Paper Heart
Last week I saw the movie Paper Heart, which uses interviews with real people and the blossoming relationship of stars Charlyne Yi and Michael Cera (playing fictionalized versions of themselves) to explore what it means to be in love. Overall, I found the film to be quite charming, due in large part to Yi’s performance. Although I didn’t completely buy the romance, I thought that Yi and Cera had good chemistry and their story was a good counterpoint to the documentary. I especially liked the homemade puppet shows used to illustrate the stories of the interviewees.
But this post isn’t so much about what I thought of the movie as much as it is about how I found out about it.
Compared to the rest of the weekend, Sunday at Comic-Con was relatively low-key for me. The plan was Doctor Who in the morning and Torchwood in the afternoon, with a couple of hours to kill in between. Once the Doctor Who panel wrapped up, I started to make my way down to the exhibit hall for more browsing but then decided that I just didn’t want to deal with crowds down there (even for a Sunday), so instead I grabbed some lunch before heading back to the ballroom.
The next panel was actually a trio of short indie movie panels presented back-to-back with no breaks in between, and first up was Paper Heart. It started off with the trailer, and then stars Charlyne Yi and Jake Johnson and director Nick Jasenovec chatted briefly with the moderator before showing a deleted scene from the movie, an interview with actor Rob Huebel wherein he is confused about Charlyne’s gender and demands that she “show them (her) dick.”
After the clip, it was time for audience questions. It started off normally, but the second guy up asked when Charlyne was going to show us her dick. Charlyne looked genuinely shocked as the guy tried to start a chant of “Show us your dick! Show us your dick!” but she broke character for a second when the crowd quickly turned on the guy and started booing. She then yelled back at the guy, “I’m not a guy, I’m a girl! I have a vagina! Do you wanna see my vagina? Do you?” At which point she stood up on her chair to reveal a large black dildo hanging out of her jeans.
She had been sitting between Jake and Nick, but now that she was standing they were at eye-level with the dildo and she made a point to wave it front of each of them. When she finally sat back down, she stood it up on the table between her and and Jake, and he could not seem to keep his hands off of it. At the end of the panel, she threw it out into the audience (at their insistence). All in all, a very memorable panel, but I was now genuinely interested in seeing the movie and an instant fan of Charlyne.
There is a bit of an epilogue to the story. The weekend it was released, there was going to be a Q&A with Charlyne and Jake after one of the screenings at the Arclight, but it was already sold out by the time I found out about it, so I made plans to see it the following Tuesday after work. Coincidentally, Charlyne was at that screening dressed as an Arclight usher and helping people find their seats. Not too many people recognized her until she helped introduce the movie. According to the movie’s Twitter account, she has shown up to several screenings in “disguise.”
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