Où est Le Boeuf?

Shia LaBeouf.

seriously.

I caught a few minutes of an episode of "Even Stevens" a few weeks ago, and I can say that I get why studios wanted to give him a shot. He was like 11 and had all of this weird, adult bravado and charisma. But why he's been in 15 movies in the 5 years since The Even Stevens Movie is a mystery to me.

That bizarre, premature adultness that we've seen in everyone from McCauley Caulkin to Dakota Fanning comes with the heavy price of age. And that dark mistress has been no less kind to young Shia, yet Hollywood has somehow put on a mother's blinders, and continues to employ him. You can practically hear these tittering sycophants tripping over each other with clumsy praise: "oh! look at my little Shia! just like a young Harrison Ford! He'll be the next Dustin Hoffman! What a talent! Listen to that husky voice!! He sounds just like a little man! Look at his two eyes, brown hair, and average build! He could play a president!"

He has an online fan club. I think that's gotta be worth something. Rider Strong doesn't have one anymore.

Shia, as I like to call him (that's actually not true. I like to call him "shia la-boof," with extra emphasis on the "boof," because it is hilarious to me. Call it childish. I'm comfortable with that), is often compared to the young versions of great actors. He was of course selected by George "the robot who forgot how to love" Lucas and (more so) Steven Spielberg to play Indiana Jones's son in this summer's Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and (also by Spielberg) as the human lead in the previous summer's heinous crime against pop culture, Transformers. Spielberg saw in Shia a young Tom Hanks.

Suffice it to say, I don't. I don't see Bachelor Party or Joe Versus the Volcano when I see Shia LaBeouf. At best, I see a young Matthew Modine. I see someone who is for some inexplicable reason continually hired, due to his relative "normalness," or something, while his contemporaries wallow in television and in bit roles in marginally successful comedies. I see someone that I hope with all my might will be out of the national spotlight by the end of this very decade.

Hopefully Y: The Last Man will be Shia's Full Metal Jacket, and Eagle Eye his Vision Quest.

Wow, Apparently I really do hate Shia LeBeouf. Maybe I'm just angry because I hate Matthew Modine (also, apparently). I was going to close this entry with Matthew Modine's April appearance on The O'Reilly Factor, but, believe it or not, even YouTube doesn't have everything. So instead, here's this: