Paper Heart a Mild Delight

"Everyone's definition of love is so different," Charlyne Yi says during her mission to find out if love exists in her new film, Paper Heart. She doesn't believe in love or the idea of finding a soul mate, so she travels the globe in an effort to explain it, but runs into a conundrum. Love is unexplainable. You can ask as many people as you want and search everywhere, but you don't know love until you've found it.

But dammit, Yi is certainly going to try. My maudlin theory is pure speculation as far as she is concerned. She follows the logical way of thinking. She doesn't believe in something unless she has seen it or it has been scientifically proven. Her curiosity leads her down many different paths, and she does indeed confront scientists, but they have little explanation other than, "There's a little magic involved." But any magician will tell you magic is a falsity, so this plays into Charlyne's initial belief that love is not real. That is until she meets Michael Cera, who plays himself (which he's been doing since Superbad anyway, so he's comfortable), and starts to wonder if her skepticism may have been unfounded.

On her quest, Yi interviews people of all different backgrounds with vastly different experiences. She talks to a man who explains that finding love is difficult because it has to be a mutual feeling, two gay men, one of whom was in love with his previous boyfriend who died at a presumably early age, and a couple who got married at 17 and still love each other now all these years later. One viewpoint sees true love as an improbability, if not an impossibility, another sees it as painful and temporary due to the fragility of human life, and another sees it as undoubtedly real and the only thing in the world that matters. These different perspectives work well for the movie because it keeps Yi wary of love, without a clear answer, and it makes her exploration of it much more interesting and poignant.

Paper Heart is based on the real life relationship between Cera and Yi and is shot like a documentary, playing like a (drastically) toned down version of Brüno, and is intelligently done, in a way that makes it difficult to tell whether or not what is happening onscreen is real. If it weren't for a few visual clues, like the way it is edited or the intercutting footage that seems unnecessary to the purpose of the movie, one might believe this faux narrative. But whereas Brüno was obviously fake, Paper Heart tries to bridge the gap between mockumentary and documentary, playing its fallacies as actuality, which works to its advantage, making the love story feel realistic and heartfelt.

And it is surprisingly affecting, thanks mainly to Cera's boyish charm, delivering his typical soft spoken sense of humor, shyly approaching Yi and hinting that he is interested. His experience with women seems limited and his bashfulness comes off as adorable. One can't help but root for him and hope that he can break down Yi's defenses and leap into her heart.

As with any romance film, you have the initial romantic spark, followed by a conflict that tears them apart before finally coming to some type of resolution, but all of this happens too quickly here and doesn't seem authentic. At a short runtime of one hour and 28 minutes, Paper Heart flies by, foolishly limiting our time with these characters. Considering that Cera and Yi are dating in real life, it's disheartening to see it move with such haste because they have a genuine chemistry (natch).

Though the film isn't perfect, I enjoyed my time with it, despite one major drawback that seriously puts a detriment on the whole affair. Yi is a quirky and charming young woman, with a likeability that permeates through the screen...for about twenty minutes. Then her cheerfulness begins to dissolve and I found myself annoyed by her incessant silliness and unfunny banter. The fun parts of the movie are when her and Cera are together. The rest is somewhat boring.

There are unquestionably some rough patches here and it might be tough for some viewers to make it through this one, but Paper Heart has enough good hearted warmth to justify a recommendation.

Paper Heart receives 3/5

Sandler Shines in Funny People

"He's really funny. I wonder why his movies are so unfunny," Clarke (Eric Bana) says about George (Adam Sandler) after meeting him in Judd Apatow's new film, Funny People. This line of dialogue perfectly captures the question many have been asking themselves recently. Adam Sandler is clearly talented and can be very funny, but his recent movies have taken thin, if not completely unbelievable premises and attempted to create stories out of them, some working towards an effective, if not entirely convincing emotional response (Click), and some so poorly thought out that they end up being complete contradictions and expose themselves for the narratively bankrupt messes they are (I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry). Funny People is Sandler's return to form, comedically and emotionally, and he delivers the best performance of his career.

The movie begins with George on his way to the doctor's office where he learns that he has AML, a form of leukemia, that is killing him. The disease is too far along in the process for known medicines or chemotherapy to work, so he is put on an experimental medicine where only eight percent of patients with similar symptoms have full recoveries. This news weighs in on him and he begins to lose hope that he will get better, and attempts to make peace with his ex-fiancé, Laura (Leslie Mann), before his death. To cope with his loneliness, he employs Ira (Seth Rogen) to write jokes for him, and even more importantly, be his friend.

Because the movie starts with George discovering the news about his disease, it's easy for the viewer to assume it and his inevitable march towards death are the causes of his depression. But as his leukemia begins to pass, miraculously fading away thanks to the medicine, we discover that it wasn't the sickness that was eating away inside of him, but rather his heartache over losing the one and only girl he's ever truly loved. That's what is killing him and knowing that he can't get her back is worse than any disease.

Adam Sandler plays George marvelously, perfectly mixing moments of humor with a true to life disposition, where his fragile outlook on life weakens the longer his body is afflicted with this physical, as well as emotional disease. He delivers a beautiful and powerful performance that really shows his acting chops. When he isn't relegated to making silly noises playing over the top characters with one note jokes, the man is a terrific actor. This is the Adam Sandler I love and this is his best movie since 2007's Reign Over Me.

Nevertheless, that doesn't mean he isn't funny here, because he most certainly is. One of the reasons the humor works in Funny People is because it is true to life, with jokes written for the story, not the other way around. In a movie like You Don't Mess with the Zohan, the absurd story took second billing to the scattered humor and produced a film with little heart, imagination, or laughs. Funny People has all three in spades and Sandler delivers more reasons to laugh here than in his last five movies combined, partially due to his willingness to poke fun at himself.

Anybody who has followed his body of work knows that he has starred in some overly trite, moronic films. In Funny People, he good heartedly lampoons himself, unabashedly allowing the movie to poke fun at not just his character, but also himself, slyly showing George's past works that look and sound just as outrageous as Sandler's own filmography, including films like Re-Do, where he plays a grown man shrunk down into a baby's body, Merman, where he plays a half man, half fish, and my personal favorite, My Best Friend is a Robot, which explains itself.

The movie, quite simply, is very funny, and that's because it is intelligent. Although it relies a bit too much on what some would dub "dick and fart jokes" (so much so that it would make Kevin Smith blush), Funny People by and large retains a sophisticated level of humor, aptly paying great attention to seemingly small details. A running joke in Hollywood, especially over the last year or two, is how Elizabeth Banks is in nearly every movie. Just last year, she had three pictures come out within three weeks, and Funny People is quick to parody this. When the film shows George's faux movie posters, Banks is shown to be his co-star on more than one occasion and is featured alongside him. This was a small touch, but a brilliant one and a hilarious wink to film lovers.

Funny People is nearly two and a half hours, which is quite a long runtime for a comedy, but every scene mattered and all were necessary in the telling of this story. It's a poignant tale that doesn't wrap everything up in a pretty little bow, but rather breaks from convention and avoids the predictable ending one usually sees coming from a mile away. No, this film explores real life emotions and shows that happy endings don't always occur, no matter how badly you want them to. Sometimes, you just have to play with the cards you're dealt. It's a sobering message and is delivered effectively through a terrific story, great humor and excellent performances, especially among Adam Sandler. Funny People is not to be missed.

Funny People receives 4.5/5

Good Premise, Disappointing Execution

Humpday follows your typical comedy set-up, akin to something like You, Me and Dupree. Ben (Mark Duplass) is a happily married man and, along with his wife, is thinking about conceiving a baby. Late one night, Andrew (Joshua Leonard) comes knocking at his door, a freeloader who explains he needs a place to stay, to which Ben, who hasn't seen him in years, happily agrees. Andrew, in his usual spontaneous behavior, meets up with a woman at a coffee shop and goes home with her. He invites Ben over where a wild party breaks out.

This is where the film starts to deviate from convention. Here they find out that an annual event called "Humpfest" is held every year where regular people make amateur porn videos in a competition. In their drunken stupor, they make the decision to shoot one together.

I know what you're thinking. "Two best friends having sex with each other on camera in a porn film? That just sounds like Zack and Miri Make a Porno." And indeed, it is quite similar. But the difference is that Kevin Smith's film depicted a man and a woman who desperately needed to make money and reluctantly decided to break that friendship barrier and have sex with each other. In Humpday, not only are the two best friends both heterosexual males, they willingly want to have sex on camera, which they claim is for the sake of "art" in that it's never been done before.

Given this premise, I couldn't help but wonder how the filmmakers would pull it off. No matter how you slice it, two straight guys, best friends or not, would never agree to have sex with each other on camera for a large group of people to watch. This was the largest hurdle that had to be overcome for this movie to work. Surprisingly, that seemed to be the least of its problems. You do actually get the sense that these two guys could actually do it due to their homoerotic behavior; they touch each other constantly, jabbing, slapping, rubbing and grabbing each other. I know gay guys who are less gay than these two. With a continuous string of behavior like this, the story really isn't as unbelievable as you might think.

With this predicament out of the way, it should have been smooth sailing to the end, but that wasn't the case. According to various sources, a good portion of the dialogue in Humpday was improvised and you can tell. It felt disingenuous, lacking in realism because you could see one actor trying to think of what to say in response to an improvised line. Other times, you could see the actors trying not to laugh, or even worse, going ahead and laughing only to pull it back together and keep with the scene. This isn't a huge problem when the conversations are silly (which many of them are), but in scenes where sincerity was called upon, it becomes a distraction.

Humpday has a few great moments, including an argument over who will be "boning" who and a humorously awkward final scene where the two men are alone in a hotel room, trying to figure out how they're going to shoot their project. Awkwardness seems to be the new "in" for comedy, with films like I Love You, Man setting the bar high, but this may be the most uncomfortable thing I have ever sat through. It was brilliantly funny and uncouth, traits that were perfect for a movie like this.

But the rest of the film lacks this type of gumption. I rarely found myself laughing, but even when I did it was more giggles than guffaws. During some scenes, the tone was so misguided that I wasn't even sure whether I was supposed to be laughing or not.

Humpday is a rare breed of film in its attempt to try something different and new, but the end result is an aimless void that plays out more closely to "Whose Line Is It Anyway?" than a feature film.

Humpday receives 2/5

G-Force Bad Even For Kids

G-Force follows a team of guinea pigs, Darwin (Sam Rockwell), Juarez (Penélope Cruz), and Blaster (Tracy Morgan) and their cyber intelligence specialist, Speckles the mole (Nicolas Cage), as they attempt to bring down an evil billionaire named Leonard Saber (Bill Nighy) who plans on destroying the world with his line of household appliances through an evil operation known as "Clusterform." This film is a cluster something.

But alas, their government support is dwindling and their funding is being stripped away. If only Disney had stripped funding from these filmmakers. Instead, they release this cinematic excretion, diluting our children's brains with enough insipidity to ensure that future generations remain stolid and submissive under the rule of the corporation's strangehold.

I'll concede this. Contrary to what my title suggests, G-Force is good for kids. But when I say that, I mean it is appropriate, not entertaining or intelligent. That is to say that parents will find little, if any, objection to it (minus the stereotypical "urban" guinea pig who just so happens to be black, although that can't compare to the egregious racism displayed in last month's Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen), though I'm hopeful that most kids will be able to see how trifling this cobbled together catastrophe is compared to other kid friendly films released this year, like the terrific Pixar masterpiece, Up.

The trailers do a good job of communicating just how ridiculous the story and childish the humor is (Zach Galifianakis as the team leader says to his agent fly at the thought of him sustaining an injury, "I don't like it when my fly is down"), so instead of sounding like a curmudgeonly old coot (Damn kids and your stupid talking animal movies!), I'll focus on its strengths.

Even with all of its deficiencies, G-Force's animation is quite good. The guinea pigs, moles, and other computer animated critters were superbly crafted. One CGI heavy scene involves a chase between the guinea pigs in their motorized rolling balls and the FBI as they approach an area with hundreds of fireworks prepped to blow, all exploding as they weave in and out of the potentially deadly blasts. It was a spectacular sequence heightened by the excellent use of Carl Orff's "O Fortuna" that made me smile and laugh. Unfortunately, this is the only moment in the entire movie that made me do that.

That isn't due to lack of trying, however. The talented voice cast was uniformly impressive, including Nicolas Cage who brillianty disguises his noticeable tone and, ironically, delivers his best performance in years. The sole exception is Tracy Morgan who voices one of the most annoying characters in a movie this year, spouting off eye rolling one liners with an overly loud emphasis, an irritating cacophony of sounds similar to what a dying dog would sound like if it could speak.

Like many films these days, G-Force uses 3D to "enhance" the experience, despite the format's tendency to be distracting, coupled with the reduced vibrancy of the color palette due to the tinted glasses. While it works for some, most movies use it unnecessarily. G-Force, however, uses it well. Since it is not a fully animated movie, it doesn't deprive your visual sense of what would be colorful stimulation. Without the 3D, G-Force would be unwatchable.

It's almost like that anyway.

G-Force receives 1/5

Orphan a Really Good Bad Movie

There is nothing more precious in the world than a little child, that is at least until it reaches for a knife and starts to murder your family and friends. If that sounds a little bizarre, it's because it is, more than you can possibly imagine. Orphan, the latest "scary child" film takes the beauty of a family and slashes it to pieces, quite literally, to a mixed effect. It comes from director Jaume Collet-Serra, the man who brought us the awful House of Wax, and although it is certainly better than that film, Orphan is still too silly and unintenionally funny to be considered good.

The picture starts out on a high note, opening with Kate (Vera Farmiga) in a devilish nightmare, still haunted by the loss of her unborn baby. Her life has become a constant struggle to deal with this terrible tragedy, but she hopes to change that by adopting little Esther (Isabelle Fuhrman), thus essentially replacing her unborn child and passing all of her pent up love onto her. Along with her husband, John (Peter Sarsgaard) and her two children, Daniel (Jimmy Bennett) and the deaf Max (Aryana Engineer), they attempt to make a normal life with Esther. However, the new addition quickly begins to tear the family apart, arousing suspicion within Kate who begins to uncover what Esther is really up to.

Esther is like the Hannibal Lecter of little girls, using her victim's own demons against them, delving into their minds and bending them to her own will. However, unlike Hannibal Lecter, who was brilliantly portrayed by Sir Anthony Hopkins in the 1991 film, Silence of the Lambs, Esther isn't scary in the slightest because Orphan tries much too hard. Look at Harvey Stephens as Damien in the original 1976 Omen film for instance. That story never stayed too focused on him and instead centered around the father finding clues about Damien's relation with Satan. By and large, this is the same story, sans the satanic element, with the parent slowly unraveling clues leading up to a grand revelation. The difference being that this story centralizes the child as the main component, eliminating any sense of question or doubt. Yes, she is evil. You can tell quite easily. All that's left is a routine horror film that plods along for two hours with little suspense or logic.

There's a certain advantage one gets to watching a horror movie with a sold out crowd because it's easier to gauge whether or not it is effective. If the audience is deathly silent and screaming at the appropriate times, you have a top notch thriller on your hands. In Orphan, moments that were meant to scare had my accompanying audience howling in laughter. The subject matter, or should I say the way it was carried out, simply wasn't scary. Being a child, Esther's foster parents naturally take her to a jungle gym where other kids are playing. Here she finds her classroom nemesis and the scene quickly turns into a fairly conventional stalker routine where the evil in the shadows jumps out of nowhere and attacks its victim. Unfortunately, a jungle gym isn't exactly the most ominous of locations.

At times, Orphan relied far too heavily on contrivances that worked at the convenience of the screenplay, including a scene where Daniel talks to his deaf sister Max, despite her ability to read lips and his ability to speak to her through (limited) sign language. He chatters just loud enough so Esther can hear through the walls. What a joke.

But then again, maybe that's the point. Orphan is one giant laugh, although I suspect it's an accidental one. Each actor delivers their lines earnestly, seemingly unaware that they're in a ridiculous film that's about as realistic as my chances of dating a supermodel. Every hollow stare, every evil smile, every goofy plot turn, all were worthy of guffaws, and they all led up to a fairly clever twist, however peremptory and unlikely it may be. But the two hours leading up to this moment are so laugh out loud stupid that the final punch lacks the momentum to land a knock out.

The ironic thing about Orphan is that the calmer moments, where the film explored some real emotions, were far more interesting and worked much better thanks to a couple of great performances from Farmiga and Sarsgaard. I would have rather seen a drama about a lonely foster child adapting to the pressures of fitting in with a new family, exploring her role as the mother's "replacement child," but alas, I was stuck with this laughably bad, yet strangely entertaining horror movie. While I sat there watching this, I thought, "This is just terrible," but thinking back on it, I realize I actually had quite a bit of fun.

This is by no means a good movie and I'm certainly not going to recommend it, but if you find yourself sitting in a packed theater with an unruly group of people able to laugh at its absurdity, you may actually find a good deal of amusement in Orphan.

Orphan receives 2/5

It's Certainly Ugly

One needs only to look at the poster for The Ugly Truth for a good understanding of its comedic quality. It depicts a stick figure male and stick figure female side by side, the female's heart in her head and the male's heart in his penis. Boy, that's fresh. If this tired joke doesn't make you roll your eyes, you might just enjoy The Ugly Truth. I, however, did not.

Katherine Heigl plays Abby, a television producer whose news show is bombing in the ratings, on the verge of cancellation, and in dire need of something different and exciting. After stumbling upon a local cable access program called The Ugly Truth, a program that dishes out the supposed "truth" on women and relationships, her news station brings on its host, Mike, played by Gerard Butler, to hopefully boost their ratings. Despite her initial hatred for him, Abby employs Mike to help her win a date with her sexy neighbor. Love flourishes within her, but not with the person she expected.

Which is to say, this movie is predictable, as most romantic comedies are. For those of you who can't figure out what happens by the end of the film based solely on the trailer, I suppose I'll give you this spoiler warning, so take heed before venturing down this written path, although you'd have to be pretty clueless to not see what is coming from the get-go.

The fundamental problem The Ugly Truth faces is that the characters are unlikable, if not morally reprehensible. During one scene, Mike details how women have a number of steps they feel they must go through to get a man, but he counters, explaining they need only one: "blow job," he says. According to him, to get to a man's heart, you only need to be willing to - through the phrase of a metaphor - take one for the team. This scene doesn't only subordinate women, relegating them down to people who are only useful for one thing, but it also makes all men look like shallow, misogynistic pigs who care only about sexual stimulation.

Mike is a guy who isn't afraid to say what he thinks, regardless of how vile it makes him look. He makes more sexual advancements than James Bond, but the difference is that Bond is smooth, suave, and sophisticated, and his lines always have a tongue-in-cheek type of vibe. Here, they just come off as despicable chauvinistic talk, in a way that makes the viewer feel like when Mike looks at a woman, he sees the backs of their heads rather than their faces. "Guys never care about your problems. When they ask how you are doing, they don't really care," he tells Abby during one scene, explaining that it's only a precursor question in the hopes that they will eventually get you in bed. He embodies the type of man who other men despise, a guy who makes everyone of the male sex look bad and as a guy, I was insulted.

By the end, we find out Mike has another layer to him, a soft spot that explains why he is the way he is: it turns out he went through a string of bad relationships. Well, boo hoo. So has everyone else in the world. His fragile psyche creates a paltry pity party for himself, passing it along to the viewer, expecting us to feel sympathy for him, but it's hard to empathize with a man who talks down to women without even a passing thought. Does this pathetic excuse make Mike a better person? Of course not. It makes him even more opprobrious because it attempts to justify his manist ways.

Don't think you're getting off easy though ladies. The female representation doesn't fare much better. Abby is controlling and vain, with an extensive personality and professional checklist that her ideal man must embody if he hopes to be with her, including such arbitrary philosophies like, "He must be a cat person," and the avaricious demand that he be a doctor, a profession unattainable to even some of the brightest minds. While not condescending to men, as Mike is with women, she essentially belittles herself with such high expectations making her arguably just as shallow.

Although Butler does what he can with his disgusting character, Heigl simply doesn't have the screen presence to carry a movie. She was fine in Knocked Up, but the difference is that the Apatow directed film complimented her, not the other way around. In that movie, she had a great script, an excellent supporting cast, a hilarious male co-star, and the story had lots of heart to it. The Ugly Truth has none of those things and her dull performance is the final nail in the already decomposing coffin.

With all of that said, there really isn't much else to discuss, although I suppose one question is still up in the air and may be a deciding factor for some readers: Is it funny? Truth be told, the film has a few mildly amusing moments interspersed between the hatred, but the problem is that I despised these characters so much that it wasn't so much what they were saying that ruined the jokes, but how they were saying them. On paper, I can see them working and in another movie, I may have been laughing, but my abhorrence for Mike and Abby denied The Ugly Truth the chance to get off the ground.

The ugly truth is that this film sucks.

The Ugly Truth receives 1/5

500 Days of Summer Truly Special

In a summer where few pictures provide the thrills they auspiciously promise to deliver, with the likes of Terminator Salvation, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen stinking up the theaters (especially the latter), is it possible to convince movie-goers to see a low key independent film like 500 Days of Summer? I certainly hope so. It is thus far, by a large margin, the best film to be released this year.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Tom, a worker at a greeting card company whose job is to come up with new sayings for a variety of different cards. Ever since he became old enough to understand love, he has believed that he won't be happy until he finds his soul mate. He's a hopeless romantic and believes that as long as you have love, you have everything in the world. Once new employee Summer, played by Zooey Deschanel, arrives at the office, he immediately falls head over heels for her. Unfortunately, Summer doesn't believe in true love and refuses to commit to anything serious, instead opting to have a casual relationship with Tom.

The film chronicles the 500 days that Summer is in Tom's life, including a hilarious scene conveying his happiness the morning after their first night together, where the world looks just a little bit brighter; people stop and smile at him, fountains explode in gushes of water when he passes, and his infectious joy convinces others around him to join in a song and dance number.

The brilliance of 500 Days of Summer is that it doesn't portray a relationship from an outsider's perspective. Instead, it shows how the relationship looks from the eyes of Tom. No, of course the city's citizens didn't erupt into dance because Tom's happiness prompted them to, but rather it was how Tom saw the world on that particular day. His blissfulness blinded him from actuality, unaware of the many flaws of a broken world, but he was happy. As far as he was concerned, everything was perfect. From this first person perspective, it allows the viewer to not only sense how Tom feels, but see his feelings up close and personal, flying high with him during the good times and sinking during the bad, including a terrific scene where he walks out into the middle of the street and everything in front of him is erased, first fading of all color, and then objects, until only his black silhouette stands in isolation, showing that at that moment he literally felt alone, not just single.

Although 500 Days of Summer doesn't necessarily follow the usual romantic comedy conventions, its story is still fairly familiar, breaking little new ground from a traditional point of view. However, it's the way the story is told that is so fascinating, elevating it above the plethora of generic rom-coms we've been subjected to over the years. At one point in the film, when Tom and Summer are rekindling their relationship after having not seen each other in a while, a narrator comes on and tells us that Tom's confidence assured him that his expectations for the evening would mirror reality, to which it then split screens, with the left side showing "Expectations" and the right "Reality," while the two play out simultaneously showing us the differences.

This moment is only one example of filmmaking ingenuity, with seemingly endless new ideas and a brilliantly written script that jumps through place and time constantly, but never gets confusing. As I sat there in the theater, entranced by what I was seeing, I was reminded of why I love going to the movies in the first place. It all adds up to an impeccable piece of work that deserves to go down in history with the likes of When Harry Met Sally as a romantic comedy classic. 500 Days of Summer is one of the most original and refreshing movies I've seen in years and I'll be surprised if anything tops it by the time December rolls around. It truly is a crowning achievement in film and a real treat for movie lovers.

500 Days of Summer receives 5/5