Why Shia LaBeouf Is Hollywood's New King of Jerks
Ladies and gentlemen, Project Hollywood has succeeded. Decades ago, we constructed an artificial environment disconnected from humanity. Its only function was to create even more artificial scenarios even further disconnected from humanity. After billions of dollars, this philosofractal metamaze has realized its ultimate goal: an utterly oblivious human. A man with less self-reflection than Dracula. A man so geocentrically self-centered, he thinks the sun is a stage light constantly searching for his best side. A man so lacking in self-awareness, he's invisible to Zen Buddhists. A man who pushed the limits of assholing harder than Goatse. May I present: Homo Shia.
A man so incapable of self-examination, he thought this looked cool.
Shia LaBeouf recently stole the spotlight by stealing an entire screenplay. He "plagiarized" the script for his short film HowardCantour.com from Daniel Clowes' comic Justin M. Damiano, in the same way settlers "short-changed" Native Americans for the island of Manhattan. But he paid less. He stole the entire comic, scene for scene, line for line, word for goddamn word. It is impossible to overstate how directly he ripped it off. I've used photocopiers that make less direct reproductions.
Shia at his writing desk.
When you read the title "HowardCantour.com," you've already experienced most of Shia's contribution to the project. The only other alterations were things like changing the bagels the characters eat into cookies. That's the level of cinematic insight Shia brings to a creative project: liking cookies.
"I go to my death shamed by association."
He also changed a mention of Le Mepris to Shakespeare in Love, because he doesn't think a lifelong professional film critic would have heard of one of the most famous French movies ever made. No, he's really changing it because he thinks you're too stupid to know anything outside of Hollywood. It's possible he doesn't even know there is an outside of Hollywood and thought the original comic had a typo. Children have copied from Wikipedia 10 minutes before the school bus arrived and put in more original work, because they change some words other than the proper nouns. He couldn't have taken from Clowes more publicly, obviously, and brutally without cloning him and beating the result to death on stage.
He didn't even tell Clowes, and he took this film to the Cannes Film Festival. He stole an entire story, took it to one of the most famous display events in the world, and didn't think anyone would notice, because he thought moviegoers didn't care about comics. I repeat: The star of the billion-dollar Transformers movies thinks moviegoers don't care about comics.
On the upside, he's a much better actor in this one.
He made millions from an extremely licensed and copyrighted property and used some to fund another movie. That means he paid actors, camera people, truck drivers, even craft services, but not the writer. He thinks the person who cleared away the coffee cups on his movie deserved more money than the person who wrote it. He even has a credit for "Script Supervisor Sarah Horton," who I'm assuming was paid to help him with the big words when reading the comic.
Which is why from now on he's Chia LeBeef. If he can't be bothered to add the proper names to his work, then neither should we. Besides, getting his name wrong is probably the only way a human can wound this vapid famebeast on our mortal plane.
"I don't know, LeBeef still sounds too tough for someone who looks like me" -Mirror Universe self-aware Shia
No human has ever been so caught. History is littered with idiots who confused recognition with respect, but only Shear-a LobeOff stole so blatantly after we built a global communications network and then enjoyed the resulting attention. His response was a masterwork of every way you can invert an apology. He deeply regrets; he apologizes that we assumed he wrote the film that he talked about making for years and didn't credit anyone else for writing; he's "embarrassed that he failed to credit" the person whose lifetime of work and experience he lifted like a candy bar. Note how all the apologies are about his feelings, not his victim's loss. And he makes promoting a movie for years without once even telling the person who wrote it sound like forgetting to pick up milk at the store. But then, he does have experience being arrested for being a moron at the store.
"I deeply regret the manner in which these events have unfolded." He knows that sounds like a stupid fake robot taking the piss out of gullible viewers. That's his entire cinematic experience!
And even then his primary role was "taking shit that belongs to someone else."
In the same message, he insists that "Being inspired by someone else's idea to produce something new and different IS creative work." Which is true, just as "The lunar missions had to reach a velocity greater than 11.18 km/s to escape Earth's gravitational pull" is true -- it's still not something Xia has actually done. He might as well argue that the true beauty belongs to the eye of the beholder from behind the wheel of a stolen Lamborghini.
If he'd only worked this out with Clowes in advance, he'd be a hero. "Hey, Shia is trying to apologize by making good conversions of comics!" But this was never about making something new. This was about making Shia look smart and talented. But hundreds of millions of dollars of special effects and marketing have already failed at that.
He looks like he was malnourished by the YMCA and is revenge-mocking the Village People.
You may have noticed that his apology was longer than four words and rightly suspected that he'd stolen it. He'd stolen it from Yahoo Answers. That's like finding out that the dog didn't just shit on your couch, it did so after eating a stranger's vomit.
"But unlike Shear LePorc, you can't stay mad at me. And I can convincingly portray some emotions."
Like only the very worst of assholes, this is where he decided he was being a dick on purpose (a bit late in his career to find something he's actually good at). But he seized the role wholeheartedly. He followed this up with a sequence of Twitter apologies, all stolen from different sources. Bullshit clarification: Some sites have discussed the meaning of this as if it was anything other than Shia unzipping his fly and urinating over everyone who ever made the mistake of paying attention to him. This is nothing but a rich man mocking the very idea of consequence. He's so immune to reactions that he didn't even experience recoil when he pissed all over Daniel Clowes.
Like all laws, conservation of momentum stops working above a certain wealth.
This soared into world-altering dickery when he hired Hollywood skywriters to scrawl another apology across the firmament. He would rather pay skywriters than his movie writer. He turned the heavens themselves into a fuck you. Then he gave Bleeding Cool an interview that Merriam-Webster is already formatting to replace their entry for "Seriously, someone needs to find a way to reformat personalities and test it on that guy," which isn't even a word, but they're going to include it anyway. Some highlights:
"Live good player"; "It's the 21st century, thug life"
You could prolapse into a bucket of bleach and not be such a painfully white asshole.
"Authorship is censorship."
Finally he adds something new to the universe: a fifth fundamental force, an attraction between every writer's fist and his face.
"Our notion of genius -- a romantic -- isolated figure -- is fucking outdated. An updated notion of genius would have to center around ones mastery of information"
He declares that people who think they actually did something when they create are selfish assholes, but contends that working out how to press control and V at the same time is an act of genius.
"It's not plagiarism in the digital age -- it's repurposing."
He thinks that taking what other people created is more important than creation. He's the incarnation of the 9gag funnyjunk cheezburger Internet scumbag idea that taking someone else's stuff and putting your logo on it makes it yours.
Of course all these lines are stolen too.
He writes like a first year philosophy major who sat through a lecture on copyright law because he walked into the wrong lecture hall and couldn't be bothered to move.
And now some kittens.
This is to lower your blood pressure. The next line runs a risk of rageurysms.
"I never asked to be paid"
Son of a bitch. He's the ultimate trustafarian, literally complaining about how he never meant to be talking to us from a mansion. He's the rich white kid who has never had to worry about money, with the asshole amplification that he thinks he earned it. But you can't earn millions of dollars for talking in front of a green screen, you can only be given it as a symptom of a system that's clearly gone insane. He got $10 million for the things he did on the set of Transformers 3. Of course he can't understand the idea of fair pay for good work. His career destroyed all three of those concepts.
He is King Entitled the First, the absolute embodiment of a rich straight white guy who thinks he deserves everything and must also be a genius for getting it. And because he doesn't remember actually doing anything smart, it must be that everything he does is smart.
"Wow, I'm the best at wearing ties!"
He's showing off what he's done and thinks he's brilliant, like a toddler with a full potty, but without the same levels of internal effort. And toilet training is about not doing what you want wherever you feel like it and expecting to be loved for it, and is therefore a level of maturity Sheeit LoBar hasn't reached.
"OK, honey, now you'll learn to use the potty so you don't keep leaving little Shias everywhere!"
He's been caught thieving in the most blatant possible way -- he globally distributed an 11-minute recording composed entirely of evidence of his theft -- and he thinks the apology is just another chance to show how brilliant he is. He's turned the act of apology into what he thinks is performance art, unaware that he's being not just a cockhole, but the sort of cockhole you'd get from a shotgun vasectomy: vast, painful, and ruining the future of millions. He's fostering the idea that words are meaningless and writers don't deserve to get paid for writing. And it's impossible to retaliate, because he's carefully spent his entire life never making anything anyone would want to copy.
This human "heh," this effortless puff of noise utterly free from information or insight, existing only to advertise its emitter's unjustifiably inflated sense of self-worth, really thinks he's the smart one here. A worse actor than an unstrung Thunderbird now thinks he's the modern media master.
Xia LeQueef unzips his fly, wondering if it's possible to fuck something and copy it at the same time.
Of course he's an idiot. He was created that way. The Hollywomb has left him utterly incapable of empathy or respect. This is what we created. We paid for those awful movies, and we knew they were affecting our society and making the world a worse place, and now they're skipping over subtle cultural influence to directly create awful humans to live in it.
He's the end result of the Hollywood trend. It used to be that the relationship between actors and writers, both vital to the success of the story, was a little lopsided in favor of the person the people could see. Then it got very lopsided. Then we started paying the pretty human-like models millions of dollars just to see them, even if it was in wordvomit like Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull, because the only words we were really paying for were the actor's name and Harrison Ford really doesn't give a shit anymore. Shia is taking that to its final form: assuming that his name alone will eclipse even the existence of the writer.
"Look at me. I'm a genius."
People are talking about apologies, but even if one could somehow be extracted from LeBeef -- and he's made it clear that the only way we could do that is to write it down, give him $20 million, and tell him it's the script for Transformers 4, and that would still be better than the actual script we'll get for Transformers 4 -- it would be meaningless. He's proven that those are just noises he makes like a plucked myna bird. What he needs to do is write Daniel Clowes a simple check for a standard screenwriter's fee. Then double it for trying to get away with theft. Then triple it for being such a dick about it. Then multiply it by 10 because he has really been such an unbelievable dick about it. And it still wouldn't even count as a rounding error in his yearly budget.
So screw Shea LaButter. Misspell his name, because it seems to be the only thing he notices, the very first words he got from someone else to take as his own. It's such a tragedy that the best thing a young man can do with functionally unlimited freedom is steal from people who still need to work, and he's such a dick about it that we still don't feel sorry for him.
Go look at Daniel Clowes. Who makes stuff.
Luke drools over the Glorious Meat Future and works out who would win between Superman and He-Man. He also tumbles and replies to tweets.
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