“It's ok, we're Americans. We're here to help you!”

Psychic army-trained Jedi warriors, a hungry reporter looking for the story of a lifetime, and the war in Iraq—I can see how producers ate up the concept of The Men Who Stare at Goats in a meeting with writers Peter Straughan and Jon Ronson. However, the movie fell tragically short of the high expectations I had entering the theater.

Produced by George Clooney with first-time director Grant Heslov, who cowrote Clooney’s Academy Award nominated Good Night, and Good Luck, the story is an adaptation of British journalist Jon Ronson’s 2005 non-fiction book of the same title, which discussed the U.S. Army’s research into psychological and paranormal experimentation stretching back to the 1950s.

Set in 2003, the movie plays like a classic coming-of-age story. A bored, down and out reporter searches for success to get back the wife he lost. Blah, blah, blah. I’ve seen this type of movie hundreds of times. Stray goats and George Clooney won’t change the fact that the plot has been used so much that it’s now a cliché. In the right hands it could’ve been great, but the combination of an overused premise, disposable plot elements used for the sake of fluff, and gratuitous use of monologues and the song “More Than a Feeling” by Boston all contributed to this downer of a movie.

The film opens with an extreme close up of Brigadier General Dean Hopgood (Stephen Lang) in the 1980s as he stares intensely at his office wall. He then tells his assistant he’s leaving the office before trying to run through the wall as if he were Patrick Swayze in Ghost. After banging his head and falling flat on his back, the general simply says “damn.” This is the comedic range viewers can expect to see throughout the movie.

Flash forward to 2003. Reporter Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor) is eager to impress his wife who abruptly left him for his one-armed editor-in-chief. After fighting and succumbing to his boss’s one-armed headlock, Wilton decides to go to Iraq to write a terrific story on the war and win his wife back. Once there he finds he is unable to enter Iraq and watches as he is once again upstaged by other reporters who are able to move back and forth through Iraq easily. Wilton eventually meets Lyn Cassady (George Clooney) who Wilton previously heard of while covering a story on an Army vet who claimed to be able to kill animals by only staring at them. After talking, Cassady eventually agrees to let Wilton accompany him on a mission, and the two embark on a road trip through Iraq. Wilton hopes to find something newsy to write, while Cassady initially stays mum on his mission.

The movie took a downward spin for me after the two new road buddies traveled across Iraq. Wilton launched into a narration of Cassady’s back story, which highlights Cassady’s training from his mentor and army leader, Bill Django (Jeff Bridges) who developed his own psychic military unit after spending most of the 1970s looking for New Age movements to incorporate into military practices. What he developed were American army unit training psychic spies, or Jedi Warriors, that practiced harnessing super powers with hopes of promoting peace. Does anyone else think it's weird that Ewan McGregor, a.k.a Obi-Wan Kenobi, starred in a movie that refers to super soldiers as "Jedi Warriors"? My sister told me there were references made to two other movies starring McGregor: Moulin Rouge! and Trainspotting. Go figure.

Back to the psychic spies--ironically, this isn’t that far fetched from actual CIA projects. One such project, spearheaded by former CIA Director Stansfield Turner during the Carter administration, actually used psychic training exercises for spies who were thought to have extra-sensory perception. Check out this video on remote viewing:



Anyway, the film spends so much time in the backstory of the Jedi Warriors that the antagonist had to be presented there. Enter Kevin Spacey as Larry Hooper, the sadistic Jedi, or Sythe lord to the Star Wars geeks, who uses his Jedi powers for evil rather than good. It is he who enlisted the use of goats to see if the troops could kill them using psychic powers. Hooper also tortured fellow psychics in hopes of expanding his own psychic power. Cassady eventually left the army after feeling guilty for successfully using his power to kill a goat.

Flash forward back to 2003, Cassady informs Wilton that he remote viewed his former mentor, Django, who had been dishonorably discharged thanks to Hooper’s scheming. Django told Cassady his mission was to come to a base in the middle of Iraq. After escaping kidnappers looking to sell them to terrorists and evading private contractors causing more harm than good, Cassady and Wilton finally locate Django who now works for Hooper in a modern psychic-training base in Iraq called PSIC, or “sick,” according to Wilton. Until reaching the base, none of Cassady’s supposed powers had ever been witnessed by Wilton, but the actual existence of the base implies that Cassady was telling the truth.

I knew the running time of the film, so I was aware that the characters reaching the base had to be the climax. In actuality, this seemed to be where the film became interesting. Unfortunately, the writers don’t take the time to explore Hooper’s modern psychic techniques, because they’re too busy trying to wrap up the film. There’s a deadpan, anticlimactic finale, which left me wondering if there was any purpose to the mess I’d just watched. Wilton did get his story, but news outlets chose to focus on the fact that Barney music was used to torture POWs at the PSIC base, much like the use of music as a form of torture for prisoners at Guantanamo Bay during the Bush administration.

I know what Clooney and Heslov were trying to accomplish with Ronson’s adaptation, which was supposed to poke fun at conservatism and its effects on the U.S. military. Unfortunately, the script glosses over too many facts to make any of the subtle points within the plot stick, and it relies too heavily on opening shots of Bush and slight jabs at former President Ronald Reagan to point out fallacies within the conservative party. The script does emphasize that it was a conservative government that was in place for much of the psychic research done in the past, and it was the Bush administration that funded the new age psychic research lead by Spacey’s character. However, the screwball comedy and underdeveloped script only frustrated and teased me as I waited for more depth and less lighthearted carousing. I guess that’s what I should have expected from a film emphasizing goats.

Rating: 3 out of 10














Up next - The Blaxploitation classic, Blacula

"Please, I need help"

(Warning: plot spoilers)

“Well shit, man. I guess that’s why they call it a ‘way-homer’…because you only get it on the way home.” I always think of this Coen brothers’ line from their second directorial effort, Raising Arizona, whenever I’ve just watched another one of their movies for the first time. I’ve continued this trend after watching their latest film, A Serious Man, starring Michael Stuhlberg (Body of Lies) as Larry Gopnik, a down-on-his-luck assistant physics professor who desperately seeks answers to life's questions as his world begins to crumble.

The story, set in a 1960’s suburban Minneapolis Jewish community, follows Gopnik as he faces unethical students, a possible denial of tenure, a surprising divorce, a bigoted neighbor, and an eccentric live-in brother—all as he’s tried to live the life of a decent man and an upstanding husband, father and brother. Since it’s a movie, the audience, along with Gopnik assumes that solutions will be found for his mounting problems. To me the movie is a more serious version of Burn After Reading, consisting of a series of wacky subplots which do ultimately propel the main arc of the plot (Gopnik’s troubles).

I’m going to deviate from my normal routine of writing for this particular post. I felt a sense of enlightenment while writing my initial review before I decided to scrap it. I knew that I wasn’t confident in my interpretation, but I still tried to present myself as if I knew what I was talking about. I’ll now describe to readers my thought process when writing a review for a movie that takes me longer to interpret.

When exiting the theater after watching A Serious Man, I wondered what the Coen brothers wanted me to grasp from their film. I remember hearing some teenager chide his friend for not understanding the plot. “Dude, how could you not get it? I understood everything that was going on. It was all connected,” he said. I remember sneering at the kid for a second because I sure as hell didn’t get it. In my cynicism I assumed that he was only pretending to understand the movie, because how could anyone know more than the Movie Guy? After coming back down to Earth and getting into the driver seat of my car, I thought of key quotes and scenes I wrote in my notepad: “receive with simplicity,” mounting troubles, graphic dreams representing closure. I realized that the main character, Gopnik, accomplished nothing and solved none of his problems during the movie, but I also realized that there were a number of other scenes that went right over my head.

After I started writing my review I knew I wasn’t completely confident in my interpretation. Obviously, the Coen brothers wanted audiences to understand that bad things happen sometimes, and there won’t always be an answer or remedy available. What else could I say? Sure, I could summarize some other plot points or scenes that I liked, but I felt I’d be masking the fact that I didn't fully understand how audiences should interpret it. I decided to research the film and read some other reviews to see what I may have missed. I usually wait to do such research after I’ve written my review because I don’t want to be influenced in any way before I express my view.

After researching, I found that all of the allusions the Coen brothers present within their movie are biblical. According to the Internet Movie Database, “Larry is a Job like figure – a good man to whom many bad things happen with no explanation…his son Danny’s looking at the tornado coming recalls God speaking to Job from out of the whirlwind that He will not explain why these bad things have happened to him.” While I’ve read all of the New Testament, I’m only on Numbers in the Old Testament, so that’s why I was unable to make the connection. Most of the reviews I read made the connection.

One quick note for those who may not be aware. There are no original ideas in screenplays—they’re all combinations of cribbed ideas/stories/news from around the world. Most can be traced back to the Bible (i.e. Donnie Darko, The Matrix, etc.)

Anyway, for me, even though I enjoyed A Serious Man, I think it'll grow on me even more after I watch it again. I’m looking forward to catching all the little things I missed my first time watching it.

My point to all of this is that I’ve come to appreciate movie critics more since I’ve delved into the review process myself. They constantly make sound, insightful interpretations after watching a movie only once. It usually takes me a couple of viewings to catch key points I may have missed.

I could take more time to elaborate on how each character is more of a caricature, or discuss the over-the-top performances by some of the actors (shout out to George Clooney’s best friend, Richard Kind, who plays Gopnik’s socially awkward brother), but I really don’t feel like it. The movie is worth seeing, so go check it out. Even though there aren't as many laugh-out-loud moments as other Coen brothers films, I still rank it near the top of their body of work.

Rating: 7 out of 10











Up next - The Men Who Stare At Goats