TODAY IN EXISTENTIAL BUFFOONERY

Shia Labeouf recently left a Broadway production of Orphans over “creative differences” (the producers’ words), with co-star Alec Baldwin. Which wouldn’t be particularly newsworthy in itself, except that The Beef himself posted a bunch of inside-baseball emails between himself and the director, himself and Alec Baldwin, and himself and actor Tom Sturridge on his Twitter account, detailing just what went wrong.

Apparently, it was an “incompatibility” between LaBeouf and Baldwin that led to the departure. Now, I hesitate to paint Shia Labeouf with the “existential buffoon” label – a phenomenon we’re obviously quite fond of here – because having a personality that tends towards sensitive, overwrought, and dramatic is basically what makes actors good at their jobs. Still, I don’t what else to call it when a guy sends an apology email and prefaces it by quoting liberally from an Esquire essay called “How to Be a Man.”

Here’s Shia’s email to 72-year-old Orphans director Daniel Sullivan (which, again, was posted by Shia himself):

My dad was a drug dealer. He was a sh-t human. But he was a man. He taught me how to be a man. What I know of men, Alec is-

A man is good at his job. Not his work, not his avocation, not his hobby. Not his career. His job.

A man can look you up and down and figure some things out. Before you say a word, he makes you. From your suitcase, from your watch, from your posture. A man infers.

A man owns up. That’s why Mark McGwire is not a man. A man grasps his mistakes. He lays claim to who he is, and what he was, whether he likes them or not.

Some mistakes, though, he lets pass if no one notices. Like dropping the steak in the dirt.

He does not rely on rationalizations or explanations. He doesn’t winnow, winnow, winnow until truths can be humbly categorized, or intellectualized, until behavior can be written off with an explanation.

A man knows his tools and how to use them – just the ones he needs. Knows which saw is for what, how to find the stud.

A man does not know everything. He doesn’t try. He likes what other men know.

A man can tell you he was wrong. That he did wrong. That he planned to.

He can tell you when he is lost. He can apologize, even if sometimes it’s just to put an end to the bickering.

Alec, I’m sorry for my part of a dis-agreeable situation. – Shia. [transcription via Jezebel]

“Look, my dad may have been a piece of shit drug dealer, but at least he taught me that real men eat dirt steaks, unlike that pussy Mark McGwire.”

I’m not sure if it speaks better or worse of Shia that he stole the dumbest parts of that email from a printed pep rally for dipshit finance guys published in 2009 in Esquire. At least he didn’t write them himself? But he still thought they were worth repeating? Here’s the original:

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The Hollywood Reporter has a fawning and lengthy cover story on Hugh Jackman (like, reasonable fawning, not psychopathic, overwrought Esquire-style fawning), and much of it confirms what we already knew – that Hugh Jackman is friendly and super-nice to pretty much everyone. “Open and immensely likable,” as the writer describes him. But there’s also some juicy stuff too, like how Jackman’s 13-years-older wife Deborrah (57) gets annoyed with the constant gay rumors:

In addition to his family, Jackman has surrounded himself with friends, including 11 high school buddies who accompanied him on a reunion trip to Japan four years ago and Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus (whose micro-finance campaign Jackman actively supports).
Despite these friends and a seemingly idyllic life, Jackman admits rumors about his sexuality have taken a greater toll than previously acknowledged, especially on his wife. “Just recently, it bugs her,” he says, blaming the Internet, which she frequents more than he does. (Jackman largely sticks to cricket sites and The Economist.) “She goes: ‘It’s big. It’s everywhere!’ “

And then there’s my favorite part, about how Jackman’s friend Tony Robbins (the famously banana-fingered self-help guru) helped Jackman overcome his anxiety, which, oddly, Jackman says gets on movie sets but not onstage. Anxiety he has since overcome by naming the different sides of his personality.

Robbins suggested the strapping 6-foot-3 superstar name the secure and insecure sides of his personality. “Frank was the more confident, and Charles was the other,” says Jackman.
“I always thought strength came from getting rid of that fear,” he adds. “And Tony said: ‘Charles is your sensitivity. Charles makes you question. Charles makes you work harder. When you walk on set, thank Charles for everything.’ ” He pauses. “Tony really transformed my life.” [THR]

The craziest part about this is that Hugh Jackman is Australian. In California, we have an insanely high tolerance for loopy dipwads, and this is par for course, but if you told the average Australian guy that you had names for two of your alter-egos, I guarantee his nickname for all three of you would be “pooftah.” If whatever weird stuff Tony Robbins tells you helps you get through the day, fine, but if he’s really in the business of self-help, a central tenet of his philosophy should be “maybe don’t tell anyone else about old Drop Dead Fred and Chris Gaines. Like, ever.”

Writing about Megan Fox as the modern-day Marilyn Monroe, as in, finding elaborate ways to say “people are interested in her because she’s pretty,” is already pretty passé at this point, so if you’re going to do it, you better pontificate, hard. And Esquire’s Stephen Marche doesn’t disappoint in his new profile of Fox, piling on some of the most embarrassingly flowery prose you’ll read outside of North Korea’s propaganda department. But hey, if you’re going to publish a seven-page photospread of Megan Fox in a fancy magazine, you’ll need some lorem ipsum text to go underneath, and Stephen Marche has got you covered. He starts – STARTS – by tricking Megan Fox into agreeing with his metaphor about Aztec human sacrifice.

Deep in her house, Megan Fox and I are discussing human sacrifice. I tell her about an Aztec ritual practiced five hundred years ago in ancient Mexico during the feast of Toxcatl, when the Aztecs picked a perfect youth to live among them as a god. He was a paragon, beautiful and fit and healthy, with ideal proportions.

Fox has been telling me about the toll that celebrity has taken on her, how the only way to keep from bending to the outside is to bend within. [...]

The sacrifice’s year was filled with constant delight, I tell her. He danced through the streets adorned in luxurious clothes given to him by the master, decked in flowers and incense, playing magical flutes that brought prosperity to the whole world. He had eight servants and four virgins to attend to his every need, and could wander wherever he pleased. But at the end of the year, when the feast of Toxcatl came around again, the perfect youth had to smash his flutes and climb the stairs of the great temple, where the priests would cut out his heart and offer it, still beating, to the sun.

Megan Fox is not an ancient Aztec…

Phew, for a second there, I was worried this magazine profile was a time warp. I almost punched a Mexican dude in self defense. “WHO DOES META WORK PHOR?!”

...She’s a screen saver on a teenage boy’s laptop, a middle-aged lawyer’s shower fantasy, a sexual prop used to sell movies and jeans.

“It’s so similar. It totally is,” she says quietly.

“She sat for a moment in reverent silence, awed into a fugue state by the validity of my overwrought metaphor.”

Poor actors. Their “yes-and” improv training leaves them vulnerable to invasion by thought parasites like this, like domesticated beasts bred for their gullibility. Please, elaborate on this hokey parallel, Megan Fox, reall make it your own:

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