Cherry is a MESS | Explained

so the russos are back with yet another movie outside the mcu but one that heavily features an actor from within the mcu cherry the semi-autobiographical film based on the novel of the same name by nico walker who is incarcerated following a series of bank robberies and unlike i don't know taika waititi whose work outside of the mcu brings me great joy the russos haven't necessarily had the best track record post avengers before cherry there was extraction starring chris hemsworth which was not great but hey the premise of cherries sounded pretty good i think talking about ptsd is super important talking about how people can end up in the military when it's not something they would otherwise want because their lack of direction is being preyed on is important talking about how the military does a [ __ ] job taking care of its veterans and their ptsd following their time in the military and how easy it is to fall into substance abuse to self-medicate for that ptsd is very important but cherry was a whole lot of movie dealing with a whole lot of topics that i'm not entirely sure uh how to feel about it at about 2.5 hours it is both too long and also not long enough for the story that it's trying to tell considering how many distinct segments there are when it feels like a coming-of-age story one that shows a look at the brutal reality of the american military with the glory stripped out how that fell into drug addiction and finally a series of criminal events and a lot of those really do go together and can make for a great movie but holy [ __ ] like there were times where this just kind of felt like i was trying to channel what goodfellas accomplished if this wasn't based on a book and real story i'd say it's like they decided they wanted to make a feature film based on the wake me up when september ends music video even a bunch of the intro dialogue reminds me of the intro to that music video you know they say life is short and i know a lot of people are really not liking this and while i didn't love it there are a lot of parts that i really did enjoy which we'll go over to give you a more general rundown cherry is the story of someone who joined the military after his girlfriend leaves him suffers from horrendous effects of ptsd that push him into substance abuse which leads to a life of crime to facilitate that drug abuse and a lot of the times my critique of stories can be that they would have done better as a mini-series because there's just so many ideas that they're trying to address and this is definitely one of those movies i know a lot of people just feel like hey if you can make it into a movie you should do that and sometimes i watch mini series where i'm like that could have been a movie but this is something trying to tackle so much and they're all really important issues that i would have just preferred at all have time to breathe and be fleshed out properly especially where the movie is unwilling to condense any of the story it keeps everything but it also adds an entire segment that the book doesn't have and for the book this is very much just a walk through the narrator's life and showing how the things that happen to you can go on to affect how you behave in the rest of your life it's not trying to pretty anything up with flowery language it's very honest in how he's describing the characters around him it's just trying to be a very honest telling while not redeeming its characters because on that note you won't find anybody particularly likable in the book or even get context to certain behaviors and choices that's an area where the movie really tries to clean things up and i get why you want something for people to grab onto when they're watching a movie it is very hard to sell a 2.5 hour movie and it's even harder to sell a 2.5 hour movie if nobody cares about the characters and with the movie they do this by making our protagonists a little bit more redeemable and through the character emily even in the book our narrator is obsessed with a girl he meets in college named emily everything in his life goes back to her even when in the book he's with other girls his thoughts go to emily and in the movie we're shown how he essentially ruins her life though in the book she didn't really need any help derailing but we'll get there and then in terms of the miscasting complaints i can kind of get that and it's not because they weren't good they were actually really great but tom holland and sierra bravo looked perpetually young it's like watching a movie of 11th graders descending into a life of drug abuse at one point we're supposed to believe that tom holland has aged like 10 plus years and all they do is give him a select stash so when the movie itself starts it kind of feels like we're just being bombarded with this series of one-liners that possibly would have felt at home on tumblr i'm 23 years old and i still don't understand what it is that people do have to be a pretty [ __ ] up tree for me not to like it sometimes i wonder if life was wasted on me it's as if all of this were built on nothing and nothing we're holding all this together they take all the beautiful things to heart and then they [ __ ] my heart something in me has always drawn me away until there's nothing holding me together that was all in the first three and a half minutes of the movie and i can't even share everything that was said so like i mentioned the russos do a really good job giving us more sympathy for this narrator not that i don't feel sympathetic for what the narrator is going through in the book but you do just make this character a little bit more likable from the get-go and in the book the change in behavior isn't quite as distinct whereas in the movie you get that very clear line of how much he's changed from his time in the military so this is our prologue we get a flash of what's happening to him later in life before it goes back in time to build us to that moment he looks to shovel he's got the sunken marked face we expect to see from drug addicts and he's robbing a bank and on top of the in-head narration which is used heavily in this movie we also get some fourth wall breaking audience narration one thing about robbing banks is you're mostly robbing women so the last thing you want to be is rude and i'll be honest that was a solid one liner and this movie actually has a lot of solid one-liners that make up for some of those lows that we're gonna get part one when life was beginning i saw you 2002. that also sounds like tumblr i'm just saying so this is where we meet the object of the narrator's life emily and she actually seems interested in him too but he currently has a girlfriend who goes to a different university with who she goes to another school but it's acknowledged that she's most likely cheating on him and kind of horrible to him so do with that what you will now something cool that i felt they did with these flashback scenes especially this one where he's talking to emily is that everything in the background takes on this blurry haze so it's really only their bodies that are in focus and i thought that was a really cool way to denote that this is like a part of his life that he's looking back on but it just kind of goes through his life his shitty job of trying to toss pizzas his friends the arguments over one of them joining the marines how his other friend really hates the fact that he's joining the marines and then the first thing we'll show to sow some doubt into the way that banks operate is he goes to try to deal with an overdraft notice that he got because he paid off an overdraft fee but it didn't clear in time even though he paid in person in cash and all the banks in this movie have like really random generic names like shitty bank now whenever actively says [ __ ] banks we're just taking back what's ours because i don't think there was a reason beyond banks have the most money at the teller for why they start robbing them but still so he deals with his woes by taking some ecstasy going to a party where he runs into emily now i will say that he does clearly do drugs before he goes off to war here but in the book it's a lot more heavy drug usage she even mentions that he was a drug dealer and emily thought it was like really cool and this is the start of his first love i think i adore you tumblr and everything is magical it's going great until he tells her he loves her right after she says she doesn't think love exists and she responds with thank you and then suddenly she wants to go to school in montreal in montreal yeah to paris of canada you may have been dumped before but have you been i'm moving to another country dumped and he is just so emotionally distraught with her planning to leave and kind of ending things with him that he joins the military look you may have been down bad but have you ever been joined the military after getting dumped down bed and this really shows how predatory the military in the u.s can be you got a kid who's making choices while emotionally distraught who told you he's emotionally distraught and instead of being like hey man you're emotionally distraught you're like hell yeah let's go we're signing you up tomorrow they don't even break up in the book he just decides he's gonna join the military because she won't be around i felt like this was a better choice on behalf of the movie and then it also adds some more emotional attention when emily shows up to his place of work to say goodbye but brings another guy with her do you want me to punch this guy in the dick no joe everyone needs a friend like joe but he ends up having to stay at work late to serve this guy who just got out of prison a bunch of drinks and i'm thinking okay this is the guy that's eventually going to get him into the life of crime but no i never saw him again i feel like there's so many side stories in this that just kind of like bait and switch you down some kind of reasoning and then nothing comes of it but it's fine and when it's home emily is there waiting to tell him that she's only leaving because she got scared and then he reveals that he joined the army why would you do that because i was sad baby so you joined the army yep and she actually says she'll wait they even get married in the movie it's played as super romantic in the book it's like we should get married before you go so i can take advantage of your military benefits but we also shouldn't tell anyone romance part two basic 2003. now this is the section that ended up being the most interesting to me we've been shown gritty reality of the us military around the iraqi war before but not typically as bitter as it is here it's so clear how much he hates everything about the military culture the posturing the power tripping the egos the people that are there because they actually believe in what they're doing even if they're being used the people that just want to kill and the people that never should have been allowed to sign up in the first place we even get an in-rectum shot while he's getting his physical and that is the level of immersion i am looking for from my films but never again it even talks about drill sergeants going on power trips and blaming it on ptsd even though they hadn't ever been in active combat joel's sergeant deco choice that's levine he starts talking about how the whole thing started feeling like make-believe the training sessions felt like pretend war games and that they were forced to come up with stupid company cheers that involved doing the robot and specifies that the only way to flunk out a basic is to try and kill yourself so don't ever join the [ __ ] army part three cherry so they're officially deployed and his first mission is putting this guy's guts back in his body yeah and somehow he's still alive and not passed out from shock but after dealing with that and seeing the war zone in real time to get back to the base and have all the infantry guys itching to get out there was really off-putting and then they find out that the guys they thought they saved died anyways quit worrying about it so much huh you got your cherry pop today that's the cherry pop he's no longer a green soldier but it's also the moment that starts planting the seed in his brain that what they're doing there is pointless dare to look busy expensive as [ __ ] and dumber than [ __ ] seeing people that enjoyed messing with the local kids who probably did a lot of really messed up stuff back home the book even mentioned two soldiers that like doing mouse murder snuff films in their free time and then his friend ends up getting blown up and the emotional weight of this moment in the book didn't feel as tangible as it does in the movie and i feel like that's more because the book is very strictly being told as a retelling and specifically a retelling of somebody who is very heavily involved in drugs so there's definitely going to be some kind of emotional separation there because you're on drugs but the movie can do this retelling as if it's in real time and it [ __ ] him up he sees his friend melted to a seat his own gloves start melting when they go to carry him into the body bag and this moment of him sneaking out the barracks at night to call emily was just so well handled it's really showing an added range to tom holland and i wish to hell this movie came together better because he really did kill it part 4 home 2005. and then he's home running into a gym to the refrain of burn baby burn maybe a bad choice and he's done such a good job that he's been awarded the medal of valor my one true accomplishment was not dying so immediately his parents and emily are there waiting for him in the book he's completely alone until his parents happen to show up in texas for thanksgiving even calls emily while drunk later on because he's hurt she's not there and just basically accuses her of being a cheating so yeah and the movie definitely makes him a lot more likable and in a different movie this might have been a conclusion had more happen before this the hero returning from war to resume his love but in the movie this is the real start of the descent we see it in that guy joe first who had gone into the marines oh [ __ ] but it's not just him our narrator can only dream of violence and dead bodies [Music] basically i was being a sad crazy [ __ ] about the horrors i'd seen so he starts popping a bunch of xanax for the anxiety and drinking because it's not working he can't do normal activities without getting worked up and obviously his behavior is starting to stress out and upset emily which is just making her miserable and afraid and if things couldn't get any worse he starts getting hooked on oxy because it's the only thing that seems to make the [ __ ] he sees go away and at this point in the book he's already doing a bunch of different types of drugs he's also been sleeping around with different girls who he can't fully commit to because he and emily aren't together anymore and even though he treats them like garbage they seem to like to be around but he always still thinks of emily and then when she does come back around and he's hooked on heroin she's also already doing heroin so there's no aspect of this being a cycle that he let her down like it is in the movies she's already there but in the movie he promises to find a way to make things better he actually goes to talk to a doctor and flat out tells him that he sometimes thinks that emily's life would be better if he had died in iraq and that he also thinks of suicide and a doctor asks him if he's ever been evaluated for ptsd isn't that what we're doing here and then he points out that he tried to talk to somebody but for some reason his files kept getting moved around and he just couldn't end up getting a hold of anybody and then the doctor by the end of it just prescribes him more oxy have you ever heard of oxycontin naturally emily was pissed and i really wish that they had focused on this kind of stuff a little bit more than them just doing a lot of heroin the military failures and veterans falling through the cracks in ways that leads to significant drug abuse is super important and very interesting to examine but i'm not really sure how i feel about the progression of this movie as they just descend into full addiction the russos keep saying that this movie is about the opioid epidemic but it really just kind of includes the opioid epidemic because i find that the book and the movie both say more about all those issues that i talked about with the military and just the entire culture that surrounds it in america i thought all that stuff was way more interesting than watching people try to score heroin as they descend into the full depths of [ __ ] their pants when they go too long between hits not to say that it isn't important to show the reality of that kind of situation i just think they kind of made a mess of doing it part five dope life and that is how we became addicts and right off the bat we're given this description of heroin addiction being like killing yourself really slowly but feeling like a million bucks while doing it but this whole section takes up about an hour of the run time and i really feel like it could have been condensed or at least handled better if they wanted to make a larger statement on the opioid epidemic because it kind of just starts descending into like how batshit crazy his life can get and like the stuff that he does and it also hasn't point out that emily is the smart one that she actually helps teach a course at the college so he has to make sure that he's there at specific times to get her another hit which is obviously something rough to achieve when you can't keep a job because you're addicted to drugs and here we have midsomar the drug dealer lovingly named pills and coke and for the narrator to get alone on some drugs he's got to go pick up a safe and hold it for another guy named black but trusting an addict with the safe is probably not the smartest thing if it takes too long for the person to come pick it up because they're gonna start getting real curious about what's inside so the second they need more drugs they obviously start busting it open and then when he comes to get it he pretends he's the cop so they obviously freak out and try to dispose everything because you know they're on drugs so the movie uses this as the method as to why they start robbing banks because it's the only way to get money fast enough to pay him back for the drugs that belong to the scary supplier in the book that was just part of the progression of needing money for drugs when they realized they couldn't rob some random dude they're like hey what about a bank so he keeps it nice simple and quiet just asks a single teller for all the money she has and celebrates with a bunch of heroin and subway and even though the bank has a clear shot of his face and someone actually recognized him he doesn't get caught did you rob a bank today yeah maybe you shouldn't leave the house for a while and he keeps doing it because once the dope runs out he gets sick he needs another hit literally while he's waiting in line to steal money from the bank he pukes in his own shirt no i'm fine i just can't stop sneezing and then he keeps doing it like nico walker in real life robbed 10 banks before he was arrested but what's even more impressive is that after robbing 10 banks he only got about 40 000 but then the inevitable emily ods in the book it actually starts with him almost oding and they have to shove ice in his pants to wake him back up again but he actually has to take her to the hospital and her mom specifically asks him to leave town so that she can get clean i know you're broken but please don't break my daughter and that really hit there was a lot of emotional resonance there that i really liked but then he didn't do anything with it her parents never reappear he does leave because he loves her but she just tracks him right back down again says that she wants to be with him and even if he leaves her she's still gonna do drugs because she wants to so it's right back to business as usual all right i want everybody to give their money to this man here one of the robberies ends up going terribly wrong and somebody gets shot but he still keeps doing it but something changes with this final robbery and we're back full circle with the teller from the beginning cause after he gets the money he asks her to press the alarm he still gets out and hands the money off to black so his debts are paid off and he shoots up in the street and waits to get arrested in the book it just ends with him shooting up again as if this is going to be some never-ending cycle though as he's taking this last hit it's worded that the vein can't run forever before the needle catches it so i'm wondering if that's kind of like some indication of like he can't run forever before he'll get caught but the change to the movie is probably to make him more redeeming in the end as he comes forward maybe in that last moment he was trying to od but he did let himself get caught epilogue 2007-2021 and this is where we completely depart from the book and see him in jail again this epilogue isn't in the book at all but it shows him attending addiction meetings and he goes for so long that he starts being the one hosting them but everything here is a drive-by though there's no time to do anything particularly deep even though this accounts for 14 years of time it's worthy they wanted the military so hard but then don't give the prison system the same treatment and then he's granted parole for good behavior and emily's there waiting for him in the parking lot still looking like she's 14 and he's looking particularly frog mouthed tom holland looks like he has a frog in his mouth when he's taking paparazzi pictures but then weeks go by and i'd look at myself in the mirror and be like maybe i do look like i have a [ __ ] and by the end i just don't fully know how to feel about this movie now i get that they wanted a nice clean audience pleaser ending but these people aren't healthy together they enable one another in the worst ways the movie stresses that it does have a lot of really nice aspects i do like the way the russos visually told the story with no walker's own narration they called his names like get up and i genuinely enjoyed the military stuff way more than i thought i would when i went into this because of how brutally honest he is in his opinions but so much of this turns into such a mess especially when it starts descending into the addiction stuff and where i might usually have ideas on how someone could condense aspects of a story or fix things up a little bit i'm kind of at a loss for what i would do here but it just feels like a very disjointed movie where a lot of the shortcomings are being covered up with some flashy storytelling some really fun one-liners but the issues still manage to come through i will say though that like in the book it doesn't try to romanticize the things that these characters are doing it does make him a way more redeemable protagonist compared to the book but it's not trying to shy away from the actions that are committed and it does really just show the depths that people can be changed based on their experiences so i do think a lot of people are really going to enjoy this and there was enough to grab onto that i didn't hate watching this a second time just as i've said multiple times over it does get less enjoyable in that like last hour but hey if you have apple tv you know why not why not toss it on but let me know what you guys think of cherry did you love it did you hate it did you kind of fall somewhere in between like me what do you think they could have done differently to make it a little bit better do you agree with me that it could have been a bitchin mini series if they'd had time to draw some of this stuff out let me know down below so that is going to do it for today's video thank you all so much for watching thanks as always to my patreon supporters subscribe to the channel if you're new leave a like on the video if you're into that kind of thing hope you're all having a fantastic day i'm mostly okay and we'll catch you all later you

Channel: Amanda the Jedi

Views: 160,066

Rating: 4.9665589 out of 5

Keywords: cherry, cherry movie, cherry explained, cherry movie explained, cherry movie review, the russo brothers, tom holland, appletv, ciara bravo, nico walker, based on a true story, cherry book, post endgame, reacting to cherry, amanda the jedi, tom holland cherry, worst movies 2021, cherry is a mess, bank robbery movie, war movie, cherry tom holland, movie review, cherry ending explained, cherry book vs movie, cherry movie tumblr, wake me up when september ends, cherk

Id: wSx3tTIb9aQ

Length: 20min 57sec (1257 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 14 2021