Shia the Beef Has Pretty Good Taste

?…because among the movies he thinks sucked, he includes Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. From the AP, courtesy of Geeks of Doom:

When I saw the second movie, I wasn’t impressed with what we did. There
were some really wild stunts in it, but the heart was gone; we got lost.

We tried to get bigger. It’s what happens to sequels. It’s like, how
do you top the first one? You’ve got to go bigger. Mike went so big that
it became too big, and I think you lost the anchor of the movie. … You
lost a bit of the relationships. Unless you have those relationships,
then the movie doesn’t matter. Then it’s just a bunch of robots fighting
each other.

And from the LA Times, courtesy of /Film:

“I feel like I dropped the ball on the legacy that people loved and
cherished,” LaBeouf said…

Meeting
with reporters Saturday on a terrace at the Hotel du Cap, he had some
strong, confessional words about his acting in the film, which he said
he felt didn’t convince anyone that he was the action hero the movie
claimed him to be. “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, who directed]. 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
said that he could have kept quiet, especially given the movie’s
blockbuster status, but didn’t think the film had fooled anyone. “I
think the audience is pretty intelligent. I think they know when you’ve
made … . And I think if you don’t acknowledge it, then why do they
trust you the next time you’re promoting a movie.” LaBeouf went on to
say he wasn’t the only star on the film who felt that way. “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.”

LaBeouf added, “We need to be able
to satiate the appetite,” he said. “I think we just misinterpreted what
we were trying to satiate.”

First of all, The Beef has my infinite respect for saying these things out loud. It takes serious balls for anyone in Hollywood to criticize their work, especially when its been so financially successful; furthermore, he’s saying what we all said when we first saw TF2 and Crystal Skull, so he’s down-to-Earth enough to see the problems we saw. Frankly, if anything, he’s too hard on himself — yeah, maybe he didn’t sell swinging on the trees as the king of the monkeys, but that’s an impossible scene to sell. It’s not like Brando at his prime could have pulled it off.

Look, we all like to make fun of The Beef, and certainly, he’s not entirely blameless in these things. But both TF2 and Crystal Skull had much, much greater problems than Shia’s performances. It’s very cool that he knows it and admits it. Two points for The Beef.