Some movies have concepts that are hard sells and immediately put them at a disadvantage. Shoot a story that on its surface seems challenging or boring, and you’re really going to have to convince your audience that you’ve done your job well in order for them to give your work a chance. And then there are movies like About Cherry, which could look like the most poorly crafted film of the year, and would still get everyone’s attention. That’s because About Cherry is about a fresh young hunk of meat (Chronicle‘s Ashley Hinshaw) just getting into the porn industry; a subject that pretty much anyone can find at least some way to get excited about.
And it’s also a subject that seems to give advertisers a lot of leeway in how they want to sell their product. While About Cherry’s first trailer seemed to sell it primarily as an indie romance about youth and finding love, the latest seems to sell it as much more of a slick and moody drama about the dark side of the entertainment industry. We’re shown a lot more footage of the porny stuff getting filmed, which seems to be the hard sell, and then we hear the naive young protagonist describe a coked-up James Franco as being “the nicest guy,” which introduces an unsettling amount of dread.
What kind of a movie is About Cherry going to prove to be once it finally gets its September 21 release? That’s hard to say. But, for film fans, it’s probably going to be worth seeing just for the fun full circle feeling we’ll get from watching Heather Graham go from being the girl in front of the camera in Boogie Nights to the girl behind the camera here. It’s the circle of porn, and it moves us all. [Yahoo! Movies]