Men Who Stare at Goats

Watched The Men Who Stare at Goats with the wife last night. I liked it, with reservations. The wife has banned me from selecting DVDs for the next month though. Bottom line, it’s a movie that tries too hard to be funny when it should just unabashedly bask in its weirdness. Yes, there are some genuinely funny moments, maybe two or three, but you’ve seen them in the trailer. The other twenty or twenty-five attempts at humor are somewhat uncomfortable, like watching a slightly drunk friend pathetically try to impress a chick that everyone, except him, knows is out of his league.

But the basic premise of the movie is … exactly something I would read in one of my long-pursued fringe books! Soldiers trained in the art of psychic warfare – by a hippie Viet Nam vet. On paper, it should have worked. Perhaps another rewrite, maybe another director, I don’t know. George Clooney and Jeff Bridges are excellent. Jeff Bridges alone makes the film worth seeing. Yeah, there are a few anti-American jabs thrown in during the Iraq portion of the film, but what can you do – Clooney is also the producer. Ewan MacGregor is more milquetoast than usual, though there are plenty of “Jedi knight” lines thrown about, no doubt at his expense and perhaps inserted into the script once he signed on to play the role. Kevin Spacey is completely one-dimensional, humorless and ineffective as the bad guy. What happened to him?

If you dig weird stuff, I’d say check it out, but don’t let your expectations get too high. And speaking of high, since so many characters are throughout the movie, it might not be a bad idea to see it in an enlightened state of consciousness. Me, I could only watch it while eating a bowl of fruit and yogurt. Yay. So sober LE gives it a C+. However, I don’t want to discourage Hollywood from cranking out weirdity like this. Keep it coming! Eventually you’ll get one right!