by Shane “LaBeef” Hnetka
I’ve never been a Shia LaBeouf fan — I don’t like his “acting” and he stars in crappy films like the Transformers series and that Indiana Jones abomination with aliens.
But LaBeouf is more than just an entitled, under-talented celebrity who seems kind of horrible. Apparently there’s something actually wrong with him.
Or at least his brain.
TOO CLOWES FOR COMFORT
In December, LaBeouf posted a short film called Howard Cantour.com to the Internet. The film, which LaBeouf directed and claimed to have written, had screened at Cannes in May to positive reviews. Shortly after Howard Cantour.com hit the web, however, critics and bloggers spotted a problem.
It was a blatant, shameless rip-off of legendary alternative cartoonist Daniel Clowes’ (Ghost World) 2007 comic, Justin M. Damiano.
How shameless? Scenes and dialogue were lifted completely from the comic, and the story is, essentially, identical.
After being exposed as a humongous plagiarist — and that’s a generous term for an artistic heist of this size — what does LaBeouf do? Issue a series of plagiarized apologies to Clowes on Twitter, of course. Then, on New Year’s Eve, LaBeouf paid a skywriter to write “I am sorry Daniel Clowes” above L.A. (where Clowes doesn’t live).
And then he went on Twitter to post a storyboard of “his” next project, “Daniel Boring”, which, strangely enough, seems identical to a scene in Clowes’ graphic novel David Boring.
Perhaps he’s not so sorry after all. One might even suspect LaBeouf had no intention of actually making Daniel Boring and was just being a total jackass to Daniel — aha, I see what he did there — Clowes.
Not surprisingly, Clowes’ lawyers have told LaBeouf to knock it off. We know this because LaBeouf, being a crazy person with a Twitter account, tweeted their cease and desist letter.
SAD LITTLE LABEOUF
What else? LaBeouf got into a Twitter spat with actress Lena Dunham after Dunham tweeted “I’ve always felt, utterly and unchangeably, that only sociopaths hire skywriters.” He freaked out his co-stars (including Brad Pitt) in the upcoming World War Two film Fury by, um, refusing to bathe and pulling out his own tooth in order to “get into the role.” And he’s already said he sent a sex tape selfie and dick pics to director Lars Von Trier to land a part in the upcoming Nymphomaniac.
But Shia might have had enough at last. The accusations of plagiarism seem to have crushed his innocent, creative spirit.
“We used to sit in a circle around a campfire and tell stories and share them and change them and own them together because they were ours,” LaBeouf sadly tweeted on Jan. 7. Then, on Jan. 10, he tweeted: “In light of the recent attacks against my artistic integrity, I am retiring from all public life.”
And then poor Shia LaBoeuf paid $25,000 to have skywriters write “Stop Creating” in the sky above L.A.
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Shane writes the online column Sunday Matinee every week on Dog Blog. He works at a Regina comic shop and is a big nerd.
