BEFORE: This time, Mary Elizabeth Winstead carries over from "The Spectacular Now", to cap off my three-day holiday weekend on Netflix. I don't have anything appropriate for President's Day, I don't see how that would be possible while I'm square in the middle of the month-long (plus a week or so) romance chain. So I'm just going to carry on, from a film about a hard-partying teen male with a girlfriend who broke up with him to a film about a hard-partying adult male with a girlfriend who broke up with him.
I'm realizing now that there's something about the way that Netflix promotes its films - they're using an image of lovable Bill Murray to publicize this film, and so for weeks I've been looking forward to a Bill Murray film - only now I find out that he's just a bit player and not the star of the film. The central character is played by Charlie Sheen, so now I'm less enthused about it. I heard that they've been using misleading art to pitch films to different demographics, and now I've fallen right into their trap. Who wants to see a film about nasty, wild Charlie Sheen? But sad, approachable Bill Murray, sure, I'd watch that. Oh, well, I can't change the chain now, I've got to soldier on.
Tomorrow, February 19, on TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" line-up, it's all about "Family Ties". Well, during the daytime, anyway, in the evening there's the head-to-head match-up for "Favorite Best Actor Win: Spencer Tracy" and then during late night it's "Creepiest Voyeurism":
4:00 am "I Remember Mama" (1948)
6:30 am "Edward, My Son" (1948)
8:45 am "You Can't Take It With You" (1938)
11:00 am "The Little Foxes" (1941)
1:00 pm "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?" (1962)
3:30 pm "Life With Father" (1947)
5:45 pm "A River Runs Through It" (1992)
8:00 pm "Captains Courageous" (1937)
10:15 pm "Boys Town" (1938)
12:00 am "Blow-Up" (1966)
2:00 am "Three Colors: Red" (1994)
I think I can only claim three here, out of a possible 11. I've definitely seen "You Can't Take It With You", "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?" and "A River Runs Through It". I'm not sure about "Life With Father", I always mix that one up with "Father of the Bride" (to be fair, Elizabeth Taylor is in both of them...) and I've seen "Blow Out" but not "Blow-Up". Another 3 out of 11 brings me to 87 out of 216, or 40.2%
THE PLOT: A graphic designer's enviable life slides into despair when his girlfriend breaks up with him.
AFTER: Well, in addition to themes carrying over from last night's film (both films had a lead male character who likes to party and has just been through a break-up) there are echoes here of other films watched earlier this month, like "Ghosts of Girlfriends Past" (both have prominent artist/photographer male leads, who've been through a parade of beautiful women) or "The Singing Detective" (male character has prominent fantasies that invade his reality).
Beyond that, it's hard to find some solid ground to pin a story on, since everything's sort of lost in a haze of confusion - if anything, this sort of resembles "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" in tone, and that's a film I've watched maybe 5 or 6 times, since I'm such a Terry Gilliam fan, and I feel like I'm no closer to fully understanding that one than I was before I saw it. Both that film and this one are movies where a lot of STUFF happens, but it's hard to see how any of it relates to any other part of it, or to get the whole thing to add up to anything. Still, stuff continues to happen, and really goes nowhere in the end - that's a real problem, sometimes when a filmmaker doesn't seem to have a fixed destination in mind, and so the film doesn't so much end but just merely STOPS at some point.
This is what I can tell for sure: Charlie Sheen plays Charlie Swan III, so right there I'm wondering how autobiographical this was supposed to be. I just found out that this film is set during the 1970's, and I didn't pick up on that fact at all. I guess I was supposed to figure that out from the terrible fashions and the cheezy-looking graphic art that Swan is responsible for, or maybe from his attitude towards women, where he sees them all as disposable sexual playthings, for the most part. Since Sheen himself had that attitude up until just a few years ago, that turned out to not be much help in pinning down the decade here.
Back in the 1970's, there was no such thing as "toxic masculinity", the most macho people like Burt Reynolds and Joe Namath probably always had swinging good times, enjoying the sexual revolution to the fullest extent, and that's coincidentally the decade of the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders, the acme of Playboy's popularity, and also the explosion of the X-rated film industry. See where I'm going with this? Charlie Sheen would have fit right in back then. But to celebrate all that stuff now seems very questionable.
Because it couldn't POSSIBLY be that a woman had a right to break up with a man because he had a drawer full of naked Polaroids of his ex-girlfriends, right? No, clearly there was something wrong with HER, only Charles Swan can't quite understand what that might be. It would be great if he could take that experience of her feeling unloved and, I don't know, maybe LEARN from it, maybe treat her (or the next woman, whichever) with a little more respect? Nah, that's crazy talk.
Where did the inspiration for this come from? One of the first names in the credits (after the director and main actors) is Charles WHITE III, who turns out to be a legendary graphic artist from the 1970's, famous for his airbrushing technique, and he worked on many album covers, in addition to the animated film "Heavy Metal". How much of this character here is based on that guy, and how much of it is based on Charlie Sheen's wild dating antics? It's kind of tough to say. Since the film also prominently features songs from just one musician, it almost feels like this film was designed to showcase that, assuming that this musician is a friend of the director, Roman Coppola. My theory is that the director here was trying to do all three things at once, showcase the fictionalized Charles White, the antics of sheen and the music of Liam Hayes, and therefore there's no one single direction for the film to take, and it ended up a jumbled, unfocused mess.
Also starring Charlie Sheen (last seen in "The Three Musketeers"), Jason Schwartzman (last seen in "The Polka King"), Bill Murray (last heard in "Isle of Dogs"), Katheryn Winnick (last seen in "The Art of the Steal"), Patricia Arquette (last seen in "Holes"), Aubrey Plaza (last seen in "Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates"), Dermot Mulroney (last seen in "The Grey"), Tyne Stecklein (last seen in "Michael Jackson's This Is It"), Lindsey McLevis, Lexy Hulme, Fabianne Therese, Bar Paly, Margarita Kallas, Maxine Bahns, Richard Edson, Alim Kouliev, Liam Hayes, Gloria Laino, Mary-Pat Green (last seen in "Fantastic Four"), with cameos from Colleen Camp (last seen in "Factory Girl"), Stephen Dorff (last seen in "Cecil B. Demented") and the voice of Marc Coppola.
RATING: 3 out of 10 Native American women in bikinis
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