\n<\/p>\n
\n\tBefore Charlie Sheen makes his first appearance in Netflix\u2019s new two-part, three-hour docuseries aka Charlie Sheen<\/em>, Two and a Half Men <\/em>star Jon Cryer pours more than a few grains of salt upon the entire endeavor.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cI had some trepidation about participating in this, partially because part of the cycle of Charlie Sheen\u2019s life has been that he messes up terribly, he hits rock bottom and then he gets things going again \u2014 he brings a lot of positivity into his life and that\u2019s when he burns himself out again. He just can\u2019t help but set that house on fire,\u201d Cryer observes.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\taka Charlie Sheen\t\t<\/p>\n<\/h3>\n \n\t\t\t\t\tThe Bottom Line<\/span> \tAlternately candid and performative. \t\t\t\t\t\t\tAirdate: <\/strong>Wednesday, September 10 (Netflix) \n\tCryer, who is easily the most clear-eyed participant in the star-studded project, raises a point that\u2019s impossible to shake for the duration: Is aka Charlie Sheen<\/em> a manifestation of Sheen\u2019s recovery or the latest phase of his addiction? Put a different way, is director Andrew Renzi doing something that\u2019s contributing to Sheen\u2019s health or enabling his sickness? Does it matter?<\/p>\n \n\tThere isn\u2019t going to be an obvious or immediate answer, and the truth is that many people won\u2019t care either way, which raises a few more variations on those two questions: What does it mean to be \u201centertained\u201d by Charlie Sheen\u2019s journey at this point? If you \u201cenjoy\u201d aka Charlie Sheen<\/em>, does that make you appreciably different from the ghoulish people who spent several months saying \u201cWinning!\u201d and making \u201cTiger blood!\u201d jokes during Sheen\u2019s last extended public meltdown? Is this a trainwreck masquerading as an instruction manual for maintenance of a particularly dangerous train? More concerningly, does Renzi know which is which? Even more concerningly, does it matter?<\/p>\n \n\tI found myself pondering these questions and feeling unsettled by how genuinely unsettled the documentary was making me. Like the sweep of Sheen\u2019s life in micro, aka Charlie Sheen<\/em> goes from fascinating to numbing, numbing to fascinating, sensational to desensitizing, and not always pleasantly.<\/p>\n \n\tIt isn\u2019t the least bit surprising that the Charlie Sheen who introduces himself to us in aka Charlie Sheen<\/em> is a wry, honest raconteur of the highest level, because we\u2019ve seen that version of Sheen several times over the five decades of his fame.<\/p>\n \n\tSitting at a booth at what could be either a diner or a diner set \u2014 it\u2019s actually Chips in Hawthorne, but it\u2019s shot in a way that makes it not always feel real, adding to the doc\u2019s artificiality\/authenticity puzzle \u2014 Sheen talks Renzi through those decades of stardom and notoriety.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tWith the frequently audible director alternating between frat boy giddiness and genuine concern at Sheen\u2019s antics, the actor appears entirely in control, a product of seven years of professed sobriety. Unlike on his \u201cWinning!\u201d media tour, this Sheen is introspective and regretful in the moments he isn\u2019t burnishing the legend of his various appetites, almost to the point that nothing feels spontaneous, putting the \u201ccanned\u201d in \u201ccandor.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tHe runs through the escalation of his drug usage, usually overlapping with aspects of his sex addiction, and although he isn\u2019t as proud at the moment of this filming, he\u2019s usually responding to previous interviews and confessions in which braggadocio was a defining characteristic. So what he\u2019s selling here is contrast; he can still show how much he\u2019s grown by being matter-of-fact about his crack consumption or the amount of money he spent on sex workers. In a documentary named after the contention that Charlie Sheen has always been a role Carlos Estevez inhabited, it doesn\u2019t fully matter that this feels like a variation on that role \u2014 a melancholic Hamlet, rather than a manic Hamlet \u2014 instead of a full removal of a guise.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tAll that matters and all that\u2019s likely to matter to most viewers is that he announces at the beginning that nothing is off-limits, and when you reach the end, that\u2019s the way it feels, even if it isn\u2019t quite true. Renzi makes a big show of asking the full crew to leave the interview space for several questions of a particularly personal nature. It comes off, though, like Renzi is doing that for the audience\u2019s benefit, since Sheen doesn\u2019t suddenly become more comfortable in the allegedly more intimate setting.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tThe \u201cprivate\u201d portion of the interview includes Sheen hastily shutting down one unpleasant recent accusation \u2014 and then dancing obliquely around what I assume journalistic aggregators will trumpet as the documentary\u2019s biggest sexual revelation, rather than wondering why this is the one thing he wants to dance around. Renzi seems so pleased that Sheen is discussing this stuff at all that several seemingly necessary follow-up questions are never posed.<\/p>\n \n\tThe documentary is built around the chat with Sheen \u2014 which gives the impression of stretching across many days, based on lighting choices \u2014 but Renzi has assembled an impressive assortment of key figures from Sheen\u2019s lives. The biggest absences are father Martin Sheen and brother Emilio Estevez, so front and center in previous pieces of the Sheen saga. Charlie is quite gracious about wishing they would have spoken for the doc and understanding why they did not. Brother Ramon is guarded in a way that suggests he\u2019s present in a representative capacity and not to give juicy quotes.<\/p>\n \n\tThere is no such hesitation from ex-wives Denise Richards and Brooke Mueller, both self-aware about their participation \u2014 Richards says her goal is to keep this from being a \u201cfluffy, glossed-over, sugar-coated piece of shit\u201d \u2014 but offering poignant and sometimes unsettling details. Lifelong friends like Sean Penn and Tony Todd are there to be supportive. Heidi Fleiss is there, surrounded by parrots, to be less-than-supportive, since she justifiably still feels betrayed by the man she calls \u201ca crybaby pussy bitch.\u201d Cryer and Chuck Lorre are there to be magnanimous.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tIn lieu of extended re-enactments, Renzi and his editing team emulate the technique that worked so well on Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie<\/em>, cobbling clips from Sheen\u2019s scripted, film and TV work to recreate biographical details and, in the process, illustrate how autobiographical many of Sheen\u2019s choices were. The approach is complemented by heavy use of the Estevez brothers\u2019 childhood Super 8 movies, genre-bending DIY productions that Charlie notes often bore similarities to the movies their father was making at the time.<\/p>\n \n\tIt\u2019s in talking about his youth and reflecting on the influence of his father that Sheen\u00a0is most relaxed and open, or maybe that\u2019s where Renzi is just most interested. Sheen has great stories about the earliest stages of his career \u2014 like having to turn down the lead in Karate Kid<\/em> or a hilarious sequence dedicated a televised showdown between Charlie & Martin and Michael Jordan \u2014 but then the stories become more drug-and-sex driven and thus more repetitive and exhausting. <\/p>\n \n\tCounterintuitively, I think that if Renzi had let Sheen talk for 30 minutes more about his professional life \u2014 yes, I\u2019m asking for quality Eight Men Out<\/em> stories, darn it \u2014 the documentary would have felt shorter (or faster-moving) because it would have seemed less monomaniacal. So much of Sheen\u2019s narrative focuses on how he kept getting new opportunities even after he hit new levels of rock bottom, but it isn\u2019t always clear why he kept getting those opportunities.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tPut a different way, Charlie Sheen has often lost the thread of what a talented actor Charlie Sheen once was and aka Charlie Shee<\/em>n loses track of that reality as well, to the documentary\u2019s detriment as a rounded portrait. Is Sheen an iconic actor who was a drug addict or an iconic drug addict who started off as an actor? It feels, especially in its second half, like aka Charlie Sheen<\/em> is fixated on the latter, to the point where I went from captivated to exhausted. The doc isn\u2019t exploitative, but its merit or lack thereof may be more evident in five or 10 years \u2014 as we see where it fits into the arc of Sheen\u2019s life \u2014 than it was after three hours of watching.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Before Charlie Sheen makes his first appearance in Netflix\u2019s new two-part, three-hour docuseries aka Charlie Sheen, Two and a Half Men star Jon Cryer pours more than a few grains of salt upon the entire endeavor. \u201cI had some trepidation about participating in this, partially because part of the cycle of Charlie Sheen\u2019s life has<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":20259,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[10403,5712,274,12468],"class_list":{"0":"post-20258","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-compelling","9":"tag-doc","10":"tag-netflix","11":"tag-tiring"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20258","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20258"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20258\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/20259"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20258"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20258"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20258"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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\n\t<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
Director:<\/strong> Andrew Renzi
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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/span>\n\t\t<\/p>\n