Paper Heart

A few weeks before I got back to Colorado, I loaded up the Google movie showtimes tool. In addition to the familiar cineplexes I knew from a year before, there was a new one: the Kress Lounge cinema. It was actually over in nearby Greeley, about a half hour drive away. In short order, from ithe listings, I could see that it was a small independent cinema, showing basically the same small indie films at the Lyric Cinema in Fort Collins. In fact they tended to swap movies over the course of the weeks.

I was really excited that I had a chance to go to the Kress quite early after I got back to Larimer County. In fact, I was forcded to, as several indie films had left the Lyric already and had migrated over to Greeley.

It was Wednesday---very chilly, after the earliest snowfall ever in northern Colorado. It felt like winter already. I headed over to Greeley all bundled up. The wind comes sweeping down off the High Plains there.

After killing some time in an independent bookstore that had wi-fi, I headed over to the Kress in the late afternoon to buy a ticket for Paper Heart.

I was blown away by what I found. I had expected the Kress to be much like the Lyric, which is located in a refurbished dry cleaners on East Mountain, and is a bit, well, rustic, as a moviegoing experience.

The Kress was totally different. It was new, a nice modern restaurant with a beautiful bar, where I took a seat and watched the Rockies beat the Phillies in a playoff game with the sound turned down.

I bought a hot green tea and warmed up while talking with the bartender. I learned that the Kress had opened up about two weeks after I had left Colorado a year ago. It was just about to celebrate its first anniversary.

The auditorum was small and comfortable, with stadium seating, as well as brand new lounge chairs. I took a seat in one. There were large windows allowing sunlight to stream in. A woman came just before showtime to close them with a large hanger. Before the trailers started I eavesdropped on a pair of young women a few seats away. They were talking about their troubled love lives. It seemed like an appropriate entree to the movie I was about to see.

The movie itself was brilliant. Let me confess right off the bat that I fell for the gag, in that for almost the entire movie, I thought it was a real documentary. Only at the end, with the credits rolling, and I learned that an actor had played the real director of the movie, did I realize that I had been had---it was in fact entirely written and scripted. Brilliant! I love being fooled by that. I'm fairly easy to dupe with narrative, because I like to sink into the world of movie stories, so perhaps that isn't saying much. In any case it all worked for me (actually I began to suspect that it was scripted during the all-too-uncanny fortune teller scene).

I'm now a big fan of Charlyne Yi, who made this movie, and stars in it. She really pulls it off, as the subject of her own mockumentary, looking for the nature of romantic love, which she asserts she has never experienced.

It's not a mindblowing masterpiece, to be sure. There's not any real knockout punch that makes me think: "this is great, everyone must see it." It's just a quiet, fun little movie that was different enough to keep me entertained for a couple hours. Lately, that's good enough for me.

As I left the auditorium and walked past the bar, the barkeep asked me what I thought of it. I gave a mild thumbs up. Good enough for me, I said. And a good introduction to the Kress.