Where’s The Beef? Shia LaBeouf Goes Full Frontal In New Sigur Ros Video

Icelandic band Sigur Ros is engaged in a cool project with their new album; they have given filmmakers a modest budget and free reign to create whatever imagery comes to mind when listening to songs off the record. If you know Sigur Ros you know that the band's music is quite non-narrative, so the sky can truly be the limit.

Israeli director Alma Har'el has taken this opportunity and gotten a lot of attention - by showing Shia LaBeouf naked in her video. Har'el is a commercial and video director whose doc Bombay Beach won at Tribeca last year, and her take on Fjögur píanó is about two junkies trapped in a repeating cycle of being junkies. I imagine some of this stuff comes from her time shooting Bombay Beach, which is about a meth-addled community on the shores of California's Salton Sea.

I'm less interested in Shia's wang - early reports made me think this video was a puppetry of the penis kind of thing - and more interested in the actor's continuing desperate attempt to be something more than the annoying kid in a bunch of Spielberg-produced movies. LaBeouf's general search for personal and artistic meaning was destined to have him end up playing a junkie, one of the ultimate "I'm such a serious actor, man!" parts. 

I wonder where LaBeouf is going to end up. The trajectory of a child star can be easy to chart in advance, but sometimes they surprise you. I think LaBeouf's endless desire to be taken seriously as an artist is going to be what keeps him from going full on Renfro in the end.