Entertainment
Shia LaBeouf’s Rat Tail Seduces Homeless Women In R-Rated Netflix Road Drama
By Robert Scucci
| Published
I hated every single minute of American Honey (2016), and it’s rare for me to find zero redeeming qualities in a film. It’s not that it’s objectively terrible. A quick trip to Rotten Tomatoes, where it holds a 79 percent approval rating, does all the heavy lifting there. It’s 163 minutes of a young woman trying to find herself while selling magazines with a bunch of other wanderers, but something about this one really rubbed me the wrong way.
I think the problem I have with American Honey is that there’s no real goal or dream to latch onto. It’s static, and while that was probably writer-director Andrea Arnold’s intention, it didn’t land for me. I’m just not the right audience for this kind of movie. I like straightforward storytelling, and American Honey is pure slice of life. I don’t hate slice-of-life outings, but I still need some kind of goal, moral, or takeaway, and I never found one here.
This could have been distilled into 90 minutes and been just as effective. Even then, I don’t think I’d feel any differently about American Honey. I had the same reaction to Nomadland, so take that for what it’s worth.
Nearly 3 Hours Of Nothing Much At All
American Honey centers on Star (Sasha Lane). She lives in Oklahoma with her abusive father and acts as the primary caretaker for her younger siblings. She dumpster dives for food and lives a miserable life. You want to root for her because she’s clearly been dealt a bad hand and wants something better. She could take night classes a library, crash with a friend while getting on her feet, find a shelter in another town to escape her abusive family while still keeping tabs on her siblings from a safe but reachable distance. It wouldn’t be easy, but it’s doable.
Instead, Star meets Jake (Shia LaBeouf with a hideous rat tail haircut), who likes causing scenes while dancing at K-Mart. Their eyes lock and she’s instantly smitten. She abandons her siblings because she’s completely sold on becoming a traveling magazine sales person with Jake and his ragtag group of miscreants, led by the super sexy but manipulative Krystal (Riley Keough).
Here’s how the rest of American Honey plays out. Jake trains Star in sales. Star doesn’t like how Jake lies during his door-to-door pitches because it says everything you need to know about his moral compass. Star and Jake fall in love, or at least Star thinks they do. Krystal gets mad that Jake’s numbers are slipping since Star joined the crew. Krystal makes Jake massage her with lotion in a motel room while Star watches, marking her territory in what her mind is the most humiliating way possible.
Day after day, Star gets in the van, wakes up in a new state, and repeats the cycle. She sells a ton of “subscriptions,” but she’s really just running a game on a string of male suitors. She never fully commits to prostitution, but she plays the part just enough to make a disportionate amount cash for her exploits under the guise of working a low-level sales scam job. Shia LaBeouf’s rat tail flaps gently in the breeze when he admits he’s been stealing valuables from every house he enters. Star and Jake roll around in the grass, people get betrayed, more magazines are sold. Yawn.
You Can Trace The Origin Of The First Time Machine To Somebody Trying To Stop This Movie From Being Made
Call me old fashioned, but I like my movies to tell a story. It doesn’t matter if it’s straight-forward, esoteric, non-linear, or fragmented. There still needs to be something holding it all together. At its core, American Honey uses its slice-of-life approach to show Star’s struggles, but we only get fleeting glimpses of where she came from and where she might be going. I understand that this is probably the point, and that I’m just not picking up what it’s throwing down, but it frustrated me because there’s some interesting stuff happening throughout, but we only see it on a surface level. Probably another intentional artistic choice. It’s a subversive way to deliver social commentary on this kind of lifestyle, but this movie screams to be more visceral and cathartic by latching onto something tangible. It doesn’t do that, so it feels like a complete waste of time.
Star is a complex character, shaped by her unstable upbringing. The same could be said for everyone she’s working with as they bounce between motels and sell subscriptions just to scrape together a per diem and party their way through their teens and 20s. Everyone is running from something, and whatever that something is must be bad enough for this life to feel like a better option. Most of these characters are probably trying to be good people, even if their instincts are completely misguided. That’s what’s interesting to me. Watching them all operate in this kind of limbo for a prolonged period of time is a disservice to the kind of resilience that’s being actively celebrated in American Honey.
Except for Jake. He’s in full-on chode mode for the entire movie, and every single scene he’s in makes me wish time moved faster.
My disappointment with American Honey comes from how many compelling stories are sitting right there in front of you, but always just slightly out of reach. Every character has some idiosyncracy worth exploring, but instead we get a long sizzle reel of their antics as a collective. Even as a sizzle reel, it still clocks in at nearly three hours. The whole thing feels like young-adult nomad porn; the kind of fantasy about running away you have when you’re 15, when all you think you need to survive is the prospect of dry humping and occasionally blowing up bottle rockets.
American Honey is streaming on Netflix. Watch it. Or don’t. I don’t care.
Entertainment
One dashboard, 20+ AI models — get ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and more for $79
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Credit: ChatPlayground AI
If you’ve ever copied the same prompt into three different AI tools just to see which one gives the best answer, you’re not alone. Different models excel at different things — but juggling tabs and subscriptions gets old fast.
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The Unlimited Plan means unlimited messages per month, making it ideal for startups, product teams, marketers, and prompt engineers who run experiments nonstop. You also get priority support and early access to new features and future models.
If you’re already paying for multiple AI tools — or constantly switching between them — this consolidates everything into one streamlined platform.
Mashable Deals
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Topics
Artificial Intelligence
Entertainment
The best Dyson vacuums actually make vacuuming fun: See my favorites for 2026
Read my full review of the Dyson PencilVac.
The Dyson PencilVac Fluffycones takes the small space vacuum to a whole new level. It’s unbelievably slim and lightweight, and seamlessly scoots into tight crevices near furniture that don’t get dusted often enough. If there are certain spots in your home that you avoid cleaning just because it’s too tight of a squeeze, the PencilVac is about to change your life.
“Fluffy” references the ultra-soft material cushioning the four brush rolls, which provide a gloriously glide on hardwood you don’t want to scratch. The PencilVac’s short battery life and limited suction power wouldn’t be ideal in homes with more than just a few rooms or lots of carpeting.
No stick vacuum takes “stick” as literally as the Dyson PencilVac Fluffycones. It doesn’t have a main body with a battery pack, handle, or dustbin like any other traditional cordless vacuum. It’s just a wand and a funky cleaning head with four microfiber cones as brush rolls — the coolest little vacuum that’s truly grab and go.
The whole vacuum can fit just about anywhere, and tight squeezes are even more accessible with a cleaning head that can spin a full 360 degrees. The agile design led me to so many awkward dusty spots that other cordless vacuums can’t comfortably reach: the small chunks of floor between furniture and the wall, between island and bar stool legs, beside the toilet, or under the low-hanging credenza. The PencilVac had commendable hard floor performance in my apartment, offering near-perfect pickup of daily debris like cat hair and long human hair, kitchen crumbs, multiple types of cat litter, and dust.
Oh yeah, the Fluffycones cleaning head has two dust-detecting lasers. One laser projects out the front to point out the hair and tiny flecks lying ahead, and one laser projects out the back to illuminate anything that you just missed. It’s so satisfying that you’ll accidentally end up cleaning for much longer than you meant to, only to be cut off by the pitiful battery life.
With the precision nozzle wand attached, the PencilVac weighs in at just 2.9 pounds. This uniquely compact design makes cleaning cobwebs out of ceiling corners or dusting baseboards so much less of a pain. The wand’s diameter is just 1.5 inches the entire way down, which made it possible to vacuum behind my dresser without pulling it out a foot from the wall.
Entertainment
RAMageddon is making it harder to find the best Windows laptops. These 10 are actually worth it.
I highly recommend the Acer Swift X 14 for creatives who need a Windows laptop with a discrete GPU for running the most demanding sorts of apps. That includes photo and video editors, graphic designers, and animators.
Most professional creatives need a Windows laptop with a dedicated graphics card to handle their intensive workloads. I like the $2,000 Acer Swift X 14 with a top-end Intel Core Ultra 9 285H CPU and RTX 5070 graphics because it’s super powerful, fairly priced, equipped with a glorious OLED screen, and long-lasting, relatively speaking. You can go with a gaming laptop instead, but most aren’t nearly as compact.
This 14-inch desktop replacement is just as fast as an M5 MacBook Pro when it comes to demanding multi-core scenarios (i.e., most creative tasks). In my testing, its RTX 5070 GPU was more than capable of running graphically taxing games like Cyberpunk 2077 at over 100fps at 1080p resolution without the help of any AI upscaling technology, so it’s very well-suited for the likes of Adobe After Effects and Premiere Pro. (And other AAA games, obviously.)
For what it’s worth, I also tried a $1,700 Acer Swift X 14 AI with an AMD processor and RTX 5060 graphics, and the Intel/RTX 5070 version performed much better. The AMD/RTX 5060 one had 17 percent worse multi-core performance, so it couldn’t compete with the MacBook Pro, and it could barely run Cyberpunk at its 60fps minimum without upscaling tech. It also had a much worse battery life of about 6.5 hours per charge. My go-to RTX 5070 model lasted just over 10 hours, which is fantastic for a laptop with a dedicated GPU.
Note that the Swift X 14 is not a Copilot+ PC, meaning it doesn’t have a super-powerful NPU for running on-device AI tasks. This isn’t a deal-breaker for creatives, but it is for serious machine learning engineers and software developers.
The Swift X 14 comes with plenty of creator-forward ports (like a microSD card slot) as well as a crisp, vivid 120Hz OLED touchscreen. It’s a real attention-getter on an otherwise plain laptop. You can’t draw on it with the included stylus, but you can do so on its haptic trackpad. It functions kind of like a built-in drawing pad.
One dashboard, 20+ AI models — get ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and more for $79
Amazon Sundays: Mornings in the Garden
