It seems Shia Labeouf might soon be taking a much-deserved break from doing terrible movies.  According to the LA Times, LaBeouf and Tom “Captain Handsome” Hardy are both attached to The Wettest County in the World, a John Hillcoat project based on a super-violent book about 1920s bootleggers.  Hillcoat’s BFF Nick Cave will be adapting. (side note: if Nick Cave and Joss Whedon had a headbutting contest, who’d win?)

Cave will be adapting Matt Bondurant’s “novel based on a true story” about Bondurant’s own family history, which mentions his great uncle surviving having his throat slit by robbers, and a magazine writer who shows up to write about the place and finds at the local hospital a man with “legs meticulously shattered from ankle to hip” and another “castrated, with the by-products of the deed deposited in a jar of moonshine.”

Uh… yes, please.

TOM HARDY: My goodness!  The robbers castrated you?
SHIA LABEOUF:  Sure did.  Cut off mah pinkie too.

VEST FIGHT!

Biggie v. Tupac.  Mel Gibson v. That Russian Chick. 50 Cent v. one of those other rappers.  These are the celebrity beefs we sort of remember.  But what about Shia LaBeouf vs. Frankie Muniz from Malcolm in the Middle?  We should really check in with that one, because I’d never heard of it before five seconds ago.  On something called The Bert Show, the hosts asked Shia LaBeouf about his streak of six number one movies.  To which Labeouf responded:

“While that’s flattering as hell, you could have put Frankie Muniz into any of the movies I’ve been in and it would’ve still been No.1.”

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BOOM!  At first I assumed Shia was just taking a page out of my pick-a-random-celebrity-to-use-as-your-whipping-boy playbook. But Popeater dug up an old interview to prove that the Frankie Muniz thing isn’t just a recent phenomenon.

The feud between the young actors began back in 2003 when LaBeouf told EW about his feelings about the star child at the time.
“I used to see him at premieres and stuff and it would always be like he was looking down on me, and then it turned into we’re equal, and then it turned into ‘Oh Frankie, I know that guy,’” LaBeouf said in the interview.
The DJ then asked if LaBeouf was concerned that Muniz might hear this and come up to him at a party, and then it got nastier.  “I don’t go to many parties and I don’t really hang out in Frankie Muniz-type zones,” LaBeouf said.

HEYO!  Take that, guy no one has thought about in the last five years!  For his part, Frankie Muniz then fired back in a commendably properly-spelled Twitter post:

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I never would’ve guessed it after watching Shia LaBeouf chug a five-hour energy, down a Patron shot, drink a Heineken, and then wink at the camera, but according to a new revelation, Oliver Stone’s Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps got paid for product placement. I know it sounds like Star Wars, love, but it’s true.

Oliver Stone said Wednesday that his “Wall Street” sequel benefited “enormously” from product placement, which helped expand a tight budget without compromising the integrity of the film.

Of course not.  All critiques of greed should include copious advertisements.  “Sad about the bailout, Winnie?  Here, have an ice cold, triple-hops brewed Heineken.  That always cheers me up when I’m feeling down.”

“Fox is known as a tight studio,” he said. “We needed help, and we took it where we could without, I think, prostituting the movie.
“No big, big cash, no Gillette shaving cream,” he added. “There was no scene that we did out of the way specifically to accommodate.”

What could I do? I was like a monkey dancing on a razor blade. We didn’t sell our souls.  It’s not like Shia Labeouf had to cut off a fing–

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Oliver Stone has won a best picture Oscar and delivered era-defining films on more than one occasion, his work inspiring everyone from the Gekko wannabes on the real Wall Street to the N-words who he says all love Scarface (his words, allegedly).  He might be the perfect director to deliver a film about American capitalism in that in both, the big question is, are they defined by their successes or their failures?  I don’t know the answer to that, I’m not a scientist.  But I can tell you that when Stone fails, he fails spectacularly.  In Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, Stone delivers a master class in how not to make a movie and creates a film which unintentionally mirrors the causes of the financial collapse it tries to dramatize — a pile of worthless elements cleverly configured to resemble something of value, but which is ultimately just a big stack of crap.

You can sense in it an attempt to define the financial excesses and failure of personal responsibility of the early 2000s era, but the scope is so broad and the critique so unfocused that it becomes little more than a pile of buzzwords.  MORTGAGE, LASER FUSION, CREDIT DEFAULT SWAPS, BLOGGING!  Only in this movie do mortgage-backed securities and alternative energy have anything to with each other.  For a project with A-list stars, a critically-acclaimed director, and a blockbuster release, it has to be one of the clumsiest screenplays ever to make it to film.  I suspect that the problem, like a 2003-era mortgage prospectus, was that NO ONE BOTHERED TO READ THE FINE PRINT.

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STONE: "No, no, your mistake, both drinks are for me, actually." LABEOUF: (*awkward attempt to smile*)

Today in Shocking News You’ll Never Believe, Shia Labeouf shared an Oliver Stone anecdote at the Money Never Sleeps premiere which seemed to suggest that the director can be, get this: foul-mouthed, egomaniacal, and difficult to work for.  It’s uncharacteristic behavior for a man famously rumored to have told a black screenwriter, “I bet you like Scarface. All n*ggers love Scarface.”  What a delight.

“We’re in the Adirondacks, and Josh Brolin and I are shooting this bike scene. And at one point I say to Josh a line — ‘You should look at yourself in the mirror first and see yourself. It might scare you,’” remembered LaBeouf. “I looked at the line for a couple of months and thought I’d go to Oliver and say, ‘You look at the mirror and look at yourself. It’s sort of repetitive. Why don’t we just cut one of those? Why don’t I say, Look at yourself. It might scare you.’ This is Oliver verbatim. He looks at me and goes, ‘I like mirror. I wrote Scarface. Go f*ck yourself.’” [Vulture]

I like to imagine Oliver Stone talking this way in all of his daily interactions.  “Hey buddy, I said ‘no mayo’.  I wrote Scarface.  Go f*ck yourself.”  “You call this a latte?  I wrote Scarface.”  “I wrote Scarface.  Your t*ts look stupid.  I’m just saying.”