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‘Slauson Rec’ Review: A Documentary About Shia LaBeouf’s Acting Class — and His Anger Issues — Is More Appalling Than Fascinating
It's a two-and-a-half-hour slog through the theater experiment LaBeouf led. But it's really a vérité exploitation film about a celebrity in meltdown.
Yet it also functions as a vérité exploitation film, since the only thing in it that’s actually interesting is watching Shia LaBeouf parade himself as a kind of acting guru and mentor, only to descend into an increasingly furious and abusive and unhinged place that leaves us with the profound question, “What in the fuck’s name is going on here?” His volatile acting-coach showmanship feels like it’s part of a tradition, stretching all the way back to Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler and incorporating the exhibitionistic ethos of the let-it-all-hang-out, acting-as-self-actualization thing that defined the experimental theater movements of the late ’60s and ’70s. He’s just throwing stuff against the wall, using his heady psychodramatic acting-coach jargon and tough-love “I’m doing this for you!” personality to turn anything and everything into an “encounter session.” And given that these are not professional actors, or even (in most cases) people who aspire to be, LaBeouf’s words to them, full of deadly serious jabber about empathy and ego, are pumped up with an intensity that feels overdone and inappropriate.
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