NetLord99

I don't quite know how to describe this movie. I suppose I can start with a simple, one-word review: bad. It's very slow moving, amateurish special effects, wooden acting, tepid direction, weak script. Basically, everything is bad. I did give it more than one star, upping it to two simply because I watched it all the way though simply to see if it improved and to reach a conclusion, to see how the story ended. It wasn't easy.

As has been noted, the acting of the two main characters is tortured at best. This is a dialogue-driven production, which requires crisp acting, solid writing, great direction. This has none of that. I can forgive the poor special effects, and certainly understand why they kept it limited. If not, it would have been distracting. You sense no connection between the two main characters, as if they were only recently thrust together. Lines are delivered flatly. The husband is a bit brutish at times, tough to like, but not enough to hate. He looks sort of like a softer-looking Vin Diesel wannabee type. Neither reacts appropriately to the situations on hand.

I did want to like the movie, and that's another reason I selected it and watched it even though I knew within the first minute it was low quality. The idea of a science fiction movie from the UAE was intriguing. I wanted to support it, and hopefully we'll see more and better produced movies in the future from the UAE. There is a lot of money in the UAE. Hopefully some of it shifts toward better movie production in the future.

This movie is very much like Charlene Yi. It pretends to be something it's not, and doesn't quite succeed enough on any level. Is it a documentary? No. Is it a scripted movie? Much more so than it pretends not to be.

By blending predictable, scripted and entirely acted romantic comedy elements in with what "appears" to be more standard documentary-style interviews, the viewer is left to wonder if anything they are seeing is real, and once that foundation of belief is cracked, the entire movie loses legitimacy. It's not good enough to be a documentary; it's not good enough to be a romantic comedy. Two negatives do not equal a positive.

The movie borders on a saccharine-styled Blair Witch Project with better production values. Li further carries this deception into the real world, denying that she's dating Michael Cera, but then noting in other places that their relationship ended in 2009, conveniently as the movie is released. She also tried to create fiction around her age, pretending to be ten years or more older than Cera, even though she looks she could sit in a high school geometry class. This leaves us to wonder, Why? The deception adds nothing to the movie plot, it's not a cutting-edge move, it's really nothing more than an annoyance.

From the acting side, Li's cutesy nerd style plays well at the start, but wears thin as the movie progresses. Cera is normally a solid actor, but interesting his scenes are the ones where it's most obvious the movie has drifted from faux documentary to a clearly acted and scripted production. It's a bit unsettling.

It's not unwatchable, there's even one or two points where it's almost charming, but many viewers are going to walk away feeling a bit flat, and a bit played.

You don't need to dive to find the remote to turn this movie off it it happens to show up for free on your TV. Yet you're not missing anything if you make it through your earthly existence without seeing Paper Heart. It's mildly entertaining, but just as easily could have been produced by a second-year NYU film student.