FURY - Sort Of A Movie Review and How Even A Pig Like Shia LaBeouf Occasionally Finds A Truffle

  

This entry has a lot less to do with the film “FURY” than I intended, but contains spoilers for the film anyhow ‘cause I’m kind of a dick like that, so if you haven’t had a chance to see Brad Pitt, Logan Lerman, Shia LeBouf and some other folk emoting at each other and killing a large assortment of of Nazis and whatnot in various spectacular ways, you might want to give this patch of bloggery a miss.

Of course this doesn’t apply if you have no interest in ever having anything to do with Shia Saide LaBeouf and his freakshow performance art/method-acting bullshit, in  which case it won’t matter since you won’t see it anyhow. Which, by the way, is the reason it took so long for me to see this and why I nearly missed this movie altogether in the first place.

LaBeouf is in fact shithouse-monkey insane in the most literal sense you can imagine, I suspect mostly because the jolly jokers he was saddled with as parents (a Vietnam-PTSD cursed alcoholic father and an Ah-Teest-jewelry-crap manufacturer mother)  decided to give him that joke-fop name and raise him on the streets in old, pre-gentrification Echo Park. His marginal grasp on reality is on full display in this movie.

The goofy little turd actually pulled one of his own teeth and sliced a scar into his own face for “authenticity”, and went for weeks living like an unwashed animal during the filming.

In case you think this is an unusual approach to “method” acting, you ain’t seen nothing — for the next movie he starred in (The Tax Collector) he got a full-front tattoo. We’re talking neck to beltline here, a real, no-bullshit, you-got-it-forever tattoo, not a single piece of which has anything to do with LeBouf or his life. It’s in fact the tattoo of a violent gangland tax-collector, including his street name (Creeper) in about 4” high letters all the way across his lower abdomen. Who does that shit?

The now-gap-toothed, tattooed goofball then got involved in creating a couple of “performance art” pieces including an anti-Trump installation which had the words “He Will Not Divide Us” on a wall above a live-streaming camera which encouraged people to say the phrase into the lens.

But it turns out that even in L.A., and regardless whether they’re personally sympathetic to the intent or not, people are only marginally cooperative with Hollywood turds-who-think-they’re-someone. Many of the less “woke” cynics spent most of their time explaining to the camera why Shia, the live-stream Viewers, Trump, Democrats, Republicans, and anyone else who happened across the installation should just piss off and go get a job instead of trying to pretend they’re worth a shit or are of more use than a mildly diverting amateur card trick. 

In the end, “He Managed To Divide Us After All” and, as with all self-serving Hollywood horse-nuggets, it turned out that it had more to do with the insufferable brain-damaged twat behind it than its purported main subject.

This 100% predictable outcome rather annoyed the LaBeoufster, who was spending his time hanging out in the area dressed like a hobo (CULTURAL APPROPRIATION!) which meant he shortly wound up in jail for assaulting someone who failed to properly comport to his Vision. 

At about the same time he was attending black-tie Hollywood red-carpet events wearing a full tux and a paper bag over his head that had hand-printed on it “I’m Not Famous Anymore”. Some sort of obscure statement about celebrity culture as far as anyone could tell, although it was mostly evaluated as “oh, that fucking idiot again” by virtually everyone in the industry, right down to TMZ and the people in the homeless dumpster tents outside the studio gates.

Since then, he’s been in and out of rehab as he’s a raging alcoholic, admits to repeatedly plagiarizing work in at least three different media (not even including a “how meta can you be today” plagiarized online apology he sent to another guy whose work he’d been caught plagiarizing) spends his spare time sexually, physically, and emotionally abusing his women, for which he’s currently being sued for a bazillion or so dollars, being fired from about 3/4 of the projects he’s ever been involved in for being a disruptive, abusive-to-everyone scumbag, bailing himself out of jail in every part of the country he’s turned up in, and in short, taking everything that is despicable about the Hollywood version of Common Folk to new, cartoon-level heights of rancid, self-entitled shit-bucketry.

The man is, in clinical terms, a complete and suppurating, hemorrhoidal asshole, even by Hollywood standards.

But to be fair, I am here talking about him, right? This puts him firmly into the Paris Hilton class of famous pestilential psychos — as with Paris, at the end of the day I know his name, and that's kind of the point with these sad-sack clowns.

And, without putting too fine a point on it “FURY” is a brilliant, if depressing, movie about the “if you’ve never been there you cannot possibly know” conversion of a regular human into a near-psychotic, homicidal, morality-impaired, front-line warrior in a real war, specifically right at the tail-end of WWII and located well inside Germany.

Trigger warning for those few of you who have served anywhere “interesting”, if you’ve got any unresolved issues from your time in the field, you probably want to get a handle on them before you see this thing. It’s fucking brutal and roughly 1000% accurate.

As LaBeouf’s character, a heavily damaged tank ammo-loader nick-named “Bible” says to the new, scared, never-seen-a-shot-fired green troop:

Boyd 'Bible' Swan : Wait until you see it.

Norman Ellison : See what?

Boyd 'Bible' Swan : What a man can do to another man.

So, it seems that movies which are immersed in psychosis, natural, fictional, or battle-induced, can benefit from LaBeouf’s presence after all. This is assuming, of course, that other cast members or the movie crew don't wind up stuffing him into a conveniently-handy drainage pipe in self-defense, which is apparently an ongoing concern if you hire the unhinged little fucker.

Seriously: A damned fine movie. Big thumbs up, even for LaBeouf, which is bitter gall in my mouth to admit.