shia labeouf

Holes (2003)

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There’s a sequence in Megadoc that features Shia LaBeouf talking about the great respect that he has for Jon Voight as an actor, despite their extreme disconnect on politics. I didn’t realize it at that time just how far back their connection went, as I had not yet seen the 2003 film adaptation of Louis Sachar’s novel Holes, which featured a then-teenaged LaBeouf in the title role of Stanley Yelnats IV, a wrongfully imprisoned child laborer whose adult enemies include overseer Mr. Sir, played by Voight. My blind spot on this topic came up in conversation at a recent post-New Year’s hangout, and I had to admit that although I had grown up reading Sachar’s work (my Scholastic book fair copy of Wayside School Gets a Little Stranger was so well loved it eventually fell apart), I had never read or seen Holes. Not only did I not realize that the film was chock full of movie stars, but that the text itself was notably complex, textually intertwined, and much more thoughtful than most fare made for children. 

Generations ago in the old country, Stanley Yelnats IV’s great, great-grandfather Elya brought down a curse on his bloodline by failing to deliver on his promised payment to Madame Zeroni (Eartha Kitt) that he carry her up a hill to drink from a spring. At the end of the nineteenth century in fertile Green Lake, Texas, the son of the town’s wealthiest man, Trout Walker, is spurned by kind-hearted schoolteacher Katherine Barlow (Patricia Arquette). When he later discovers that she is in love with Black onion farmer Sam (Dulé Hill), he leads a mob that burns down the school and results in Sam’s death while he is rowing across the lake from his onion farm. Sam’s death seems to curse the town, as it never rains again and the lake dries up. Heartbroken, the former schoolmarm rechristens herself “Kissin’ Kate Barlow” and avenges Sam’s death by becoming an outlaw, eventually robbing a stagecoach occupied by Elya’s son, the first Stanley Yelnats. Stanley survives, but his stories of “taking refuge on God’s thumb” make little sense to his descendants. Kissin’ Kate buries all of her loot somewhere in the salt flats that were once Green Lake and allows herself to die from the bite of a yellow spotted lizard rather than allow Trout Walker to try and torture the location out of her. 

A century later, Stanley Yelnats III (Henry Winkler) is trying to create a perfect recipe for foot odor, and his son is overjoyed when a pair of cleats belonging to a major baseball star seem to fall from the sky, but he’s caught with them and the shoes turn out to have been stolen from a charity auction, with young Stanley taking the offer from the judge to go to Camp Green Lake instead of juvenile detention. Once there, he meets his bunk’s “counselor,” “Doctor” Pendanski (Tim Blake Nelson) as well as the aforementioned Mr. Sir, whose role at the “camp” is unclear other than to be a brute and a bully. He’s also introduced to his fellow inmates and their typical kiddie novel prison nicknames: “Armpit,” “Zig-Zag,” “X-Ray” (Brenden Jefferson), “Magnet,” “Squid,” and most importantly, “Zero” (Khleo Thomas). Each day, the boys are driven a distance from the “camp” to dig a hole, five feet in diameter and just as deep, to “build character,” with the tantalizing promise that if they find anything interesting, they might get the rest of the day off. Despite being the smallest of the inmates by quite a bit, Zero is the fastest digger, and he offers to help Stanley with his hole every day in exchange for teaching Zero to read. When Stanley finds a small metal tube engraved with the initials “K.B.,” he’s bullied into letting X-Ray take the credit, which finally gets Camp Green Lake’s heretofore unseen warden (Sigourney Weaver) out of her house to lead a thorough excavation of everywhere around X-Ray’s hole, indicating that they’re not just digging holes for carceral punishment, but because she’s looking for something out there.

The construction of this little narrative is surprisingly elegant for something made by Disney in the twenty-first century. Most of that intricacy comes as a result of having the novel’s author write the screenplay, which ensured that all of the rich subtext that characterized the Newbery Medal-winning book made it to the screen. All of that plot synopsis above is doled out in beautifully concise increments, with all of the planting of future payoffs feeling completely organic and real. The story of Elya Yelnats is related as if it were no more than a typical family story that playfully scapegoats an ancestor for the clan’s current financial predicaments, and the reveal that Zero’s real name is Hector Zeroni, sharing the last name of the woman whom Elya failed to close the loop with before heading to America, comes late enough in the film that the primarily young audience has probably completely forgotten about her by then. Although the film doesn’t show Trout Walker calling Sam any racist epithets, it doesn’t shy away from demonstrating the dangers to a star-crossed mixed race couple in the 1880s, or the fatal outcome of racist mobbery; the only concession it makes (other than sanitizing its language) is filming Sam’s death at a distance, as Kate stands on the shores of the lake trying to warn him before the peal of a gunshot and Sam’s distant figure collapsing in his rowboat. It’s dark stuff, and the kind of thing it’s hard to imagine a major studio adapting a book with such serious subject matter at such a huge scale in these more mealy-mouthed, faux-progressive times. There’s a mature sincerity about the whole thing that really makes Holes stand out. 

I was quite taken with the way that all of the different narratives were eventually braided together into one larger, grander story. Eventually, after one piece of abuse from Dr. Pendanski too many, Zero hits his oppressor in the face with a shovel and runs off into the barren wasteland around Camp Green Lake, prompting the warden to tell her men to get rid of his files since, as a ward of the state, no one will be looking for him after her disappears. After a few days, Stanley takes off after him into the desert, eventually finding him camping out beneath onion man Sam’s overturned boat, where the younger boy has been managing to survive on jars of Kate’s spiced peaches, still preserved there after all this time. It’s from this vantage that Stanley spots a mountain peak that resembles a thumbs up and, recognizing it as “God’s thumb” from his great-grandfather’s survival story, the two of them make their way toward it. Zero almost doesn’t make it, but Stanley carries him the rest of the way to the top, where they discover one of Sam’s onion patches, still thriving, and regain their strength. Just as importantly, Stanley’s rescue of Zero has at last fulfilled the Yelnats family’s responsibility to the Zeronis, lifting their curse. Stanley teaching Zero to read likewise ensures that the latter is able to read the former’s name (or rather, Stanley I’s name) on the trunk that they unearth and keep it from falling into the warden’s hands. With her dying breath, Kate had told Trout that he and his children could dig for a hundred years and never find her treasure, and with the warden’s arrest upon the arrival of the Yelnats’s new lawyer and a couple of Texas Rangers (as it turns out, having a child prisoner with no record of him—Zero’s files were destroyed to cover up his presumed death—is bad news), Trout and his descendants wasted their lives on a treasure they never got to possess. At last, for the first time since Sam’s death, rain comes to Green Lake. 

This is an impressive film cinematically as well. The fades between the verdant Green Lake of the past and the dusty plain of the present that is featureless other than its thousands of holes are concise and effective visual storytelling. Zero and Stanley’s ascent of God’s Thumb is very convincing, full of very expensive looking helicopter shots, and it looks fantastic. The locations are, overall, gorgeously photographed, so that even the desolate area around the camp/prison looks beautiful. Never having seen the movie before, I always assumed based on the presence of LaBeouf, who was a Disney Channel sitcom performer at the time, that Holes would be on par with their direct-to-cable original movies, functional and utilitarian rather than thoughtfully arranged and aesthetically interesting. It has some weaknesses of that genre, notably in the film’s soundtrack, which is full of inspirationally titled tracks (“Keepin it Real,” “I’m Gonna Be a Wheel Someday,” “Don’t Give Up,” etc.) that sometimes literally describe what we’re seeing on the screen, which feels like an over-explanatory narrative crutch for a film that otherwise trusts in its audience’s ability to pick up on nuance and subtlety. This extends to having the young actors perform a mixed hip-hop/pop track that plays over the film’s credits and is, respectfully, embarrassing. I probably saw the music video for it on television at the time of release, and that colored my perception of what I thought the movie was for a couple of decades, so I chalked up the frequent recommendations of it as little more than my peers’ nostalgia. I’m pleased to discover I was wrong. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Megadoc (2025)

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There’s a moment early in Megadoc in which Francis Ford Coppola is giving a speech to his assembled Megalopolis actors on the first day of rehearsals, and it feels very much like the first day of a high school theatre course. He quotes Dante’s Inferno, specifically the quote “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here,” which is posted at Hell’s gates, but then says that he has his own version, which is “Abandon worry, all ye who enter here,” which he notes should be on a sign in there in the large rehearsal space. “I have a sign and you’ll see it,” he says; “It’s supposed to be up,” revealing that, even in these early moments, things are already off schedule despite all the decades spent preparing for the film. “In this space,” he adds, “during this time, nobody can be bad, nobody can get in trouble.” Here, filmmaker Mike Figgis (Leaving Las Vegas) zooms his camera in on Shia LaBeouf, and I don’t know if that was a live decision or one that came up in the edit, but it’s prescient nonetheless. 

Figgis was invited by Coppola to document the creation of Megalopolis, a movie that I ranted about at length starting about 29 minutes into our podcast episode about Destroy All Monsters. I won’t recount the whole thing, but I summed it up at the time thus: “Bloated, hollow, ugly, infantile, pompous, stupid, pretentious, hubristic, insipid, hideous, homophobic, talent-wasting, facile, nepotistic, provocative (derogatory), neoliberal, lifeless, inconsistently performed, self-fellating, tiresome, shallow garbage.” In its own way, Megadoc is a perfect metatext for the film around which it revolves, namely in that just as Coppola couldn’t help but write a flawless avatar for himself in the form of Cesar Catilinia, he of the riches of the Emersonian mind. Inserting himself into the narrative obtrusively, Figgis is also far too much a presence in this “documentary;” it is, at best, an elevated behind the scenes featurette, albeit quite a long one. Initially, all the subjects present seem put off by his camera’s presence, other than Aubrey Plaza, who was not only the only person in Megalopolis who knew what kind of movie she was in but also the only person in Megadoc who knew what kind of movie they were in. She moves in quickly and adopts Figgis’s viewpoint as if it were the omnipresent camera of her character Wow Platinum. She’s an early delight in the finished Megadoc as the first person to be willing to do candid interviews, although it’s unclear exactly where Plaza ends and Platinum begins here, all to the film’s enrichment. 

After that first day playing warm-up theatre games, things get more serious. Megalopolis takes on a conceptual art designer who is initially over the moon about getting to work with Coppola, and her office is adorned with concept images of the various applications of Megalon. By the midpoint of the film, Coppola gets into an argument with the on-set art director where it seems like the director just isn’t understanding that it would be a good idea to put a blue screen at the rear of a shot. He mocks the man, saying “This gets back into why I like live effects, because although, in your opinion, they’re not as extraordinary and wonderful as the other kinds, I don’t agree with you.” The way he puts a little edge in on the words “extraordinary” and “wonderful,” you can tell that he’s just trying to needle the guy to make a point, and after he’s fired the team and brought on the kind of lean art department to which he was more accustomed, he sneers while saying “The last film they did was Guardians of the Galaxy.” We cut back to that concept artist in her office, and all the images have been taken down from the wall behind her, and you can tell that she’s drawing on a lifetime of practicing speaking very deliberately and politically about the egos she’s encountered as she says, “I’ve wondered if we missed the signs earlier on that he wanted to approach the movie differently. I do wonder if he didn’t communicate it as clearly.” 

This firing of the art department and hiring of a new one is only one of many woes that contributes to Megalopolis’s budget problems. Although I didn’t care for Figgis’s insertion of some of his own on-set video diaries, one cannot say that he doesn’t have a good head for comedic timing, as he’ll often pair footage of Coppola making spur-of-the-moment creative changes and decisions that have major financial consequences with on-screen text revealing just how much money was spent on inconsequential fluff. There are several minutes of rehearsal and test footage from Coppola’s failed attempt at getting Megalopolis off the ground in 2001, and they’re some of the most interesting things on display here, as we get to see Virginia Madsen perform a scene as Wow Platinum and a sequence of Ryan Gosling as LaBeouf’s character Clodio, with (I think) Scott Bairstow as his flunkie Huey. There’s a table read attended by Uma Thurman at which Billy Crudup learns that he’s been cast as Cesar rather than as Clodio as he believed. This shows us that, at that point in his career, Coppola was actually doing screen tests and taking other necessary steps in the filmmaking process that seem to have been completely absent from the production of the Megalopolis that made it to screen. Coppola is old and grumpy by his own admission, sometimes directing from his trailer so as not to explode at cast and crew, but he’s also gathered a huge crew at his own great expense to stand about while he and his son Roman fart around with trying to make an in-camera effect happen, when that’s the kind of detail that should absolutely be figured out and locked down by the time you get actors into costumes and make-up. It’s the kind of colossal waste of capital that one would expect when spending a studio’s limitless funds, not one’s own money obtained by selling off vineyards. 

The film spends time on the conflict between Coppola and LaBeouf, and it is legitimately fascinating. Although I don’t think he’s a very good person and that his history doesn’t give him any excuses regarding his behavior, I also have sympathy for most former child stars who have a hard time maturing. It was once a VH1 reality show cottage industry to point and laugh at aged child actors of the seventies like Danny Bonduce and Peter Knight as they struggled with their demons (and frequently lost), which was gross then and remains so today. What we can learn from them is that although there are successes like the Fanning sisters and Scarlett Johansson, they are the exceptions to the rule that early life stardom is a machine that creates mental illnesses down the line. LaBeouf has a few moments of raw human vulnerability here about how this is his first chance to work with a director from the old guard rather than just taking a job because he was a “starving kid,” (I’m no Crystal Skull fan, but on behalf of Spielberg, ouch), but then he also spends a lot of his screen time arguing with Coppola, trying to perhaps stretch his acting muscles while the exasperated octogenarian is clearly just trying to get things done, either because he’s elderly and tired or because every second of this is hemorrhaging his wallet. Late in Megadoc, LaBeouf recounts the fact that Coppola told him he was the worst actor he had ever worked with; “He says, ‘You know, I have one regret on this show.’ I said, ‘Okay, what’s the one regret?’ He goes, ‘You. You have been the biggest pain in my fucking ass,’—the only time he cursed—‘You’ve been the biggest pain in my fucking ass of any actor I’ve ever worked with.’ I said, ‘Really? Really? Any actor? Did I show up fucking 700 pounds overweight in the jungle? Really, any actor? Did I quit ten days before we wrap? Really, any actor?” It’s relatively good stuff and the only thing that really elevates it above the kind of thing you would have seen in a DVD special features section fifteen years ago. 

In his review of Megalopolis, Brandon noted that one of the modern ills that Coppola attacked via his fictional proxy was “journalists framing great men for fabricated sex crimes,” which relates to why this film barely counts as a documentary, if at all. Figgis and Coppola are, if not friends, at least amicable colleagues, and Megadoc does not address the allegations against Coppola, which first came to public attention roughly around the time of the film’s release. Although there’s been no resolution to the legal ramifications at the time of this writing, it’s telling that Megadoc ends its insight into the film’s creation not with the wide release to the public in September 2024, but at the Cannes premiere in May of 2024, with no additional dialogue or insight over what amounts to little more than cable red carpet coverage. It’s perhaps because Megadoc revealed moments before that Coppola’s wife Eleanor died in April of that year, right after footage of their sixtieth anniversary party on the set of Megalopolis. It verges on the disrespectful in its pre-emptive use of Coppola’s grief to end on a poignant note instead of addressing what is ultimately the most controversial thing about Megalopolis’s production. Tsk. 

The most magnetic person on screen, however, remains Plaza. Even in her Zoom audition, she’s funny and fantastic, and it reminds you that she truly is one of the great comedic minds of her generation. There’s a quietly disturbing scene in which we get to see the result of her petitioning to improv a scene with Dustin Hoffman, which jumps immediately to the two of them arm wrestling and Hoffman is flirting with her, and although he might be doing it “in character,” it makes one’s skin crawl regardless. It’s the only thing that seems like it’s not completely tempered by a need to skirt around the edges of anyone’s ego, but it’s not enough to save it. As a documentary, it’s functionally informative but not very insightful, but that’s not to say that it doesn’t have decent entertainment value, which is more than I would say about Megalopolis. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Megalopolis (2024)

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In an early scene of Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis that attempts to introduce all its major players at once, Adam Driver recites the entirety of Prince Hamlet’s “To be, or not to be” soliloquy at a cacophonous press conference.  It’s a classic-theatre intrusion on an aesthetic that’s already precariously imbalanced between the antique Art Deco sci-fi of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and the uncanny green screen CGI of our post-MCU future.  Old-timey newspaper reporters with “PRESS” badges tucked into the ribbons of their fedoras meet Driver’s recitation of Shakespeare with adoring, rapt attention, but the rest of the main cast is visibly unsure how to play the scene.  A wide range of talented, sought-after actors (i.e., Aubrey Plaza, Giancarlo Esposito), cancelled has-beens (i.e., Dustin Hoffman, Shia LeBouef), and unproven upstarts who don’t yet have full control of their craft (i.e., Chloe Fineman, Nathalie Emmanuel) circle around Driver, individually calibrating their plans of attack.  Every single person in the scene has a different idea of what kind of movie they’re in, so that the world’s most frequently quoted soliloquy is the only anchor that provides the bizarre exchange any sense of structure.  Megalopolis appreciators will tell you that this teetering, unfocused tone is the sign of a genius director at work, exploring new cinematic territory by disregarding minor concerns like coherence or purpose.  In my eyes, it’s a sign that the film isn’t directed at all; it’s a gathering of immense resources and disparate ideas into a single frame to accomplish nothing in particular, just an awkward dissonance.  Coppola may have had a clear picture of Megalopolis envisioned in his mind, but he did a piss-poor job of communicating that vision to his collaborators and his audience.

This is a sprawling, extravagantly expensive movie with exactly two ideas.  The first is that America is currently experiencing its own Fall of Rome, an idea that was popular among academics and media types about two decades ago.  The second is that Francis Ford Coppola is an underappreciated genius, an idea that was popular among academics and media types about four decades ago.  The America-in-decline angle of the story is at least well suited to the past-his-own-prime auteur’s current mindset as a bitter old man.  It not only affords Megalopolis an easy aesthetic mashup of Roman & Manhattan architecture on which to build its chintzy CG future-world, but it also gives Coppola a platform to complain about the newfangled things that bother him as a geriatric grump, like cancel culture, queer people, and Taylor Swift.  The signs that America has lost its way in amoral decadence include public lesbian smooching, pop music hags like Swift masquerading as teenage virgins, journalists framing great men for fabricated sex crimes, and mouth-breathing masses finding their bread-and-circuses entertainment value in the lowly artform of professional wrestling.  This, of course, could all be turned around if great men like Coppola were handed the reins of culture & governance, as represented in Adam Driver’s genius architect inventor who’s held back by small-minded bureaucrats.  Driver’s Caesar Catalina has discovered & commodified a miraculous fix-all substance called Megalon that will transform society into a golden utopia through better housing, better fashion, better medicine, and better artistic inspiration . . . if only the evil government figures and conniving women in his life would just get out of the way.  He discovered this substance by loving his wife very much, as the main supernatural conceit of the film is that it’s set in a world where all women are either villainous sluts or virtuous spouses, and the only way to save America from becoming the next Rome is by returning to old-fashioned family values.  It looks & talks like a movie that cares about the future, but all of its actual ideas & attitudes long for the past.

Megalopolis is the ultimate vanity project, Coppola’s tribute to his own genius.  It’s debatable whether he sees himself more as the outside-the-box architect of the future (Driver) or the wealthy but fading uncle who will ensure that future’s existence by keeping his money in the family (Jon Voight), but the movie is astonishingly masturbatory either way.  I can’t get over his cowardice in not casting himself as an actor in one of those two roles, as is tradition with smaller-scale vanity projects like The Room, The Astrologer, and the Neil Breen oeuvre.  Even more so, I can’t get over the hubris of making this $120 mediocrity about how his world-changing genius is held back by small-minded money men, when those same resources could have funded a dozen projects from younger visionaries who actually do have something new to say but no capital behind them. Coppola somehow doesn’t see that he’s the villain of his own piece.  He’s the old-fashioned conservative mayor (Esposito) getting in the way of young, iconoclastic talent (Driver).  If you look at the films produced by his company American Zoetrope, it’s essentially a nepo baby slush fund, investing mostly in properties that bear the Coppola family name (with occasional exceptions for sex-pest friends who can’t find funding elsewhere).  Compare that to Martin Scorsese lending his name recognition as a producer to filmmakers like Joanna Hogg, Josephine Decker, and The Safdie Brothers.  Both New Hollywood legends have benefited from the critical scam of “late style” forgiving some of the looser, lazier touches of their recent works, but only one has been investing in the future of filmmaking beyond his own mortality.  Coppola has no moral obligation to spend his production money outside the bounds of his vanity or his family, but it’s a little rich to watch this self-funded self-portrait of misunderstood, cock-blocked genius projected on an IMAX screen at a corporate multiplex and not scoff at the lack of self-awareness.

There are fleeting moments of pleasure to be found in Megalopolis‘s 140min runtime.  While most of the cast appears to be totally lost in terms of intent or tone, Adam Driver gives a commanding, compelling performance that vibrates at just the right frequency to match the uncanniness of the material (a skill put to much better use in the similarly bizarre Annette).  Audrey Plaza & Shia LeBeouf gradually establish menacing chemistry together as a semi-incestuous duo of schemers who attempt a coup on Driver & Voight’s empire.  Their softly kinky aunt-on-nephew sex scene together is maybe the one moment that genuinely works on a dramatic level, and the downfall of their failed plot to seize power is the one moment of genuinely successful humor: a visual gag involving John Voight’s lethal boner.  However, even the punchline conclusion to their saga is a nasty, hateful lashing out at power-hungry women and gender-nonconformers that immediately sours the movie’s sole moment of levity.  Visually & thematically, it’s all very limited and uninspired, but there are enough talented performers on the cast list to make sure something lands.  Even the casting feels like a grotesque hoarding of misused resources, though, with formidable players like Laurence Fishburne, Kathryn Hunter, Dustin Hoffman, and Jason Schwarzman being given nothing to do except stand around and support or thwart Driver’s world-changing genius as humanity’s Savior Artist.  After seeing Megalopolis, I’m less convinced than ever that any single man’s singular genius could possibly be the savior of anything. It’s a lot more likely that the resources earned by the world’s Great Men will be locked away in trophy cases, only to be passed down to family members as heirlooms & inherited wealth.  There’s no real future here, just mawkish glorification of the past.

-Brandon Ledet

Disturbia (2007)

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The world of Rear Window riffs & remakes is a strange, fascinating realm that defies much of what you might expect from Hitchcock-inspired cinema. Outside of a few straightforward Rear Window riffs that keep the original’s story firmly housed in the thriller genre, films like the 1998 made-for-TV remake starring Christopher Reeve or De Palma’s Body Double, a lot of works that pull influence from the Hitchcock classic stray far from its murder mystery roots. What Lies Beneath hammers the film’s obsessive voyeurism into the shape of a ghost story. Addicted to Love and Head Over Heels focus on its gender politics humor and forge the unthinkable: the Rear Window romcom. Perhaps most oddly, though, the 2007 Shia LaBeouf vehicle Disturbia rehashed Rear Window into a late-in-the-game version of the late 90s slasher typified in titles like Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer, and Urban Legend. In fact, the movie was pitched in those films’ heyday, only to be pushed back when word got out that the Christopher Reeve version of Rear Window was in production. Although the idea of rehashing Rear Window as a late 90s slasher is just as absurd as molding it into a romcom, Disturbia is strangely the only one of these Rear Window riffs that was sued for infringing on the rights of the short story “It Had to Be Murder,” the source material for the Hitchcock classic. The case was ultimately dismissed because the similarities were too broad, which is actually indicative of how Disturbia matches the power & the humor of the Hitchcock work: barely, if at all.

I don’t have a lot of experience with Shia LaBeouf as an actor, so I can only recognize him working in one of two modes: American Honey mode and Transformers mode. In American Honey mode, LaBeouf is a Serious Artist who uses his natural charisma as a sleazy snake oil salesmen to find something a little ugly, but very true in his character onscreen. In Transformers mode, he’s a gross clown who asks you to laugh along & identify with that sleaze instead of cringing in recognition. Disturbia firmly boasts a Transformers-flavor LaBeouf, a falsely macho teenage clown who asks you to continually exclaim, “What a goof!” as he lazes around watching Cheaters, plays video games, and lustily spies on the girl next door through his trusty (and likely crusty) binoculars. It’s clear that the macho teen boy audience is when Disturbia is aiming to make its money. Early on, LaBeouf gets a supposed Big Cheer moment when he punches his (presumably underpaid, overworked) high school teacher in the jaw and lands himself on movie-long house arrest. What follows is a PG-13 version of an American Pie-style comedy where he woos the Next Door Hottie by openly drooling/spying and But I’m a Nice Guy!-ing her. It eventually works and just when they’re about to have their Big Kiss, character actor David Morse swoops in as a creepy next door slasher villain who steals their attention, nearly saving the film single-handedly. Morse is effectively, undeniably creepy as the possible serial killer these teens spy on and attempt to expose to skeptical adults. As he’s on house arrest, all LaBeouf can do is watch in horror as the evidence against Morse builds and more potential victims wander into harm’s way. He’s just like a wheelchair-bound James Stewart in Rear Window (just 10x more annoying).

To be fair, my frustration with Disturbia is not entirely LaBeouf’s fault. Were the film actually released in the late 90s when it’s nu-metal slasher mode wasn’t yet stale and I was a teenage shithead myself, I likely would’ve been onboard. Even now, David Morse’s expert work as the cold-hearted killer is almost enough for me to forgive the film’s mid-00s hard rock braggadocio and lame, teen-friendly bro humor. In essence, though, this is frequently a comedy where the jokes just didn’t work for me and only rarely the Rear Window slasher I desperately wanted it to be. The most interesting aspects director DJ Caruso, who’s also responsible for this year’s xXx: Return of Xander Cage of all things, brings to the table here are the ways the film updates & perverts the original Rear Window dynamic. There’s something less pathetic & more understandable about a teen creep spying on his neighbors through his house’s windows than Stewart doing so as an adult man. Technological updates like Internet search engines & video recordings also change the dynamic of LaBeouf sleuthing around for info on his killer next door. If you’re curious about the ways Rear Window has been reshaped & reimagined since Hitchcock’s heyday, Disturbia is a must-watch, especially for David Morse’s terrifying presence and the novelty of that seminal classic being filtered through a generic PG-13 slasher that should’ve been released in the days when KoRn was king. Once that novelty wears off, however, you’re left with a lowbrow teen comedy that seems to think it’s hi-larious to watch a teenage Shia LaBeouf construct towers made of unwrapped Twinkies and stomp out flaming bags of dog shit. Just know what you’re getting into.

-Brandon Ledet

Transformers (2007)

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onehalfstar

Two cataclysmic events in my life have lead me to this desperate hour, where I’m considering watching the entirety of the live action Transformers franchise for the very first time. First, I found myself intrigued by the convoluted mythology and grave, self-obsessed tone of the trailer for the upcoming fifth entry, The Last Knight, which is being reported as the final directorial contribution to the series from explosion fetishist Michael Bay. Secondly, I recently fell in love with Bay’s 1998 disaster pic Armageddon as the beautifully constructed, spiritually corrupt Conservative fantasy piece that it truly is. These freaky, reality-shattering occurrences have lead me astray, tempted me into a den of sin. I knew it was wrong to watch Transformers, a transgression I’ve avoided for an entire decade until now, but I did so anyway. I was rightly punished for crossing that line.

Transformers matches Armageddon‘s massive runtime and occasionally approaches its attention to heightened visual craft, but it is in no way in the same league as that morally deficient masterwork. At one point a single-scene character shouts, I kid you not, “This is a hundred times better than Armageddon, I swear to God!” They are the worst of liars. The reason that one-liner is worth mentioning is that Transformers is in many ways not an action fantasy piece, but instead the absolute worst designation any film can achieve: a failed comedy. After kicking things off with a little jingoistic Army worship, the film gleefully launches into its true bread & butter: a torrent of shitty, often offensively unfunny “jokes.” Bernie Mac plays a sleazy car salesman who repeatedly yells “Mammy!” in the broadest delivery possible. Characters are made fun of merely for speaking Spanish or Hindi as their first language. Half of the bloated runtime is dedicated to the hilarious idea that the film’s protagonist is interested in fucking Megan Fox, a pursuit the leering camera very apparently identifies with. Once the titular transforming robots show up, they join right in with both the racial caricature and the Megan Fox Is A Total Babe lines of humor. They even add a little scatilogical flavor to the painfully unfunny comedy by pissing on one of the antagonistic G-men who slow down the plot. I’d like to claim that the jokes in Transformers would only appeal to ten year old boys who don’t know any better, but the film pulled in $700 million at the box office, so I guess the joke is ultimately on me for not laughing along.

As someone who regularly enjoys and promotes the sillier, campier end of genre cinema, it goes against everything I believe to say this, but I think Transformers would have been a much better film if it actually took its own ridiculous premise seriously. As a film built around a series of Hasboro toys (shape-shifting robots from a war-ridden planet that hide among us as common automobiles), the film is already wildly goofy enough in its basic DNA that there’s no need to lighten the material with constant, insensitive bro humor. By turning every single narrative beat in the first two hours of the film into a stale joke (Heh, heh. I like it when the black robot says, “This looks like a cool place to kick it.” Heh, heh.) and opting to center its story on the human characters who encounter the robots instead of the titular alien beings everyone paid a ticket to see in the first place, it’s as if Transformers is constantly apologizing for its own existence. Assuming the audience couldn’t possibly want to actually watch the talking robots film advertised on its poster, Transformers dedicates about two thirds of its runtime to watching Shia LaBeouf feebly try to charm the (short) pants off Megan Fox. LaBeouf is convincing as a high school con man here (just as he’s convincing as an adult con man drifter in American Honey), but for some reason we’re asked to identify with his sleazy, insincere ways and laugh at his slimy, immature humor. Megan Fox is . . . less convincing as a small town high school student, but it’s not really her fault that she was cast merely to look supermodel beautiful so Michael Bay could drool at her consistently exposed midriff. Did I mention that she’s hot and a gear head? It doesn’t matter, because she’s not a talking robot alien, which is what most people paid to see.

Full disclosure: I did attempt to watch this Transformers franchise-starter when it was first released about a decade ago, but I couldn’t make it all the way through. The first 50min of the film bored me to tears and when the robots started talking I just found it too goofy and had to abandon ship. I now see how wrong I was. The first hour of Transformers is indeed still a boring humor vacuum, but the talking robots honestly aren’t all that bad. A straightforward sci-fi action film about two Cybertronic races (the Autobots and the Deceptions) fighting for possession of an intergalactic MacGuffin known simply as The Cube and debating in grave, heavy-handed speeches about whether humanity is worth saving (“Humans don’t deserve to live,” “They deserve to choose for themselves!”) doesn’t exactly sound like anything new or unique. In fact, after the Marvel takeover that’s unfolded in the years since this film’s release, it sounds like par for the course for the modern, bloated blockbuster. However, when Transformers leaves LaBeouf & Fox’s “hilarious” nonstarter romance behind for its concluding half hour of nonstop robot battles, it starts to feel like a passable slice of Hollywood entertainment. Careless destruction of property & faceless casualties pile up while Bay matches his robo explosions with a soaring, almost religious orchestral score. I’ve heard the robots’ ever-shifting, impossible transformations in these films described as a form of Cubist art before, which is a little lofty of a critical claim, but actually starts to make sense once the battle gets out of hand. Then, when it’s all over, LaBeouf & Fox make out on the hood of a robot car (which, it’s with noting, is a sentient being), reminding the audience that the film wasn’t always entertaining. In fact, most of it focused on these two dweebs for no discernible reason.

I’d be a liar if I said I didn’t enjoy any of Transformers before that concluding robo-battle. The film’s 80s-obsessed music cues were often pretty funny, especially in comparison to the jokes in the dialogue. The actress who played Shia LaBeouf’s mother, Julie White, was a total charmer in her all-too-brief performance, especially when she joins in in oggling Megan Fox’s hot bod. I even got a laugh out of two (!) Shia LaBeouf one-liners: one where he describes the Autobots as “robots, but like super advanced robots,” and another where he answers his parents’ question, “Why are you so dirty and sweaty?” with “I’m a child.” My biggest laugh in the film, though, was when a cop abruptly tells LaBeouf to shut up, since it’s exactly what I had been thinking for at least the first hour of the runtime. If all the humans of Transformers had just shut up and let the robots do the talking/battling, the film might have actually been entertaining, or at least less painfully embarrassing (it’s especially difficult not to feel bad for Jon Tuturo & Tyrese Gibson here). It’s in the climactic battle when Michael Bay really lets loose. Hundreds of human lives are squashed within minutes without a stray, momentary thought given to their loss. A steering wheel comes to life and eats a Stuck Up Rich Brat’s face. Everything explodes and is ground to dust in a lovingly shot cacophony. It’s too bad that the two hours preceding that cathartic release is embarrassed of its own nature as a Transformers film and buries its talking robots under an insurmountable mountain of ill-considered “comedy.” I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I hope future entries in the franchise take their robo-alien folklore a lot more seriously.

-Brandon Ledet

American Honey (2016)

/ swampflix / 10 Comments

EPSON MFP image

three star

American Honey was a very specific kind of disappointment for me, a type of letdown I only ever seem to find in buzzed-about indie releases. For months, the critical narrative surrounding this film has been that it’s intensely divisive. Even the film’s trailer, with all of its Shia LaBeouf-with-a-rat-tail earnestness & musings on the joys of making money/getting turnt, promised a production that could elicit a strong love it or hate it reaction. I went into American Honey expecting intensity, so I was oddly disappointment when I mostly found it to be fairly okay. Normally, enjoying a movie on the whole, but not finding it to be too big of a deal would still be a totally worthwhile, even comfortable cinematic experience. With titles like American Honey, Gaspar Noe’s Love, and The Revenant, however, the expectation is to have an extreme reaction, positive or negative, and it’s kind of a bummer when they don’t deliver on the divisiveness promised by their reputations.

Part of the reason films like this are such a letdown when they’re only moderately enjoyable is that they require so much work from the audience’s end. American Honey is deliberately light on plot, yet stretches nearly three hours in length. Its squared-off aspect ratio and daydreamy tendency to get lost in traditional beauty detail like hair blowing in the wind & flowers waving off the side of the highway play more like a lengthy scroll through an Instagram account than a feature film. The movie asks you to hang out in a closed space with Shia LaBeouf for hours on end; while LaBeouf is actually serviceable at worst here, that’s still a lot to ask from some people in light of his James Franco x1000 Misunderstood Artist public persona. The film clears these potential hurdles with ease, avoiding a lot of eyeroll-worthy indie movie cheese with a decidedly laidback, candid tone. However, its overall effect of capturing the directionless drift of a never-ending road trip might not be worth the headache required to get on its wavelength. If you meet American Honey halfway to buy what it’s selling (magazines or otherwise), the best you can hope for is a warm, comfortable meandering through America’s dead spaces and a visit with the young ghosts who haunt them. It’s an enjoyable experience, but one with a hefty toll.

A van full of teenage castaways tour America selling magazine subscriptions door to door, parking lot to parking lot. Although they could not care less about the product they’re peddling, the operation is handled like a “legitimate” business. They have orientation rituals, meetings, big seller rewards, and a boss figure who stands to benefit the most from their sweat & persistence as they remain fixed in their economic standing. These are America’s throwaway kids, drifters. They hitchhike, sport dreadlocks, dumpster dive for raw chicken, self-medicate with a steady diet of bong rips & grain alcohol. In the film’s more unique moments it strives only to see the country through their eyes. Economic desperation drives them down dusty roads, through cheap motels, and hundreds of miles past the families who abandoned or abused them. In their words, they “explore America, party, a bunch of stuff. It’s cool.” In our eyes it’s not cool at all; it’s depressing. The movie attempts to construct a will-they-won’t-they romance between two of the kids (LaBeouf’s mostly-nude body being part of that bargain) and to find moments of intense physical & emotional vulnerability in its narrative tangents, but it can never fully escape its status as a delicate, laidback hangout film, with all of the underwhelming impact that distinction entails.

British director Andrea Arnold captured this downstream drift with just as loose of a battle plan as you’d expect. In her own first tour of America, she’s acting as a sort of explorer/partier herself, packing the van with real-life drifter kid non-actors, which makes for some truly effective moments of quiet devastation. Sometimes she can reach a little too far in her attempts to capture America’s spirit. Her camera’s strange fascination with the mechanical ritual of line-dancing makes for a bizarre moment of authentic detail, but we also get shots of wildflowers juxtaposed with the blood river runoffs of slaughterhouses that really test the resolve not to roll eyes & walk away. There’s a sort of sweet, childish sensuality in the physical flirtation that builds the central romance, but the entire courtship is sparked with the lovelorn pair making eyes to Rihanna singing “We fell in love in a hopeless place,” which is just about the least subtle music cue possible; and I’m saying that as someone who typically places no significant value on subtlety. When the kids are daydreaming & sing-shouting along to the same endless repetitions of songs by Kevin Gates, Juicy J, and the like, Arnold captures something convincingly true & brutally sad about these nomadic ragamuffins pursuing an eternal road trip to escape the inevitability of “real life.” When she starts peppering the scenario with loaded guns, stolen cars, and soul-shattering romance, the movie loses its footing a little and resembles something much more generic & familiar.

The overall result, then, is a mixed bag. American Honey winds up being enjoyable, but maybe not worth all of the trouble it takes to reap its smaller, more delicate benefits. Like I said, calling a film out for being merely enjoyable is a strange complaint to get hung up on, but I’m honestly jealous of the folks who had a strong reaction to it, either way that response swung. I wish I could call this film high art or low trash, but I instead find myself drifting between the two extremes, mumbling half-remembered rap lyrics to myself & hazily waiting for my next drink.

-Brandon Ledet