About Cherry

Have you ever been watching a WLW film and thought to yourself how much better this movie would be if James Franco is in it? If so, I’ve got the movie for you! If that doesn’t appeal to you, there’s nothing else that would make About Cherry something I would recommend to anyone. It’s bad.

About Cherry tells the story of a young, queer woman who has a positive employment experience in the porn industry. It focuses on Angelina who, at age 18, starts topless modelling to earn some money so she and her friend can move away. After this, she gets a job on a porn website, rising quickly through the ranks both of popularity and of kinky stuff she does on camera. Also, James Franco’s there for some reason.

About Cherry primarily exists to tell a more positive story about the sex industry. Written by Lorelei Lee, a porn star herself, About Cherry paints porn in a light of it being a lucrative, fun and safe career. I’m glad Lorelei Lee had a positive experience in this career. However, I think that it’s a little irresponsible of the film not to at least bring up the possibility that porn can be demeaning, exploitative and unsafe for its workers.

Going away from my moral objections, About Cherry has a problem with introducing conflict that doesn’t resolve. For example, Angelina’s mom is kind of a crazy bitch and Angelina’s younger sister still lives with her. Her mom shows up in one scene and then leaves. The plot is dropped without resolving Angelina’s issues with her mother nor what will become of the sister. Similarly, Angelina’s friend who she runs away with is clearly in love with her. He spends most of the movie as a nice guy until all of a sudden, he transforms into a Nice Guy. After this abrupt transformation, he too is just dropped from the movie. Conflict is introduced and then quickly moved on from.

Seriously, why the fuck is James Franco here? He plays Angelina’s boyfriend. Irritatingly, he’s one of the best developed character in the story. They spend way too much time on his character given that he ends up disappearing from the plot abut halfway through. Once Franco disappears is when the WLW contnet starts.

Heather Graham plays Angelina’s female romantic. Her and Angelina have chemistry after Heather Graham is the camera woman for Angelina’s first foray into porn. At home, Heather Graham is in a long-term relationship with a woman who has a mixed view on her partner’s career. Later in the movie, when Heather Graham’s partner realizes her attraction to Angelina, she yells at Heather Graham for not only infidelity but for the large age gap between the two. The phrase “she’s a child” is used in regards to Angelina.

This is the plot that bothered me the most, which bums me out because it is the WLW plot. The thing is, the script brings up a bunch of wholly valid reasons for these women not to be together. They have a substantial age gap, Angelina is barely legal, Heather Graham is in a long-term relationship. But after bringing these issues up, they just ignore them and allow these characters an uncomplicated happy ending. I can’t help feeling like the movie made a more convincing argument about why the two shouldn’t be together as opposed to why they should. All they really have is romantic tension and sexual compatibility.

About Cherry’s first priority is to positively portray the porn industry. I guess it succeeded in this but every other part of the script suffers. The characters aren’t well thought out and the relationships are worse. This movie would have really benefited from one central theme of conflict instead of several smaller ones. The lack of a large enough story line that can span for an entire film makes the movie pretty uninteresting and rather disjointed. It’s just a movie about a woman who begins to do porn and has a few interpersonal conflicts, none of which are dramatic enough to be sustained for 90 minutes.

Overall rating: 4.3/10

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