Mondo Cinema

Avoid this movie at all costs: Charlie Sheen bombs in a horrific clunker — see these flicks instead

Whatever promise Roman Coppola might have displayed as a director a few years back with CQ goes egregiously unfulfilled, if not utterly betrayed, with A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III (at Sundance Cinemas downtown), a tediously in-jokey and interminably self-indulgent disaster that brings out the worst in everyone involved.

To be sure, it’s not like Coppola — son of Francis, brother of Sofia — raised astronomical expectations with CQ, a modestly clever 2002 dramedy about a self-absorbed, super-serious American film editor who’s tossed into the mad, mod ‘60s world of cheesy-breezy European co-productions. But at least that film had a sense of playfulness about it, along with strong eye for defining period detail.

In sharp contrast, Charles Swan is a strained and painfully unamusing bore, with Charlie Sheen typecast in the lead role of an undisciplined jerk and chronic womanizer whose surreal fantasies are meant to be funny and fascinating. Throughout this catastrophe, Coppola repeatedly strikes dim echoes of 1970s stream-of-conscious comedy-dramas — especially All That Jazz and Who is Harry Kellerman and Why is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me? — that obviously inspired him.

By doing so, however, he only manages to underscore how inferior his film is to those he has ransacked.

Charles Swan is a strained and unamusing bore, with Charlie Sheen typecast in the lead role of an undisciplined jerk.

Sheen plays Charles Swan III, a celebrated graphic designer who has a personal and professional meltdown after his stunningly beautiful (and conspicuously younger) live-in girlfriend leaves him. Her decision to split — which, based on everything we see, seems an entirely reasonable response to unconscionably caddish behavior — encourages the self-pitying Swan to indulge in various fantasies, most of which place him, his snarky best buddy (Jason Schwartzman) and his anxious business manager (Bill Murray) in conflict with gorgeous but emasculating women.

There is one truly funny moment, when Murray fleetingly riffs on John Wayne while he and his cowboy-clad buddies are attacked by beautiful babes dressed (barely) in Native American attire. But the moment passes, and the movie slogs onward.

The running gag of Sheen’s playing a character not unlike his off-screen self (or at least the persona we’ve come to know through tabloid press accounts) gets stale after, oh, I dunno, the first five or six minutes. Sporadically, Sheen appears to be incorporating into his performance certain characteristics of other notorious naughty boys — including producer Robert Evans (note the tinted glasses) and Playboy founder Hugh Hefner.

But, really, those are the things you start to notice only when you’re casting your gaze about the screen to find something, anything, that will sustain your waning interest.

Ironically, Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III is opening in H-Town the same weekend that Roman Coppola will learn whether he’ll receive a much-deserved Oscar for co-writing (with director Wes Anderson) Moonrise Kingdom. Don’t be surprised if, this time next year, he’ll be a Razzie nominee for this flick.

BOLLYWOOD MADNESS

This weekend, there are no fewer than five — count ‘em, five! — Bollywood imports on view at AMC Studio 30. The lineup of new and continuing features includes:

ABCD (Anybody Can Dance): Director-choreographer Remo D’Souza’s spirited comedy-drama about ambitious competitors on a top-rated dance show is said to be India’s “first 3D dance film.” Sounds right to me.

Kai Po Che: Abhishek Kapoor’s fact-based drama about three friends divided by political and religious conflicts deals with unusually serious (by Bollywood standards) subject matter: The 2002 riots in Gujarat State in which Hindu mobs killed nearly 1,000 people, most of them Muslims.

Murder 3: You will not be at all surprised to learn that this is a sequel to a movie titled Murder 2. It’s a mystery involving a successful wildlife and fashion photographer whose new girlfriend starts to wonder whatever happened to the guy’s former lover.

Special 26: A true-crime drama (with songs) based on a notorious 1987 jewelry heist in Mumbai, featuring Indian superstar Akshay Kumar as a charismatic criminal mastermind.

Zila Ghaziabad: Another Bollywood drama (with songs) based on real-life criminal activities, this one focusing on a violent gang war in 1990s Ghaziabad.

OTHER SCREENS, OTHER CINEMA

Moving from Bollywood to Nollywood, we have Doctor Bello (also at the AMC Studio 30), a Nigerian-produced drama with some familiar American faces (including Isaiah Washington and Vivica A. Fox), about a New York-based cancer specialist who tries to save a patient with the help of an uncertified Nigerian doctor living in Brooklyn.

At 14 Pews, Tatsumi, Eric Khoo’s imaginative biopic about Japanese comics artist Yoshihiro Tatsumi, returns Saturday and Sunday after its H-Town premiere at the 2012 Houston Cinema Arts Festival.

And the Mountainfilm on Tour Festival — a series of documentary films dedicated to raising ecological and cultural awareness — continues at the Asia Society Texas Center.

COMING ATTRACTIONS

Two leading Oscar nominees in the Best Documentary category — Malik Bendjelloul’s Searching for Sugarman (at 7 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday) and Kirby Dick’s The Invisible War (at 7 p.m. March 1, 4 p.m. March 3) — have been booked for return engagements at 14 Pews. But wait, there’s more: Free Saint Arnold’s Beer will served at the Searching for Sugarman screenings.

A scene from A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III at Sundance Cinemas with Jason Schwartzman, Bill Murray and Charlie Sheen

A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III at Sundance Cinemas, Jason Schwartzman, Bill Murray, Charlie Sheen.jpg

A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III Facebook

A scene from A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III at Sundance Cinemas with Jason Schwartzman, Bill Murray and Charlie Sheen

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Movie Review

Cheesiness undermines Whalefall's intense survival story

Photo courtesy of 20th Century Studios

Austin Abrams in Whalefall.

Austin Abrams has been a professional actor for 15 years, but the 30-year-old seems to just now be getting his due. After years of mostly supporting roles in films like Paper Towns, Brad’s Status, and Weapons, he has been charged with leading two films in 2026 where he’s largely acting by himself: First Resident Evil and now Whalefall.

Abrams plays Jay Gardiner, who has returned home to California a year after the death of his hard-ass father, Mitt (Josh Brolin). The two had a tempestuous relationship, and while his mom (Elisabeth Shue) and sisters (Jane Levy and Emily Rudd) reminisce fondly about him, Jay finds it difficult to come up with good memories. The two did share a connection with the ocean, and Jay decides to honor him by going scuba diving.

Ignoring warnings of whale activity in the area, Jay makes his way out into a notoriously dangerous part of the ocean near their home. Soon after he starts swimming, he encounters a sperm whale chasing after a giant squid. Jay inadvertently gets sucked into the enormous creature’s mouth and, ultimately, inside its body. Faced with a seemingly inescapable situation, Jay’s only hope lies in the lessons his father taught him.

Directed by Brian Duffield and adapted by Duffield and Daniel Kraus from Kraus’ book of the same name, the film is at its best when it depicts Jay struggling to survive within the whale. The claustrophobic nature of the setting and the various obstacles (multiple contracting chambers, the squid, and more) he faces make every scene inside the whale feel as intense and cover-your-eyes scary as any great horror movie.

Naturally, the entire movie can’t be about his survival efforts, and so the filmmakers toggle back and forth between Jay’s ordeal in the whale to memories of times with his father. Not so coincidentally, these remembrances come with subtle or overt wisdom from Mitt that would serve Jay well in his current situation. More often than not, these flashback scenes are so on-the-nose that they come off as cheesy instead of inspirational.

It’s also difficult to derive any big emotions from the story other than revulsion at the way Jay’s body is brutalized while he’s inside the whale. None of the characters in the film receive a notable introduction to the audience before big events start happening. It’s next-to-impossible to be invested in their stories when their personalities are being revealed in bits and pieces throughout the movie.

Abrams does well enough in bringing out the terror Jay feels in the whale and the sullenness/anger he has toward his father in other scenes. But whether it’s because his lines in the whale are hard to understand (he’s often talking around a scuba mouthpiece) or the disconnect the character has with father, there’s just something missing in his performance. Brolin’s performance is one-note, and Shue, Levy, Rudd, and John Ortiz don’t appear enough to make a big impact.

With Kraus onboard as the co-writer of the film, it may be the case that Duffield was not given leeway to change the story of Whalefall too much. What might have worked in the book doesn’t seem to translate equally to the film, and while Jay’s nightmare in the whale is effective, the rest of his story doesn’t come across as successfully.

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Whalefall is now playing in theaters.

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