Joe Sachem Archives – CULTURE MIX

Review: ‘Cherry’ (2023), starring Alex Trewhitt

June 30, 2022

by Carla Hay

Alex Trewhitt in “Cherry” (Photo by Damien Steck)

“Cherry” (2023)

Directed by Sophie Galibert

Culture Representation: Taking place in Los Angeles, the comedy/drama film “Cherry” features a predominantly white cast of characters (with some Latinos and a few African Americans) representing the working-class and middle-class.

Culture Clash: A 25-year-old woman, who is drifting in life and has problems keeping a job, finds out she’s 10 weeks pregnant, and she only has about one day to decide what to do about this unplanned pregnancy.

Culture Audience: “Cherry” will appeal primarily to people interested in an intimate and well-acted portrait about a woman who has to come terms with her views on family planning and what she wants to do with her life.

With a realistic mix of drama and some comedy, “Cherry” presents a memorable portrait of a 25-year-old woman who has just one day to decide what to do about an unplanned pregnancy. As the movie’s title character, Alex Trewhitt gives a captivating performance. “Cherry” tells Cherry’s story without judgment but with plenty of charm and emotional authenticity.

Sophie Galibert directed “Cherry” and co-wrote the movie’s screenplay with Arthur Cohen. “Cherry” had its world premiere at the 2022 Tribeca Film Festival, where it won the Audience Award for Online Premieres, a category of movies that the festival only made available through the festival’s Tribeca at Home online programming. It’s more than a movie about an unplanned pregnancy. It’s also a movie about how this unplanned pregnancy has made Cherry rethink her personal relationships and what she wants to do with her life.

The beginning of the movie, which takes place in Los Angeles, shows Cherry roller skating around the city in a seemingly carefree way. At this point, Cherry doesn’t know yet how much her life will soon change within a few hours. Cherry isn’t roller skating just for fun. She’s financially broke and doesn’t have a car. Roller skating is the cheapest form of transportation that she currently has.

Early in the movie, Cherry is shown going to her job at a place called the Polka Dots Costume Shop, where she works part-time as a sales clerk. Some of her work at this costume shop also includes doing magic tricks for customers and occasionally handing out balloons. Her boss Roger (played by Joe Sachem), who owns and manages the store, is usually easygoing. But on this day when she arrives at work, he tells Cherry that’s he’s had enough of her chronic tardiness. “One more fuck-up, and you’re done,” Roger warns.

It’s the first sign in the movie that Cherry has a tendency to be flaky and irresponsible. Conversations that happen later in the story reveal that Cherry has a long history of drifting from job to job. She also does not have any life goals or plans. However, she has to think about what direction her life will take when she goes into the store’s restroom to take a pregnancy test. It’s how she finds out that she’s pregnant. Cherry doesn’t have much time to let this revelation sink in because she has to start her work shift.

Outside the store, Cherry is doing some store promotion for people passing by on the street. She does some magic tricks and balloon designs, in a way that that’s similar to what a hired clown would do at a children’s party. Two people who stop by are a preoccupied-looking woman (played by Samantha Barrios) and her son, who’s looks to be about 8 or 9 years old.

The woman asks Cherry to entertain her son while she quickly goes in the store. Cherry makes a balloon gift for the boy. Cherry says the balloon is supposed to be a make-believe sword, but it looks a lot like a penis. The boy notices it too and runs into the store with the balloon to tell his mother, who gets very upset. Roger fires Cherry immediately.

With no job and still reeling from the shock of finding out that she’s pregnant, Cherry (who does not have any health insurance) goes to a local health clinic to get another pregnancy test done. It’s a Saturday, which is a day when the clinic will see people by appointment only. Cherry shows up as the clinic is about to close, but through some persistence and begging, she’s able to see a doctor without an appointment.

The only doctor who’s on duty at the clinic is Dr. Amalia Garcia-Ortega (played by Sandy Duarte), who is, just by coincidence, about eight or nine months pregnant. After Cherry takes another pregnancy test, Dr. Garcia-Ortega (who is compassionate and patient) confirms that Cherry is pregnant. The doctor also tells Cherry that Cherry is 10 weeks into her pregnancy and will soon reach 11 weeks. How soon? In a few days.

In California, abortion is legal up to 24 weeks of pregnancy. But because Cherry doesn’t have health insurance, her options on where to get an abortion are limited. She will most likely have to rely on a low-cost clinic, such as the one she’s at now. Dr. Garcia-Ortega does not tell Cherry what to do about the pregnancy.

Instead, the doctor gives Cherry all of the options and tells Cherry that it will be Cherry’s choice on what to do. If Cherry chooses to terminate the pregnancy, the clinic offers a lower price ($500) if the abortion is up to the 11th week of pregnancy. Any abortion between the 11th and 24th week of pregnancy will cost more money than Cherry can afford.

While Cherry is absorbing this information, she asks to have an ultrasound, so that she can see and hear what’s inside her uterus. This ultrasound seems to have an impact on Cherry, as if she’s shaken by the reality that she has a tremendous decision to make. The rest of “Cherry” is about her making this very important decision that could change her life. The clinic is closed on Sundays, and will re-open on Monday, which Dr. Garcia-Ortega says will be the last day before Cherry is technically 11 weeks pregnant.

The father of the child is Cherry’s live-in boyfriend Nick (played by Dan Schultz), who is a musician in a band and a part-time event DJ. Some of his DJ work is at a local roller skating rink where Cherry likes to hang out. It’s never stated exactly how long Cherry and Nick have been together, but some of the movie’s conversations hint that Cherry and Nick have been a couple for less than a year.

Cherry and Nick live in a three-bedroom apartment with “four guys who smoke a lot of pot,” according to a comment that Cherry makes. If Cherry chooses to have this child, she doesn’t want to raise a child in this environment. Nick’s father was an aspiring musician who gave up his music career to raise a family. It’s something that’s brought up in the conversation when Nick finds out that Cherry is pregnant.

The movie never shows Cherry in the place where she lives. Instead, she goes to several other places during the 24-hour period when she makes her decision. When she tells Nick that she’s pregnant, it’s while he’s at a roller skating rink during his shift as a DJ. His reaction might or might not influence Cherry’s decision.

Cherry also visits some other people who have had an impact on her life, including a group of about four or five women called the L.A. Roller Girls, who are hired for events and have big plans to tour. Cherry used to be a member of this group but stopped going to L.A. Roller Girls rehearsals. She hasn’t recently stayed in touch with the group’s members, so they assume that she lost interest in the L.A. Roller Girls.

Ironically, the Sunday that Cherry has to make her big decision is on Mother’s Day. An enlightening part of the movie is when Cherry has a Mother’s Day brunch with her older sister Anna (played by Hannah Alline) and their divorced mother Carla (played by Angela Nicholas), who is worried about Cherry having such an aimless life. This scene with the Mother’s Day brunch gives a lot of insight into the dynamics of Cherry’s family.

Anna, who is a trial attorney, is married and has been unsuccessfully trying with her husband Jeffrey (who’s not in the movie) to get pregnant. Carla and her ex-husband Bob (played by Charlie S. Jensen) have been divorced for years, but the pain of the divorce still lingers. It’s eventually revealed that although Bob was a good provider for the family, Cherry thinks that Bob wasn’t emotionally available as a family man, and it bothers Cherry that he doesn’t call her. It might or might not explain why Cherry seems unable to commit to anything, but it definitely shows she has some “daddy issues.”

To a lesser degree, Cherry is also insecure about Anna being considered the overachieving “golden child” of the family, while Cherry thinks she’s perceived as the unreliable screw-up of the family. Through bits and pieces of conversations during this Mother’s Day brunch, it’s revealed that Cherry has often received financial help from her mother Carla, who has gotten tired of Cherry being so indecisive about what Cherry wants to do with her life.

Later, in one of the movie’s best scenes, Cherry meets her father in the parking lot of an casual snack eatery. In the parking lot is a cherry red Volkswagen that’s owned by Cherry’s maternal grandmother, but Cherry sometimes borrows the car. The car has a dead battery, so Cherry has called Bob (who works as a security guard) to meet her in the parking lot while he’s on a lunch break, so that he can bring his car to give a battery jumpstart. Their conversation is realistically awkward, but it has an emotional resonance that is subtle yet impactful.

Throughout the movie, Trewhitt gives an immensely authentic portrayal of someone who suddenly has to make a momentous, life-changing decision. In movies where the protagonist has an unplanned pregnancy, there are usually a lot of melodramatic scenes or panicking, but Cherry is dealing with this decision in a way that doesn’t involve her breaking down in hysterics. She begins to understand she has the responsibility of making a decision that could affect her life in the long-term, when she has gotten accustomed to living her life “in the moment” and not thinking too much about her future.

“Cherry” also has incisive observations about how people often make parenting decisions based on how they were raised as children. A lot of Cherry’s fears and insecurities about being a “responsible” adult could be linked back to feeling like her life was shaken up because of her parents’ divorce. Children of divorce often have “abandonment” issues, especially if one of the divorced parents is more involved in raising a child than the other divorced parent.

What’s also effective about this movie is that it doesn’t present Cherry as a stereotypical plucky young heroine who’s supposed to be adored by everyone watching the movie. She has a friendly personality, but she’s the type of person who is unreliable and seems to want to avoid growing up. That doesn’t make her a bad person. It makes her a person who’s been indecisive and noncommittal about a lot things in her life. And she can’t be that way for this big decision about her pregnancy.

Through her conversations and interactions in the 24-hour period that she makes her big decision, Cherry starts to see how some of her own flaws and commitment-phobic ways have affected her relationships. Cherry has some resentment toward her father for not being the type of parent she wanted. However, she goes through some of her own self-analysis about how she might have let down people in her life too. Not everything is said out loud from the movie’s screenplay, which is why Trewhitt’s performance is stellar at conveying Cherry’s inner emotions and personal evaluation of her life.

A lot of movies about unplanned pregnancies want to make the subject matter sad and depressing, while other movies with the same subject matter want to turn the unplanned pregnancy into a comedic plot device. And other movies have an agenda to preach what decision should be made about an unplanned pregnancy. “Cherry” does none of that. Instead, this movie poignantly shows how in one 24-hour period, a woman’s decision about a pregnancy has made her re-evaluate her life and perhaps use that self-reflection to make changes for the better.

UPDATE: Entertainment Squad will release “Cherry” in select U.S. cinemas on April 14, 2023. The movie will be released on digital and VOD on April 21, 2023.

Review: ‘Bad Detectives,’ starring Dralla Aierken and Freya Tingley

July 2, 2021

by Carla Hay

“Bad Detectives”

Directed by Presley Paras

Culture Representation: Taking place in Los Angeles, the dramatic film “Bad Detectives” features a predominantly Asian and white cast of characters (with a few African Americans and Latinos) representing the middle-class and wealthy.

Culture Clash: Two young women with opposite personalities inherit their grandfathers’ detective agency and have conflicts while trying to solve the mystery behind their grandfathers’ deaths.

Culture Audience: “Bad Detectives” will appeal primarily to people who don’t mind watching dull, amateurish detective movies with horrible acting.

Steven Chan in “Bad Detectives” (Photo courtesy of Mutiny Pictures)

“Bad Detectives” should’ve been titled “Bad Acting.” The cast members’ stilted and boring performances are among this amateurly made thriller’s many problems. Everything about this movie looks like a student film project that wouldn’t get a passing grade at a top film school. The best thing about this horrible movie is that it’s mercifully only 72 minutes long.

Directed by Presley Paras and written by Chris Johnson, “Bad Detectives” is the first feature film for Paras and Johnson. And this lack of experience shows, because everything about this movie looks like it was made by filmmakers who don’t really know what they’re doing. “Bad Detectives” (formerly titled “Year of the Detectives”) attempts to be a stylish, noir-influenced thriller with touches of comedy, but the movie goes in all the wrong directions and ends up falling flat.

And the acting is just excruciatingly terrible. It’s one of those movies where people in the cast just recite their lines and can’t make the conversations look natural. Sometimes, the acting has emotions that are over-exaggerated like a cheesy soap opera. And sometimes, the acting lacks the necessary emotions, such that the actors might as well be portraying zombies. The sound mixing is often uneven, with soundtrack music that blares too loudly in some scenes.

And the so-called “detectives” in the movie do more arguing than any real detective work. Instead of investigating and finding clues themselves, these “detectives” have scenarios where other people randomly show up to reveal information in badly written dialogue. And the action/fight scenes are incredibly basic and boring. This movie also has no suspense and couldn’t even craft a good mystery.

The movie’s two central characters are Nicole “Nic” O’Connell (played by Freya Tingley) and Ping Liu (played by Dralla Aierken), who are—cliché alert—completely opposite in their personalities but must work together for a shared goal. Nic is a foul-mouthed hothead who likes to blurt out things like “Fuck you!” for no apparent reason. Ping, who is polite and level-headed, is more likely to want to find a peaceful solution to a problem rather than starting a fight.

The first five minutes of the movie don’t have any talking and just have over-indulgent montages of the Los Angeles setting where the story takes place. Nic, who’s a U.S. Army veteran, is shown walking through Chinatown with a backpack. A man, who’s later revealed to be a thug named Wu (played by Stephen A. Chang), seems to be following Nic without her knowing it.

Nic arrives at the O’Connell & Liu Detective Agency, which is a dormant business because the two owners have recently died. The door to this small, dimly lit office is open, and so Nic pulls out a knife in case there’s an unwelcome intruder inside. A woman namd Ping Liu (played by Dralla Aierken) is sitting at a desk inside the office.

Ping says to Nic, “You can never sneak up on me. You’re still too loud.” Nic says, “Fuck you!” Ping replies, “I’m not here to fight.” Nic snarls, “Neither am I.” Ping responds, “Then why are you carrying a knife?”

This is the type of empty dialogue that litters the entire movie. Nic spends most of the movie being angry at Ping, but there’s no explanation for why Nic has so much hostility toward Ping. During one conversaton, Nic inexplicably shouts at Ping: “I served my country, bitch!” There is so much unexplained backstory to these characters, it’s like “Bad Detectives” is a sequel to a movie that never existed.

Nic’s and Ping’s recently deceased paternal grandfathers are the two people who started the detective agency. In a meeting with an estate lawyer named Mr. Strathmore (played by Jim Meskimen), Nic and Ping find out that these grandfathers made Nic and Ping the sole beneficiaries of everything the grandfathers owned. The two women have inherited the detective agency, the building where it’s located and—to their dismay—a lot of debts.

Mr. Strathmore advises Nic and Ping to sell the building to pay off the debts, but they ignore the advice. That’s because Nic and Ping become preoccupied with trying to prove that their grandfathers’ deaths weren’t accidental. The grandfathers were found dead together on the street, after apparently falling from a building. However, there are clues that this fall was no accident.

Mr. Strathmore also gives Nic and Ping a postcard with a photo of a Chinese figurine. Nic and Ping later hunt for this figurine, which is a rare artifact that was stolen and is linked to the mystery of their grandfathers’ deaths. This “treasure hunt” aspect of the story brings no surprises, and it’s handled in a very tedious manner.

Shortly after Nic and Ping first meet with Mr. Strathmore, a mysterious man in a business suit greets them in the office waiting room. His name is Tony Chow (played by Steven Chang), and he says that he used to work with Nic’s and Ping’s grandfathers. Tony also says that he has important confidential information to share with Nic and Ping. They agree to meet at the detective agency.

At the detective agency, Tony tells Nic and Ping that he currently works for a wealthy politician named Assemblyman Wei (played by Victor J. Ho), who initiated a “hurried foreclosure” in the building where the detective agency is located. Tony says that Assemblyman Wei was tied to a paper trail that would prove his corruption in something that the grandfathers were investigating. It’s implied that Tony is a “whistleblower” whose life will be in danger if Assemblyman Wei finds out that Tony leaked this information.

Tony hands Nic and Wei an autopsy report that shows that the grandfathers had blunt force trauma and broken noses when their bodies were found lying face up on the ground. Their deaths suspiciously appear to be from homicide, not an accidental fall. Tony also says that he knows that the grandfathers were on their way to uncovering something important in the Assemblyman Wei investigation when they died.

Predictably, Nic and Wei want their grandfathers’ cause of death to be re-classified as homicide. And so, the rest of the movie is about them trying to prove it and tracking down this mysterious figurine. The man named Wu who was stalking Nic in the beginning of the movie works for Assemblyman Wei, and he does a lot of Assemblyman Wei’s dirty work in beating up and threatening people.

Nic and Ping are two of the people who are assaulted by Wu, who ambushes Nic and Ping, and beats them up when they’re alone in the detective agency office. After the assault and before he leaves, Wu takes a sip from a coffee cup that was on an office desk and says with a smirk, “Not bad. Goes down easy.” It’s an example of this movie’s cringeworthy attempt at comedy.

There are supporting characters that show up randomly in different parts of the story. Three middle-aged associates of the detective agency lurk around, even though they apparently don’t have jobs at the agency anymore. This lunkhead trio consists of Ralph (played by Bob McCollum), Jack (played by Vic Polizos) and Joe (played by Joe Sachem), who are nothing more than the Three Stooges of this story.

Ralph, Jack and Joe are first seen rummaging around the office while Nic and Ping argue. The only reason why Ralph, Jack and Joe are in this movie is to spoonfeed clues to Nic and Ping about the grandfathers’ activities. Nic and Ping don’t actually do a lot of research themselves.

There’s also an art gallery owner named Constance Lane (played by Susan Priver), who has knowledge about the mystery figurine. Constance is supposed to be an enigmatic femme fatale type, but she’s just bland and robotic. Her role in this mystery is so obvious as soon as she meets Nic and Ping for the first time.

Nic and Ping are at Constance’s gallery and inspecting a figurine that looks exactly like the one that was stolen. Constance conveniently walks right up to these two strangers and tells them the history of the figurine and introduces herself as the gallery owner. Constance might as well as well have worn a sign that reads, “I’m Probably Involved in Art Fraud.”

And there are two police detectives named Detective Wong (played by Ping Wu) and Detective Weezul (played by Paul Rae), who always show up unannounced at the detective agency. Their only purpose in the movie is to be condescending to Nic and Ping, because they think these two women can’t possibly have what it takes to be “real” detectives. The characters of Detective Wong and Detective Weezul are written in a very heavy-handed and obtuse way.

Viewers are supposed to believe that these busy police detectives have nothing better to do with their time but hang around the detective agency, wait for Ping and Liu to show up, and then insult them like childish bullies in a schoolyard. In one scene, Detective Wong and Detective Weezul are in Nic and Ping’s office doing their usual taunting when Detective Weezul picks up a small vase, as if he might break it. Ping responds by saying, “Break it and I’ll break you.”

That’s one of many examples of the awful lines of dialogue in the movie. In another scene in the movie, the chief villain tells Nic that she will be heavily rewarded if she finds the figurine. She replies, “That’s not justice.” The villain says, “What is justice without vengeance? I hope you never have to feel my vengeance.” The substandard acting makes this type of dreadful dialogue even worse.

“Bad Detectives” makes an attempt to have eye-catching cinematography, especially with the aerial shots of the city. But with drones being able to capture these images on camera just as well as humans can, there’s really nothing outstanding about the movie’s cinematography that deserves praise. All the gimmicky camera angles in the world still can’t erase the stink of this movie’s bad directing, moronic screenwriting and awkward acting.

Mutiny Pictures released “Bad Detectives” on digital and VOD on June 22, 2021.