Other things I love: brutal honesty.
This kid doesn't seem to beat around the bush much when it comes to talking about his work. Actually - mild side-trip for a second...I just got completely derailed trying to research the origin of that "beating around the bush" idiom. Apparently it has some hunting origins. As best I could find:
"The likely origin of the phrase, beat around the bush, is derived from early hunting techniques in which unarmed men would walk around the forest beating tree branches and making noise, so as to flush the game from the bush. This allowed the hunters to avoid directly approaching the animals. This technique was most often used in boar and bird hunting. In boar hunting, this was done as a safety measure due to the razor sharp tusks and the likelihood of a boar charging a hunter. In bird hunting this was to scare the birds from their cover so that hunters could take them easily."So there you have it.
But, back to LeBeouf.
He's at Cannes this week, and chatted pretty candidly with the LA Times about both Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
Both turkeys.
Both huge cash cows.
Both disappointing to -- apparently -- both audiences and Shia alike.
Excerpt from the LA Times article reads like this:
It's official: Shia LaBeouf has no filter. While hardly no one can blame the 'Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps' actor for recently saying he "wasn't impressed" with the Michael Bay-helmed 'Transformers 2,' his latest comments about another film and its much-more-famous director may actually catch some heat. Interviewed at the Cannes Film Festival, LaBeouf came right out and said he was saddened by 2008's 'Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,' saying he and everyone involved -- including director Steven Spielberg -- "dropped the ball" on the blockbuster sequel.
"I feel like I dropped the ball on the legacy that people loved and cherished," LaBeouf told the LA Times, apologetically. "If I was going to do it twice, my career was over."He's totally right.
Oh, and LaBeouf wasn't the only principle actor bummed out by the movie.
"We [Harrison Ford and LaBeouf] had major discussions. He wasn't happy with it either. Look, the movie could have been updated. There was a reason it wasn't universally accepted."
While the film may have been a financial success, earning nearly $800 million worldwide, LaBeouf believes Spielberg needs to hear it from a friend that 'Skull' was a mess. He urges the director to not let one bad movie get to him.
"I'll probably get a call [from Spielberg]," LaBeouf rightly predicts. "But he needs to hear this. I love him. I love Steven. I have a relationship with Steven that supersedes our business work. And believe me, I talk to him often enough to know that I'm not out of line. And I would never disrespect the man. I think he's a genius, and he's given me my whole life. He's done so much great work that there's no need for him to feel vulnerable about one film. But when you drop the ball you drop the ball."
LaBeouf fully admits he wasn't very convincing as a leather jacket-wearing action hero, saying he just wasn't up to the task.
"You get to monkey-swinging and things like that and you can blame it on the writer and you can blame it on Steven [Spielberg]. But the actor's job is to make it come alive and make it work, and I couldn't do it. So that's my fault. Simple."
LaBeouf begins filming the third 'Transformers' movie on Tuesday, but last week he said he "wasn't really impressed with 'Transformers 2'" and that despite having "some really wild stunts," the flick's "heart was gone."
On Michael Bay, who directed 'Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen' and will also helm the third film: "Mike went so big that it became too big, and I think you lost the anchor of the movie."
Loved that he specifically touched on the swinging through the trees with monkeys bit. Because that (along with the "surviving a nuclear blast in a fridge" bit along with the "going over waterfalls in a jeep" bit, along with the "aliens making Cate Blanchett explode with knowledge" bit along with the "wedding at the end bit" along with the entire "Presence of Karen Allen" bit) was a definite low point in a movie full of low points. But I liked that he took the high road and admitted he wasn't "action hero" enough to carry it off believably. Not that it had anything to do with him, it had more to do with the presence of a completely computer-generated jungle and awful computer-generated monkeys. That's a no-win situation, right there. To me, that says this kid "gets it." They made a bad movie. He probably had FUN making the bad movie - all of them probably did....but at the end of the day, it wasn't worth the franchise coattails it road into summer blockbuster status.
So, too, with Transformers.
The first one was a great, guilty pleasure. A few laughs, some good action sequences, Megan Fox in a little denim skirt bent over under the hood of a car. All good things. The horrible shortcomings of the sequel made a little more sense when I realized the second installment was a casualty of the writers strike and that the script was patched together at the last minute by a handful of different people - that actually excused quite a bit. But what the first movie did right, the sequal drove into the ground without any finesse ("quirky parent characters" anyone?). Audiences recognized that. Shia isn't saying anything the rest of us hadn't thought through already.
So, I'd take issue with that opening line about the kid having no filter. I think he filters just fine. He didn't sabotage the movies while they were still in theatres by bashing the direction at the premiers or during the press circuits. He was decently self-effacing even here and acknowledged some culpability in the equation.
I guess the question at this point becomes "what happens if 'Wall Street 2' or Transformers 3 or whatever he tackles next likewise lacks heart, falls flat, and fails to deliver?" Does HE become the X factor in all of these rather lackluster movies? The "Eagle Eye" lover in me says Nope!. But I'm a sucker for this guy, and -- apparently contrary to popular belief -- think he's actually a decently believable actor with plenty of charisma and silver screen appeal.
It was interesting to see an immediate reaction in the blogs against him - accusing him of biting the hand that feeds, of being too cavalier in doling out the condemnation, of being an ungrateful, spoiled little hack that doesn't show proper respect to industry elders, even suggesting that he'll end up unemployable if he makes statements like that about directors like Spielberg.
Ehhhhhh, I'm thinking he hasn't really damanged anyone or anything that wasn't already damaged the second we watched Indy bounce across the dusty plains in the fridge or the second we watched a yellow Camaro give that obnoxious blonde a facial with mystery green car....goo. And I suspect (though who knows for sure) that it's BECAUSE Shia's got a solid relationship with The Spielberg Hand That Feeds that he's able to make these sort of observations in a respectful way (ok, yes, a very public way, sure, but......). And is verbalizing what the rest of us have thought for ages really being terribly flippant? Nah.
Basically, I think this is a great case of folks overreacting. Aha - my theme lately: I'm having a good time acting non-plussed while people get called out for being inappropriate.
Hey, the 4th Indiana Jones was 20 years coming - the least they could have done was made a GOOD movie after 20 years. As for Transformers: we all know the second movie in a multi-movie franchise always blows. Now it's just up to them to create a great third installment that makes us forget about, oh, EVERYTHING from the second.
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