Alphabetical Movie – Hot Shots!

With the benefit of hindsight, I can’t help but watch Hot Shots! and wonder when Charlie Sheen began his inevitable slide into Charlie Sheenness.

Here you have a kid who folks thought should have been nonminated for a freakin’ Oscar for Platoon and he turned into the best punchline for celebrity gone horribly awry since Lindsay Lohan.  Even while Robert Downey, Jr. gets to celebrate a career pulled from the ashes of his own addiction, Sheen seems committed to find new ways to embarass himself.

No, he hasn’t done anything lately.  But does he need to?  He’s a punchline.  Pretty soon he’s going to end up being the sort of actor who does cameos in movies like Hot Shots! so the audience can laugh and say “that Charlie Sheen cameo was hilarious!”

Someday, perhaps, he will find himself enjoying a renaissance of roles in his old age.  He’ll get the David Carradine Kill Bill role right before he, too, perishes due to auto erotic asphyxiation. We all know that is the way he’s going to go, right?

I suppose he could go a different and far more sinsiter direction.  Perhaps Kirk Cameron will convert him to evangelical Christiantity.  He’d still babble incoherently but suddenly a lot more people would take him seriously, which is creepy.

Right now, though, we look back at stuff like Hot Shots! and, of course, the classic sequel Hot Shots, Part Deux and we have to ask – was this the pinnacle of his career?  Will he never be better than that?

All you fans of “2 1/2 Men” shut up.  There is nothing about a standard (if popular) network sitcom that will qualify as the “pinnacle” of anyone’s career.  Least of all Sheen’s.  John Cryer, maybe.

The guy isn’t going to run out of money.  He was getting paid something like one million dollars per episode or some similarly insane number.  He’ll have to work his way through an awful lot of hookers and blow to spend that money.

I could be underestimating him.  Maybe he can work his way through that much blow without dying.  The dude does have tiger blood.  I haven’t seen a lot of research on the effect of cocaine on tigers.

Maybe someone should do the research on Sheen.  They wouldn’t even have to pay for the cocaine.  He probably has enough.

Sheen is one of those individuals who should exist more as a lesson than anything else.  He’s a good actor, he was very successful, he has a lot of money and it is pretty obvious that none of it makes him happy.  The next time we think that if we just had a little more of something that we lack, we should look at him and remember that he has a lot more of everything and he’s miserable.

Because you have to be that miserable to fall that far.  You can only do the kinds of things Sheen does to himself if you really loathe yourself.  I don’t feel sorry for Sheen but I use him as a great example for why I shouldn’t feel sorry for myself.