Last night Shia LaBeouf went on David Letterman, and Dave, to his credit, wasn’t Shia (sorry) about asking The Beef about his public feud with Alec Baldwin. You know, the one where Shia passed off an Esquire article (and a pretty lame one at that) as his own public apology. Shia tried to explain, but he was so obtuse and full-of-sh*t actorsy about it that the audience was openly mocking him before he’d even finished talking. It’s actually remarkable how quickly they turn on him. Here’s a partial transcript (more after the jump, with video):

SHIA: I’m pretty passionate and impulsive. And he’s passionate and impulsive too, and I think that makes for some fireworks.

DAVE: So… why did you get fired?

SHIA: Because me and Alec had tension as men. Not as artists, but as men. In a room, I think that became a hard thing to deal with. When you got tension as men, that’s tough till July. You know, it’s cool for increments, but I think to do that for a long period of time… is pretty tough.

“When you got tension as men, that’s tough till July.” Deep, bro. Is that another truism gleaned from the perfumed pages of the Megan-Fox-as-Aztec-sacrifice issue? Got any juicy bon mots about matching ties to cuff links?

Now, it’d be good internet business to just say “HERE’S SHIA LABEOUF ACTING DOUCHEY, LET’S POKE HIM WITH STICKS!” because that’s the kind of simple morality tale that plays here in the cat-o-sphere. And you know, it wouldn’t be totally wrong. But in the interests of fairness, it should be pointed out that there are some contextual reasons why Shia Labeouf might be trying to communicate in metrosexual slam poem that go beyond his personal preference.

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Luther Campbell, aka Uncle Luke, is surely best known for writing songs like “Me So Horny” and “Pop That Coochie” with 2 Live Crew, but he has warranted mention on this site a few times before, like when he starred in a Sundance short where he has sex with some naked zombies. Basically, it’s not like he’s been sitting around his townhouse waiting for a comeback on Omelets with the Stars or something. Today he’s back in the news, having written an editorial for the Miami New Times referring to Spike Lee as “Hollywood’s resident house negro.” Uncle Luke has apparently been writing this New Times column for quite some time, but hardly any of us noticed until he started sh*tting on Spike Lee because we’re terrible.

Screw Spike Lee. Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained is a brilliant flick that more accurately depicts the African American experience than any of the 15 movies about black culture Lee’s directed in his lifetime.
[...]
Lee needs to get over himself. He’s upset because Tarantino makes better movies. The man who put Malcolm X on the big screen is Hollywood’s resident house negro; a bougie activist who wants to tell his fellow white auteurs how they can and can’t depict African Americans.
He complains that Tarantino uses “n*gger” too much (100 times) in Django Unchained, but show me a white man in the 1800s who wasn’t dropping n-bombs left and right.
Tarantino is one of Tinseltown’s most clever directors. Some of the most brutal scenes in Django Unchained are metaphors for the unfair racial inequality African-Americans still experience today. For instance, Leonardo DiCaprio’s plantation owner character Calvin Candie trains some of his male slaves to fight to the death in a sport called “Mandingo Fighting.”
When one of the slaves refuses to fight, Candie threatens to feed him to his wild dogs. That scene is analogous to professional boxing where white promoters control black fighters through fear and intimidation.
In another scene, a bunch of slaves are shocked to see Django riding a horse since blacks were never allowed to have one. That’s like the cops who stare at and then pull over the dude who is driving a Bentley on South Beach.
While on the horse, Django tells the slaves that he’ll treat them worse than any white man ever will. That’s the truth about blacks in positions of authority in today’s corporate America. They will treat blacks worse than any white boss every could.
Lee could never pull off a movie like this. When he’s not being an ass from his court side seats during New York Knicks games, he’s making bull crap films that most African Americans cannot relate to. [MiamiNewTimes/Luke's Gospel]

Obviously, I liked Django Unchained quite a bit, and I’m almost positive I didn’t come away from it with a rosier view of slavery or more desensitized to violence. I generally like Tarantino and think Spike Lee is generally the black version of Oliver Stone, a guy who claims many causes but none more than self-aggrandizement. In short, kind of a twat. That said, between this and Armond White calling Sam Jackson an Uncle Tom (I disagree with his analysis, but he made the occasional valid point), I’m a little uncomfortable with how quickly arguments over this film seem to devolve into vicious personal attacks. Which is to say, I can think of at least one more Mandingo Fighting parallel that should make us all a bit queasy about cheering too hard for this feud. Can’t we agree to disagree? I mean you didn’t hear white people calling each other race traitors because they didn’t like Crash. And it would’ve been just as valid because that movie was an embarrassment. Or The King’s Speech. In fact, if ever there was a white version of an Uncle Tom, it’s Colin Firth, that repressed motherf*cker.

Unless you’re well versed in obscure celebrity beefs, you might not remember that, as of last March, Human Centipede director Tom Six had planned to sue his star, Dieter Laser, for breach of contract for pulling out of The Human Centipede 3. Laser’s reason? I shit you not, creative disagreements. God only knows what had to be in a script for a guy who played an evil doctor who stitches people’s mouths to their assh*les to object to it, but luckily this story has a happy ending: Laser and Six have made up and will be re-uniting for The Human Centipede 3, the most hotly-anticipated movie about shit eaters since Rock of Ages. I’m told this one will be 500% more medically accurate.

Last March, it was reported that Dutch filmmaker Six, who wrote and directed both 2010′s Human Centipede (First Sequence) and the following year’s The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence), was threatening to sue Laser for breach of contract. At the time, Ilona Six — Tom Six’s sister and the co-producer of the Human Centipede series — issued a statement claiming that Laser’s ego had “grown to laughably big proportions,” that the actor had demanded “unacceptable script changes,” and that he had backed out of the project “only seven weeks prior to shooting.”

“Look, all I ask is three things: I don’t want to play that stupid doctor, I don’t want to see any a-to-m scenes, and I get to fight a giant spider in the third act.”

The producer has now confirmed to EW that the lawsuit has been dropped and Laser, who memorably portrayed a deranged surgeon in the first film, will play a lead role in the franchise’s third entry. Laser will not, however, play the same character he did in Human Centipede. According to the producer, Laser and Human Centipede 2 star Laurence R. Harvey are set to play a new, villainous duo “with a storyline no one will expect.” Ilona Six also announced that “a big American celebrity” is set to appear in the film, which will start shooting in the U.S. this May. Finally, the producer confirmed the third film will feature a human centipede of more than 500 people.

That big American celebrity? You guessed it, Frank Stallone.

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Over the weekend, Spike Lee told Vibe TV that he won’t be seeing Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained, because it’s disrespectful. I don’t know how he knows that without having seen it, but whenever people don’t see a movie, I like to imagine them saying “here’s my impression of the audience for Miracle at St. Anna.”

“I cant speak on it ’cause I’m not gonna see it,” Lee said. “All I’m going to say is that it’s disrespectful to my ancestors. That’s just me… I’m not speaking on behalf of anybody else.”

I guess “speaking on it” doesn’t include what he just said or what he said on Twitter, because he also Tweeted the following:

American Slavery Was Not A Sergio Leone Spaghetti Western.It Was A Holocaust.My Ancestors Are Slaves.Stolen From Africa.I Will Honor Them.

— Spike Lee (@SpikeLee) December 22, 2012

“@ba_benny_boy @spikelee its just a movie damn spike”Wrong.Birth Of A Nation Got Black Folks Lynced.Media Is Powerful.DON’T SLEEP.WAKE UP YO

— Spike Lee (@SpikeLee) December 22, 2012

While Spike Lee has a history of saying dumb things (accidentally retweeting an elderly couple’s address while trying to incite mob violence against George Zimmerman being only one of the more recent) and of publicly criticizing Tarantino, I don’t want to just dismiss what he says out of hand because of who he is. Though I will say that if you’re trying to do intellectual cultural criticism, maybe a phone that capitalizes every word and makes you sound like semi-literate spambot isn’t the best tool.

As for the criticism, I’m not sure what it even is. That you’re not allowed to make genre films about serious subjects? That every slave movie should be Roots? The holocaust is a terrible comparison. “Slavery was a holocaust! You don’t see Tarantino making three-hour spaghetti westerns about the holocaust, do you? I mean, other than that three-hour holocaust western he made three years ago!”

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If the 24-hour news cycle wasn’t a joke before, it certainly is now. Presumably desperate for SOME kind of story in the aftermath of the election, CNN’s Don Lemon, who I’d never heard of before today, yesterday tweeted “Said hi to @JonahHill in hotel. Think he thought i was bellman. Didn’t know his name til bellman told me. A lesson to always be kind.”

Yes, quite the lesson. Sometimes you go up to say hi to a guy, and he says hi back, but he doesn’t do it good enough and you’re like, “Whatever, jerk, I don’t even know your name!” Hey, Mother Goose! It’s your cousin, Marvin Goose! You know that new fable you’re looking for? Well listen to this!

Because CNN is an important hard news channel, they had Lemon on Soledad O’Brien’s morning show this morning to “set the record straight.” It’s a very important story, and I considered it my journalistic duty to transcribe the story exactly as Lemon told it:

“I was stuck in an airport in Cincinnati for six hours, because a cab driver wanted to take a picture with me. I missed the cutoff for my bag. Listen, Jonah Hill doesn’t owe me anything, and he may have been having a bad day, but he treated me like the help.

I basically just wanted to say ‘I like you, I think you’re funny.’ I didn’t remember his name, I was checking out of the hotel. And he walked by, and I said, and he just kinda just, kinda like… oh. Like I was the help. And so then he walked by, and so I was like ‘Maybe you misunderstood, I just wanted to tell you that I think you’re really funny.’ And he just kinda like gave me the wet handshake, kinda like ohh, and just, like ehhh, and then walked away.

And so I looked at the Bellman, and I said, what’s that guy’s name? And he said ‘Jonah Hill,’ and I went ‘Oh,’ and he went ‘ohhh. And he was like ‘…yeah. right.’

And so, it normally doesn’t bother me. But I was DONE, because I had been taught to always be kind to people.”

Let us not forget, this man is in charge of telling stories for a living. Can you imagine if Don Lemon been on the ground during one of history’s real crises? “That’s right, John. I was on the scene when the Shah addressed the protesters. The Shah kinda came up to them and was like, ‘hey, I just wanted to tell you you’re really treasonous,’ and then the students were just kinda like ‘ehh,’ and the Shah just sorta gave them a limp sorta wave, and they were like ‘ohh,’ and then I saw the Savak and the Savak and I looked at each other and they were just kinda like ‘…oh,’ and I was like ‘ahh, yeah… right.’ But I was DONE, because my great aunt June always taught me that having secret police was kind of like whatever. Also I was feeling really kind of pleh because I waited three hours at the falaffel restaurant that night. “

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