About Cherry (2012)

An American drama directed by Stephen Elliott, starring Lili Taylor, James Franco and Heather Graham.
A girl leaves her home, messed up family and boyfriend to move to San Francisco with a male friend. She has paid for the trip with money from a nude photo shoot and enters the porn industry. She meets a rich lawyer and they begin a relationship. Her mother and sister visit, but things don't work out very well with that.
Kind of a weak start, strong middle and terrible ending. It took a little while for things to get happening, but then held my attention. Production was good and the characters worked. There was lots of selective focus in camerawork. A good example is filming filming and having the camera focus shift from camera screen to action. Correct casting and good writing made it seem like the characters were not acting, but actually in these scenes. Isn't that the goal with casting, acting and dialogue? The ending was really just a vaguely implied series of incomplete information. It's difficult to spoil what is so difficult to describe. Small changes took place and we have to assume that time has elapsed before these quick scenes of altered situations. I rate it adequate because the middle was made so well.
No image again because blogger is still broken.

Bowfinger (1999)

An American comedy directed by Frank Oz, starring Steve Martin, Eddie Murphy, Heather Graham, Terence Stamp and Robert Downey Jr.
A failing film producer gathers the rag-tag bunch that he calls his crew to film a movie featuring a famous movie star who doesn't know he is in the film.
This was actually funny from a filmmaker's view. Anyone making films who is not in the Hollywood elite has faced similar problems at some point. From film students like myself to independent filmmakers, we know this territory. The plot made sense to me, although I think that Eddie Murphy's character would rather have just acted in their movie than think he was going insane because of being ambushed by the team. The characters were mostly cast well. The brother of the star actually being the star acting a different part is the only thing I objected to. The video was decent and I think the fictional Mexican crew did a good job on their shots too. The sound was seamless. I could hear the dialogue and the music was appropriate. Overall, a regular American comedy that is well-made, but how many of those do we need? Superfluous is the word I'm looking for. I rate it adequate.