A Vanity Fair article about it..
It started as performance art. It ended as
Boyhood.
KATEY RICH
It started as just another “crazy Shia LaBeouf art project,” as weird and self-indulgent as the time he sat in a Los Angeles art gallery and cried from behind a paper bag. But as #AllMyMovies, the LaBeouf movie marathon with LaBeouf in attendance, wraps up its run today at the Angelika Film Center in New York, it’s becoming something different—and something surprisingly poignant.
Twitter, or at least my corner of Film Twitter, exploded when the marathon began on Tuesday, with this year’s little-seen
Man Down. “Watch Shia LaBeouf watch his own terrible movies!” we crowed, with no small amount of schadenfreude. “Will he really manage to sit through
Transformers: Dark of the Moon?” we wondered. When he did, and looked as baffled by it as the rest of us, it was undeniably hilarious.
But like any joke that keeps going, it changed; Shia took a nap during
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, and we couldn’t help thinking of the physical toll this kind of stunt would have taken. Shia ordered pizza for the other people in the theater, and even though he still wasn’t speaking to his fellow moviegoers, he started seeming a bit more human. A writer for
Entertainment Weekly who sat next to him in the theater noted how easy it was to temporarily forget, and then remember with a jolt, that the actor breathing the same air was a real person at all.
The tide began to turn, even for us looky-loos just playing along on Twitter; to peek at
the schedule and then watch Shia watching himself as an animated penguin in
Surf’s Up was to retake that journey of watching him grow up on-screen, and glimpse again, through that silent live-stream feed, the boy who’s spent most of his life on camera. Thursday afternoon, when
The Even Stevens Movie began playing around two P.M., LaBeouf looked livelier than ever—laughing, staring with rapt attention, even wiping away some tears. It’s you watching the home movie of your own 12th-birthday party, just in a theater full of strangers, and all under the strange guise of art.
Is
The Even Stevens Movie Shia LaBeouf’s “Rosebud”—the device that transports him to an easier, simpler time, before
#IAmSorry and
plagiarism charges and
Kingdom of the Crystal Skull? We can’t really know—he’s an actor, after all, and these emotions we’re reading on the silent live stream could all be part of the “art.”
But #AllMyMovies can be
our Rosebud, at least a very Shia LaBeouf–specific one. Here’s the kid we made a star for some good reason way back when, who’s managed to make something fascinating and poignant out of the most navel-gazing art project imaginable. That’s more than you can say for many of the LaBeouf movies he’s spent two days watching. Who can’t help being eager to see what he brings us next?
