, when Yi visits some kids on a playground and asks them about love. The trailer editors wisely only used some of the footage, leaving the rest to be a delightful surprise in the movie itself.