So Shia LaBeouf, noted coffee assaulter, released a short film yesterday called "HowardCantour.com." It revolves around the musings of a film critic who considers himself a "warrior." The self-important fool at the heart of the film can't come to grips with how much of a nothing he truly is. It's quite sad.
In short, Shia's short was almost textbook punching down: a wealthy and famous movie star taking potshots at the trolls who review movies online. As such, I was content to ignore it. But. BUT. It turns out that Shia LaBeouf plagiarized the content of the film from a relatively obscure cartoonist. Buzzfeed's Jordan Zakarin has the details:
The piece stars Jim Gaffigan as an online film critic named Howard Cantour, and it is almost a direct adaptation of Justin M. Damiano, a 2007 comic written and drawn by famed artist Daniel Clowes.
Nowhere in the promotion for or credits of the film does LaBeouf mention the Clowes comic; Eric Reynolds, longtime editor of Clowes’ comics and associate publisher at Fantagraphics, called the film "shameless theft!"
"The first I ever heard of the film was this morning when someone sent me a link. I’ve never spoken to or met Mr. LaBeouf," Clowes told BuzzFeed. "I’ve never even seen one of his films that I can recall — and I was shocked, to say the least, when I saw that he took the script and even many of the visuals from a very personal story I did six or seven years ago and passed it off as his own work. I actually can’t imagine what was going through his mind."
Busted, LaBeouf apologized. But, in a shocking twist, he plagiarized the apology too. You can click through to the Buzzfeed piece for the details on that.
I don't have a ton to add to this, except to note the obvious: A filmmaker who abuses an easy target like film critics for being uninspired hacks and then gets caught red-handed acting like an uninspired hack himself is not a filmmaker who needs to be taken seriously. Shia should stick to the punching robots and leave thinking big thoughts to those who can handle it.