Last night I attended the L.A. premiere of Roman Coppola‘s A Glimpse Inside The Mind of Charles Swan III (A24, limited on 2.8, VOD everywhere). I wish I could say it’s more than a mild little me-and-my-jaded-fantasies riff, but it really isn’t. I’d like to say it’s a half-decent tribute to the lore of Federico Fellini‘s 8 1/2, but I’m afraid of what Fellini’s ghost might do to me. I’d like to…I don’t know what I’d like. I don’t know anything. I’m lost.

Swan is an episodic diddly-doodle and a cherry-chocolate dingleberry, and I really don’t understand why Coppola made it to begin with. He has a lot of industry pallies and he definitely knows how to shoot and design but…why?

Design is clearly where Coppola’s passion lies. At times Swan is a slick-looking dessert film in a sort of retro glossy-Hollywood way. The bulk of it is jizz-whiz, but let’s at least acknowledge that the extended crane shot used for the finale — a fourth-wall breaker on the beach — is very smoothly composed. I honestly said to myself, “Hey, that wasn’t half bad…if only the rest of the film had the same pizazz.”

On the other hand Coppola has gone on record as saying he loves gold-toe socks, and that should tell you that something in the mechanism isn’t quite right.

Paul Mazursky‘s Alex in Wonderland (’70) was also inspired by 8 1/2. It was regarded as a failure when it opened, but Mazursky’s film is a stone masterpiece compared to A Gimpse Inside The Mind of Charles Swan III.

Swan gives you a feeling that Coppola and his friends probably had fun making it. But it’s basically a stiff and a wank, and all Coppola has accomplished in slapping it together is to inform the industry that he’s a gifted production designer who lacks the discipline and the drive to make a film (in either a narrative or impressionistic vein) that adds up to anything solid, and that he isn’t good enough to make another 8 and 1/2 so….why?

Set in either mid ’70s Los Angeles or a dream-realm version of same, Swan is about a smug, financially flush, poon-obsessed party hound (Charlie Sheen) who’s a successful designer and…you’re bored already, right? I wanted to duck this libertine smoothie from the get-go, and I didn’t give two shits about his being morose about having lost his girlfriend (Kathryn Winnick). If Sheen had been shot or stabbed to death halfway through I wouldn’t have blinked. In fact, I’m almost sorry this didn’t happen because if it had Swan would at least be a meditation about death and the after-realm.

I don’t want to open up a can of death beans, but Sheen playing a character based on his own private madness of sex-and-drugs-and-indulgence is ludicrous. I didn’t care for his alter-ego at all, and I don’t think Coppola does either.

The movie is about Swan wandering around inside his head, indulging in this and that memory or fantasy and sniffing some blah-dee-blah asswind.

“If you’ve ever been through a bad break-up, all you want to do is think about it and process,” Coppola has said about the film. “That’s kind of what the project is. A character study of a guy in this state of mind with Charlie as a very dynamic and imaginative character, so there’s a lot of fantasy sequences and crazy shit.”

The costars include Jason Schwartzman, Bill Murray, Patricia Arquette, Aubrey Plaza, Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Colleen Camp. They’ve all taken themselves down a notch or two.

I thought it was odd that Sheen didn’t even show up for his own premiere last night. He lives here, right?

As long as we’re talking about wank movies that are basically about drinking and sex and heartbreak, I would love to see a dark comedic farce about the day-to-day management of a New York singles bar called Dingleberry’s.