The Men Who Stare at Goats (2009)

More of This is True Than You Would Believe.

Today’s movie has been in my Netflix queue for so long that I no longer remember what inspired me to put it there in the first place.  I have a vague recollection of watching part of this movie while in the break room at work and I do so hate to only watch 15 or 30 minutes of a movie and leave without knowing what happened.  Well, however it came to be in my Netflix queue, it arrived recently so I felt I should give it a watch.  That movie is The Men Who Stare at Goats, based on a book by Jon Ronson, written by Peter Straughan, directed by Grant Heslov, and starring Ewan McGregor, George Clooney, Jeff Bridges, Kevin Spacey, Stephen Lang, Stephen Root, Robert Patrick, Rebecca Mader, Nick Offerman, and Glenn Morshower.

Reporter Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor) has fallen on some hard times after his wife left him for the newspaper’s editor.  Feeling like he needs an escape, and perhaps a chance to prove himself to his ex-wife, he goes to Kuwait to report on the Iraq War.  While waiting to be granted permission to enter, he stumbles across a man named Lyn Cassady (George Clooney), a name that Wilton recognizes from a man he interviewed a little earlier that told him about a group of American soldiers being trained to use their psychic abilities for combat, teaching them things like invisibility, remote viewing, and phasing.  It was rumored that Cassady had even been able to stop a goat’s heart with his thoughts.  Wilton gets Cassady to agree to let him tag along on his mission and, while doing so, Cassady tells Wilton about his time with the New Earth Army through flashbacks.

I’ve come to realize that I just don’t like reviewing movies that are just “okay”.  If a movie is awful, I’ll have lots of things to say making fun of it.  If it’s good, I’ll be able to sing its praises.  But if it’s okay, all I really want to say is, “meh.”  I’ll try to use more words – and real ones – to describe my feelings about this movie.  It’s an okay and pretty interesting movie, based mainly on a pretty well-written story.  Even though a bulk of the movie felt like just riding around in a car with Ewan McGregor and George Clooney, the subject matter kept it interesting, especially if you consider that this stuff was apparently mostly based on true stories.  So with the story being so interesting, what was the problem?  I would say the problem is that this movie was a comedy but not really all that funny.  I would say that the goofiness that they introduce us to during the course of the movie is amusing, but they were never able to climb over the hill and actually strike me as funny.  But since the comedy was never really a failure, it wasn’t painful to watch.  Just not funny.

The cast of the movie was all pretty spectacular, but they got some pretty big names to participate.  Ewan McGregor was the main character of the movie, and he did a good job displaying the range of emotions his character went through during the movie.  He starts off depressed and mopey because of his wife leaving him, then he went to being pretty skeptical of the New Earth Army stories, and he was totally on board by the end of the movie.  I liked that he kept talking to Clooney about the “Jedi Warriors”, as they called themselves, like it was such a ridiculous notion, even though he’s the only one in the movie that actually has been a Jedi warrior before.  I liked Clooney in the movie as well.  He seemed to take the ridiculousness very seriously, which is always a good choice.  Jeff Bridges was also very good as the hippie leader of the New Earth Army, Bill Django, but it also seems like a character that was written with Jeff Bridges in mind.  Kevin Spacey also plays a dick very well, and he did that here.

The Men Who Stare at Goats was a decent enough movie because of its wacky and interesting story and top notch performances.  The problem with the movie is that it was a comedy but it just wasn’t funny.  I would say, to its credit, that it was amusing for the greater majority of the movie, but it just couldn’t crest that ridge into funniness.  It’s worth watching if it’s on, but I wouldn’t say you need to go out of your way for it.  The Men Who Stare at Goats gets “Now more than ever we need the Jedi” out of “He was dying of a broken heart.  And maybe the cancer as well.”

Let’s get these reviews more attention, people.  Post reviews on your webpages, tell your friends, do some of them crazy Pinterest nonsense.  Whatever you can do to help my reviews get more attention would be greatly appreciated.  You can also add me on FaceBook and Twitter.  Don’t forget to leave me some comments.  Your opinions and constructive criticisms are always appreciated.

Red State (2011)

Today I consider myself a professional movie reviewer because I received an early viewing of Kevin Smith’s newest and second to last movie, Red State.  …Okay, to be honest, I viewed it on iTunes in an early showing type thing for $10.  But still!  Red State stars Michael Parks, Melissa Leo, John Goodman, Kyle Gallner, Kerry Bishe, Michael Angarano, Stephen Root, and Kevin Smith’s wife, Jennifer Schwalbach Smith … and it rocks!

Red State starts off as the tale of 3 high schoolers lookin’ for some sexy time.  One of the kids, Jared (Kyle Gallner), finds a site on the interwebs where people can meet up to get laid.  The woman he meets on this site says she will take on him and his two friends, Travis (Michael Angarano) and Billy Ray (Nicholas Braun), so the 3 head out for some action.  On the way there, Travis accidentally sideswipes a car parked on the road and, when they go to investigate, a man pops up and startles them off.  Shortly thereafter, so does the man in his lap (GAY ROADSIDE NOOKIE!).  The 3 continue on and arrive at a trailer in the middle of nowhere where they are greeted by the woman, Sarah (Melissa Leo).  She accommodates them in her trailer with beers and the boys soon find out they’ve been drugged.  Meanwhile, at the police station, the man who was sideswiped earlier turns out to be the local law, Sheriff Wynan (Stephen Root), a closeted homosexual who can apparently oft times be found on the side of the road with men, unbeknownst to his wife.  He sends his deputy off to find the car that sideswiped him.

Jared wakes up in a cage, hearing a sermon.  He finds himself in the chapel of the Five Points Church, a group of religious nuts modeled after the Westboro Baptist Church.  The sermon is being delivered by their version of Fred Phelps, Pastor Abin Cooper (Michael Parks).  After his fire and brimstone “God hates fags”-type speech, he unveils a gay man saran wrapped to a cross and they proceed to shoot him in the head, dropping his corpse into a basement where Travis and Billy Ray are being held.  They then saran wrap Jared to the same cross.  Outside, the deputy arrives at the Five Points Church and sees the car that sideswiped the Sheriff.  The Pastor goes out to meet him and send him away.  Meanwhile, Billy Ray and Travis start to free themselves using the dead gay corpse’s exposed bone to cut their bindings.  Billy Ray leaves Travis to rot, but is soon shot by Ralph Garmin, who is then shot himself.  The deputy hears the shots and calls it in, and is then shot himself.  The Pastor threatens the Sheriff with photos of his roadside gayness in order to keep him silent.  The Sheriff makes a call and it gets to ATF Special Agent Keenan (John Goodman).  The rest of the movie is how self righteous, religious gun nuts react to someone trying to serve a search warrant to them.  Hint: it doesn’t go well.

I’ve got to say, I’m a huge Kevin Smith fan.  I own every movie he’s directed (yes, even CopOut) and I love the greater majority of them.  And lately, even more than his movies, I love him for his podcast/internet radio endeavors with Smodcast Internet Radio.  And, being an avid listener of Smodcast, I have been beaten over the head with this movie for a very long time now.  So when listening to his podcast and I realized I was still in time to catch this movie on iTunes, I could not pass up the opportunity.  So, let me say right now, Smith has not let me down.  This movie is great.  This is Smith’s first attempt to venture out of comedy (though his comedies have varied in comedic genre quite a bit) and into horror.  Well, he called it horror if memory serves.  I don’t know that I would call it horror.  It’s somewhere between horror and action to me.  I’d call it suspense.  This movie was absolutely riveting from start to finish.  As I usually do, I was attempting to play a video game while watching this movie on my computer, but I had to stop because my controller kept turning itself off from inactivity.  I couldn’t take my eyes off the thing!

This movie not only plays different from other Smith movies, it looks completely different.  A lot of his movies (Clerks excluded, of course) are pretty colorful movies.  This movie is dark and gritty, with a lot of the color really toned down, somewhat like what they did in Saving Private Ryan.  Also, as Smith himself tends to say, most of his movies don’t involve any movement for the camera.  And in a dialogue heavy movie as his usually are, that works fine.  This movie is filmed as if by a frantic bystander with a handheld camera and really draws the audience in to feeling like they are there amongst the religious craziness.

The acting continues the awesomeness of this movie.  A lot of the movie hangs around Kyle Gallner, and he is great.  I spent the entire movie trying to figure out where I’ve seen him, and it apparently was in the new Nightmare on Elm Street, Jennifer’s Body and the Haunting in Connecticut.  Good to see he’s finally allowed in a good movie.  Another big part of the movie is following Dan Connor … I mean John Goodman, who is also fantastic.  He had to be really conflicted about the orders he received in this movie and really did a great job, though I can’t say I expect much less from Goodman.  He seemed to have slimmed down a good amount for this movie too.  The driving factor of the whole movie has to be Michael Parks; a man most movie goers would recognize but not by name.  He was twice in Kill Bill and was pretty memorable in From Dusk Till Dawn too.  Oh man is he good in this.  He is freaky and charismatic at the same time, the kind of guy that would attract these kind of crazies.  And backing him up was recent award winner Melissa Leo who loses her shit after the death of her husband in this movie and may have freaked me out more than Parks.

If there was a complaint to be made of this movie, I’d say I wasn’t the biggest fan of the ending.  I don’t want to ruin it because I think you should all see this in whatever method you can, but suffice to say the ending is a little deus ex machina and unsatisfying to me, but nowhere near enough to ruin the movie.  Saying more would ruin it, so I shan’t.  Go see this movie!  I was happy to give my money to this movie in order to support a man that has given me so much enjoyment in his other movies while he takes his movie away from the studio system and brings it straight to the fans where it belongs.  And if Kevin Smith hasn’t brought you enjoyment through his movies or podcast, then I’m not sure how we are even friends.

My personal kudos to Kevin Smith for a job well done.  I will happily be purchasing this movie when it is released on DVD.  In the meantime, if this review goes up while it’s still available on iTunes, I fully recommend you go rent it there or almost anywhere else video on demand can be found (I think it’s on X-box live, Playstation Network, etc.).  It was only 10 bucks for me, and let’s face it, that’s how much a movie costs anyway, and iTunes will save you the drive.  And Kevin Smith shot his wife in the face for this movie!  …Okay he only wrote it in the script, but I saw it happen in the movie!  I give this a “I highly doubt God hates fags, but Robert loves Red State” out of Eleventeen.

And, as always, please rate, comment, and/or like this post and others.  It may help me get better.