Charlie Sheen

(In French, On TV, March 2019) The 1980s were about as bad as things got when it comes to exporting violent American imperialism through the magic of Hollywood movies (not-so-coincidentally climaxing with the TV-friendly Gulf War of 1991), and if the release of Navy Seals missed the end of the Reagan administration by two years, it started production years before, with a script from a retired Navy SEAL, pre-production stopped by director Richard Marchand’s death and several script rewrites slowed down by the 1998 WGA Writer’s Strike. None of those delays mattered much considering that the Middle East was still a hotspot during the Bush I administration, and so was the projection of American power in the area. The plot, as conventional as it is, has Navy SEALS tracking down errant Stinger missiles and getting into all sorts of shenanigans. As you’d expect from a Hollywood film, the Navy SEALs protagonists are presented in a very mainstream-friendly way: They fight for America, and they’re bad boys! They don’t play by the rules! They do dangerous things for fun! TO THE EXTREME! As befit a muscular military action film of the 1980s, it does very much feel like an attempt at a recruitment film, albeit not quite as slick or successful as Top Gun. There is some ironic value in seeing Charlie Sheen here in full bad-boy soldier mode, not only considering his troubled personal history later, but specifically his role as the lead of the Hot Shots! military spoofs starting the following year. Still, once you put away issues of geopolitical power projection and ironic casting, there isn’t much here to report—Navy Seals is about as basic as military action films were during that period.

(On Cable TV, June 2014) Charlie Sheen and self-indulgence go really well together, but there’s a difference between showing it in tabloid headlines and seeing it in a full-length feature film. Billed as a comedy, A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III stars Sheen as a circa-1970s graphic designer dealing with the abrupt departure of his latest girlfriend. Delusions, flights of fancy, anxiety attacks, crippling doubt all follow, inevitably leading to wacky despair-fueled hijinks and acceptance of sorts. It’s as good as any excuse to prop the Charlie Sheen persona as a romantic lead, and for writer/director Roman Copolla to do whatever he wants with the tools of cinema. (It all culminates, somewhat amusingly, into an intensely self-reflective final shot in which the actors name their characters and the artifices of filming are revealed all the way to a mirror shot of the director and camera operator.) As a light-hearted romp playing with cherished visuals, competent actors in small roles (including Bill Murray, Aubrey Plaza, Jason Schwartzman and Patricia Arquette), A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III isn’t without occasional interest. It does not, however, coalesce into something more meaningful that scattered vignettes and Sheen playing some idealized version of himself. (Or, rather, some idealized version of what other people should be thinking about himself.) I’ll admit that it’s easy to transfer any feelings about Sheen-the-persona onto Swan-the-character, but then again the film makes it easy to do so. I don’t happen to particularly like the Sheen persona (although, like many others, I find it unexplainably compelling), and that may explain a decidedly tepid reaction to the film despite by usual fondness for meta-cinematographic tricks and showy set-pieces. At best, it’s a surreal, strange and kind-of-wonderful film. But for anyone even remotely aware of Sheen’s antics over the past few years, it definitely takes a special state of mind to go past the misogyny, self-adulation and conscious myth-making at play here.