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Tag: Howard Cantour

  • Shia LaBeouf Announces Retirement

    It’s been a strange past few months for actor Shia LaBeouf. First he was accused of stealing ideas from Daniel Clowes’ “Justin M. Damiano” for his film “Howard Cantour.” Then he took to the air and hired a skywriter to write an apology for it. And that was followed by a bunch of peculiar tweets where he copied popular apologies from rappers Gucci Mane and Kanye West.

    And all of that was just since December of 2013. Not to mention the fight he had in London before that, and the huge meltdown he and his ex-girlfriend displayed on a Los Angeles street corner a while back.

    Well now, the 27-year old actor is in the news again for announcing his retirement. Apparently, with all of the ridicule he’s been taking in the last couple of months, he said he wants to give everything a rest for a little while, which is probably an attempt to get people to forget about his strange behavior. “Retiring from all public life [due to] the recent attacks against my artistic integrity,” tweeted LaBeouf.

    However, some might say that if he wanted to be forgotten for a while, he wouldn’t have tweeted something so newsworthy, because it’s bound to give him even more attention–which makes the actor seem like he may have a hidden agenda.

    Of course it’s possible that he’s using all of this attention to draw eyes to his up and coming film “Nymphomaniac,” a story that documents a woman’s sexual experiences throughout her lifetime. Reportedly, the actor had to send in pictures of his “junk” to be considered for the role.

    “The first info we got, and I’ll never forget this, because my entire team reacted with such fear. The first request from the production end, not from Lars, but from production, was pictures of my penis,” he said.

    Image via Wikimedia Commons

  • Shia Labeouf Might Face Legal Action For Plagiarism

    Who knew plagiarizing another persons work could result in legal ramifications? Almost everyone, but maybe not Shia Labeouf.

    On Monday, Labeouf debuted his short film Howard Cantour online and many people noticed the story line was similar to something they had read before.

    The story line of Howard Cantour “examines the life of an anguished online film critic.” That familiar story line could be found in the 2007 graphic novella Justin M. Damiamo by Daniel Clowes.

    Now it looks like Clowes may be looking to take legal action against Labeouf. According to Fantographics’ Eric Reynolds, Clowes’ publisher, the writer “is exploring his legal options.”

    Reynolds was “baffled” when he found out about LaBeouf plagiarizing Clowes’ work. “LaBeouf changed the name of the main character, but he used the comic as a direct script and storyboard. Clowes has a real melodramatic voice that is very idiosyncratic and LaBeouf just used the dialogue word for word. There is no ambiguity. There is no way that anybody wrote this but Dan Clowes. It just defies any kind of logic or good sense. This was so blatant and inexcusable that it was as baffling as it was appalling.”

    Labeouf took to his Twitter on Tuesday to apologize for plagiarizing Clowes’ work, explaining that he was sorry for not giving credit to Clowes during the process of making his short film and regretted plagiarizing his work.

    The actor has continued to apologize and talk about the plagiarism on Twitter.

    Even though Labeouf has flooded his Twitter account with apologies, Reynolds says he hasn’t reached out to Clowes to apologize to him directly. Said Reynolds, “As far as I know the only comments he has given were those late night Twitter comments a few nights ago.”

    The short film has since been taken down from the website.

    Image via Labeouf’s official Twitter account.