10 Awesome Things In The Best Summer Movie Season Ever‏

8. No More Shia LaBeouf - Transformers: Age Of Extinction

The Scene: This time, the scene we're setting is actually more off-screen. Shia LaBeouf has had a funny old year, appearing in Danish miserablist Lars von Trier's four hour sextravaganza Nymphomaniac (where he played a man of indeterminate accent), ripping off comics creator Dan Clowes for a short film he directed, before having a public meltdown culminating in turning up to a red carpet even wearing a paper bag with "I'M NOT FAMOUS" scrawled across it. Not that the disappearance of LaBeouf from Hollywood was any great loss, since he'd be one of the worst parts of the Transformers franchise for a while now. Not only was his turn as Sam Witwicky annoying, grating and obnoxious, but this total dork's ability to pull girls way out of his league was starting to get a bit silly. Which is why we all breathed a sigh of relief when LaBeouf was absent from the fourth film in the series, instead tagging in Mark Wahlberg. Why It's Awesome: Because, for all of his sins - and there are many, from the rapping to the attempted murder of two Vietnamese gentlemen - Wahlberg is a pretty good actor. He's certainly put in more solid performances than LaBeouf has managed, even during the Even Stevens days. The Transformers series is an inherently ridiculous one, dealing as it does in giant robots from space who for some reason come to Earth and disguise themselves as commercial vehicles. Age Of Extinction went one further by introducing the Dinobots which, really? Dinobots? How is disguising yourself as a dinosaur in the modern day anything close to, well, a disguise? Having Wahlberg's down beaten, blue collar charm in the mix helped keep things a little more grounded. Relatively, anyway.