The Men Who Stare At Goats (2009)

WARNING: SOME MILD SPOILERS AHEAD

I'm sort of enjoying this later-period George Clooney. In both last year's Burn After Reading and the just-released The Men Who Stare At Goats, Clooney seems to be shooting for a subtler, more A-list version of William Shatner, cleverly tweaking his movie-star image and his rugged good lucks for the sake of comic absurdity.

Goats is the sort-of directorial debut of actor/screenwriter/producer Grant Heslov. I say "sort of" because I looked him up on IMDB and saw that he has actually directed a few things before, none of which seem to have gained any real notice. But with Goats (probably because of his Clooney association, with whom he co-wrote Good Night, and Good Luck) he's rocketing out of the gate with a solid pedigree film crammed full of bonafide movie stars (Clooney, Kevin Spacey, Jeff Bridges, Ewan McGregor).

The comedy, based on the book of the same name by journalist Jon Ronson, purports to be the mostly true story of a top-secret group of New Age "supersoldiers" -- led by a Dude-ified Bridges as Bill Django-- formed in the 1970s and trained in the art of psychic warfare. The story revolves around a sadsack journalist named Bob Wilton (McGregor) who somehow manages to convince one of these soldiers, Lyn Cassady (Clooney), to let him tag along with him on a covert mission into Iraq in 2003. Throughout the drive into the desert Cassady tells Wilton all about the history of the "New Earth Army", which is revealed though a series of meandering but basically amusing flashbacks. We're introduced to a motley crew of possibly batshit "psychics" including Django, the naive and hippie-dippy General Hopgood (Stephen Lang), the certifiably nutsoid Gus (Stephen Root), and the sublimely oily Larry Hooper (Spacey). We witness the rise of the New Earth Army and its eventual corruption and demise under Hooper's Machiavellian stewardship. Meanwhile, Wilton and Cassady stumble into a few scrapes -- including getting kidnapped, riding along with a bunch of cowboy Blackwater douchebags (led by Robert Patrick, who seems to be channeling the spirit of George W. Bush), and almost dying of thirst in the desert. All the while, Cassady repeatedly attempts to demonstrate his "superpowers" to the skeptical Wilton, with generally anticlimactic effect.

The movie is pretty amiable, and it has only the barest hint of a narrative to hold it together. Watching it meander toward its conclusion is certainly an amusing and, most of the time, agreeable experience. But there is something slightly discomfiting about the tone. Heslov seems to want to make a biting Three Kings or M.A.S.H.-styled satire, but he doesn't really have the strength of his convictions so he relies largely on slapstick for the comedy. The movie wants so desperately for you to like it that it smiles at you when it should show teeth, caresses when it should cut. The modern-day framing story is set in the early years of the current Iraq War, and the light approach to what should be relatively heavy subject matter (all the psychic nonsense aside) left me feeling a little queasy. A car being blown up by an IED is used for comic effect...and it is funny, until you stop and realize that this shit is still going on right now.

Particularly unpleasant -- in light of the recent massacre at Ft. Hood -- is a scene in which a young New Earth Army recruit, whacked out on LSD, stumbles naked across an Army base and starts shooting. To be fair, Heslov and the studio can't really be blamed for the unfortunate timing, and the scene itself is not meant to be funny. But the relatively quick shift back to farce left a sour taste in my mouth.

Overall, I'd give The Men Who Stared At Goats a mild recommendation. Clooney's performance alone makes it worth the price of admission. He plays Cassady like a slightly crazed and sun-blasted Clark Gable, and manages to hit all the right comic notes without ever quite tipping into caricature. He's able to elicit laughs with a mere twitch of his eyes (I just about peed myself during the "sparkly eyes" moment). The same can't be said for Spacey and Bridges, however. Their performances -- while funny -- are much broader and more conventional.

I really hope Clooney keeps channeling his inner Shatner for many years to come.

BONUS: Dead Man's Shoes & This is England trailers

Judging from the several (okay, four) Facebook messages I received after I posted my last review, it seems I stoked some interest in Shane Meadows. It also seems I misspoke a bit when I referred to him as "...one of the finest and least talked about filmmakers working today." That's not exactly true. In Britain, it appears he's talked about a great deal. Over here, though, he continues to fly under the radar.

Also, before I wrote the Dead Man's Shoes review it didn't occur to me to check and see if This Is England is also on Netflix Instant Viewer. It is. And, in all honesty, it's the superior film. So watch them both. They're awesome-tacular.

It was further suggested that I should mention some of Meadows' other films -- particularly his acclaimed A Room For Romeo Brass (1999), which also stars Considine. I saw that one not long after it first came out, and I remember enjoying it. He also directed Twenty Four Seven (1997), Once Upon A Time In The Midlands (2002), and last year's Somers Town. I haven't seen Midlands or Somers Town yet, but I believe they're all available on DVD.

Anyway, in an effort to keep your interest piqued, here are the trailers to Dead Man's Shoes and This Is England, courtesy of YouTube.

My The Men Who Stare At Goats review will be up shortly.

Dead Man's Shoes (2004)

NETFLIX INSTANT VIEWER HIDDEN GEM #1:

Dead Man's Shoes is a deceptively simple little revenge film. You would be forgiven if, after reading the Netflix plot description, you dismiss it as something you've probably seen before.

In a nutshell: Richard (Paddy Considine), a British soldier and war veteran, returns to his tiny hometown in Northern England where he at first threatens and then brutalizes a group of local thugs who perpetrated a nasty and dangerous prank on his mentally disabled younger brother (Toby Kebbell).

If you've ever seen the Michael Caine classic Get Carter (1971) or the Charles Bronson anticlassic Death Wish (1974) -- or have even a passing knowledge of them -- you can probably guess where this goes.

But the opening credit sequence -- a series of 8mm home movies scored to Smog's mournful "Vessel In Vain" -- should tell you right away that writer/director Shane Meadows is up to something slightly different here. Meadows and Considine take this pulpy genre construct and use it to explore some pretty heady themes of grief, rage, and familial guilt and resentment. What promises to be a fun and nasty thrill ride will end up breaking your heart.

Meadows is one of the finest and least talked about filmmakers working today. Like all true directors, he understands that the root of a great film lies in the performance. In both Dead Man's Shoes and his followup This Is England (2006) -- a harrowing journey through the history of England's skinhead movement and its corruption by the rise of the National Front -- Meadows demonstrates a knack for matching the right actor with the right part (Considine here, the terrifying Stephen Graham in England). These aren't showy performances, but they'll hit you hard.

Meadows' style is not quite verité, but -- like Alejandro González Iñárritu (Amores Perros, 21 Grams, Babel) -- he uses verité to create a gritty and fully realized environment, and then blends it masterfully with a more traditional narrative approach. Like Iñárritu, the effect can border on histrionic at times. But, unlike Iñárritu, Meadows knows when to quit. He refuses to pound us over the head with social commentary, instead letting it bleed organically through the characters and the story.

Dead Man's Shoes is a simple movie, but you're unlikely to find a genre film this emotionally rich being produced on this side of the pond. Check it out.

The Fourth Kind (2009)

WARNING: SOME SPOILERS AHEAD

There are all types of bad movies.

There are so-bad-they're-good movies like Con Air (1997), Road House (1989), and Independence Day (1996) that throw themselves upon you so shamelessly with their brazen ridiculousness that -- like a three-legged weiner dog desperately humping your leg -- you kind of can't help but love them, at least a little bit.

There are so-bad-they're-unwatchable movies like Batman and Robin (1997) and Van Wilder 2: The Rise of Taj (2006) that should really just be shot behind the woodshed or drowned in a river like a bag of kittens.

There are B movies. There are Michael Bay movies. There are Larry the Cable Guy movies.

And then there are movies like The Fourth Kind. These are the worst because -- like an abusive boyfriend -- they knock you around for awhile and then come back with a sly smile, a sparkly little trinket, and a solemn promise to do better. You give them another chance, and they just knock you around some more.

The Fourth Kind begins with Milla Jovovich walking toward us through some foggy Tim-Burtonesque woodscape and flatly intoning into the camera: "I'm actress Mila Jovovich, and I will be portraying Dr. Abigail Tyler. This film is a dramatization of events that occurred in October of 2000. Every scene of this movie is supported by archival footage. Some of what you're about to see is extremely disturbing."

Oooh, creepy. This kind of "based on a true story" bullshit is a time-honored tradition in horror movies, starting at least with John Larroquette's equally bullshit (but much more effective) opening narration at the beginning of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974): "The film which you are about to see is an account of the tragedy which befell a group of five youths ... Had they lived very, very long lives, they could not have expected nor would they have wished to see as much of the mad and macabre as they were to see that day..."

First-time writer/director Olatunde Osunsanmi tries to freshen up this convention by taking it a step further and having his lead actress break the fourth wall. He keeps it going by introducing each new character with a Chyron giving his/her name and the name of the character ("Elias Koteas [as] Dr. Abel Campos" for example). The movie then cuts repeatedly back and forth between the "dramatization" (featuring recognizable if not exactly A-list movie stars) and supposed "archival footage" (featuring unknown and often faceless actors). It's sort of like The Blair Witch Project meets Unsolved Mysteries on crack.

Osunsanmi tries his damnedest to keep this conceit going, and he never once misses an opportunity to jump cut between the two modes or to go into a really awkward split screen and overlap the dialogue. It's an interesting strategy at first. Then it's just obnoxious.

The movie purports to be a retelling of an "actual series of events" that took place in Nome, Alaska about a decade ago (this is all news to the people of Nome, apparently). A beautiful young psychiatrist (Jovovich) -- still reeling from her husband's unsolved murder -- discovers a pattern in her patients' recurring nightmares about an owl and decides to put one of them under hypnosis. The guy promptly freaks out and kills his family. The town sheriff (Will Patton) -- who seems to harbor some sort of inexplicable grudge against her (I guess he's annoyed that she keeps bugging him to solve that whole my-husband-was-murdered thing) -- forbids her from hypnotizing any more of her patients. She ignores him and hypnotizes another guy who promptly freaks out, levitates, and snaps his own neck.

And then things get weird.

It's no spoiler to say that this movie revolves around alien abductions. As a card-carrying weirdo freak who's into such stories and who spent four years of college in Alamosa, CO, with the specific hope of seeing a UFO, I was impressed by how much they got right in terms of the mythology. I was unimpressed, however, by how much they got wrong in terms of, you know, filmmaking, acting, writing, and basic storytelling.

There are a few effective moments here and there, and -- like the abusive boyfriend's apology -- they kept me hooked and hoping that the rest of the movie would get better. The footage of the psychiatric sessions and the hypnosis is genuinely freaky, as is the audiotape recording of Dr. Tyler's own apparent abduction. In other words, pretty much all the crap they crammed into the trailer. That stuff's easy, though. If you crush a baby's skull in a car door on camera, you're bound to get a reaction from the audience. The film completely misses on all the difficult stuff -- the character motivation, the cinematography, the story structure, etc -- that actually makes a good movie.

And, as awkward and overcooked as it is, I liked Osunsanmi's faux-docudrama approach. With a little (okay, a LOT) more restraint, it could have been effective. I almost expected The Fourth Kind to be some sort of parody of TV shows like Unsolved Mysteries and Monster Quest. That could have been fun. Alas, I think it's meant to be taken seriously.

The dialogue is, by and large, never less than atrocious. It's all either overheated melodrama or clumsy and amateurishly delivered chunks of (generally useless) exposition. The acting is a notch better than the script deserved, but that's the best you can say for it. Jovovich proves once again why I just can't really take her seriously as an actress. Even a solid veteran like Patton sinks under the weight of this thing. Weirdly, the unknown actors in the archival segments are even worse, which destroys all but the thinnest thread of verisimilitude the movie might have otherwise had. The only person who emerges mostly unscathed is Koteas, who could probably infuse a reading of Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking with the slithery charm of an Internet pederast.

The story ceases even trying to make sense after the first act, instead contenting itself to hopscotch from spooky scene to spooky scene with very little to offer in between. Osunsanmi tries to manufacture some sense of drama during the down time by having his actors either stare portentiously into the camera or scream at each other. It would be laughable if it wasn't so headache inducing.

There's not much more to say about this one. Just leave it alone. You deserve better.

Where the Wild Things Are (2009)

In the interest of full disclosure, before I start this review I have to admit that I was never really all that in love with Maurice Sendak's seminal 1963 children's book Where the Wild Things Are.

In retrospect, this seems a little strange. A story about a weirdo little kid with an overactive imagination, disenchanted with his day-to-day existence and yearning to sail off and romp around an island with a bunch of monsters should feel like autobiography. But for whatever reason the book never really grabbed hold of my imagination the way it did some kids. I remember liking the basic idea and thinking the pictures were pretty cool, but that was about it.

Right before the Spike Jonze/Dave Eggers film adaptation came out a couple weeks ago, I went to a Borders and thumbed through a copy of Sendak's original to see if the adult-me could figure out why the book fell with such a thud on the kid-me so many years ago. It surprised me how clearly I remembered the pictures, but it didn't surprise me how narratively slight the actual book is. For a budding writer like myself (I was putting together my own little text-heavy picture books when I was six), the cool pictures and those ten lines of prose just didn't cut it.

The book essentially goes like this: little Max gets in trouble, little Max gets sent to bed without dinner, little Max runs off to the land of the Wild Things, little Max and the Wild Things swing from some trees, little Max gets bored, little Max goes home. The most interesting stuff was completely left out. What exactly happens when Max and the Wild Things start running through the woods? Do they kill and eat things? Do the Wild Things ever threaten to turn on him? What?

The Neverending Story (1984) was (and is) one of my favorite movies. Thematically, it's almost exactly the same as Where the Wild Things Are. I wore out my VHS copy with repeated viewings over the years, but I don't remember cracking open my Wild Things book more than once or twice. The difference was, of course, that in Wild Things nothing really happens. In The Neverending Story a whole mess of shit happens. I couldn't have put it this way at the time, but there are stakes.

When I went to see the movie, I was vaguely curious and not really expecting to have a strong opinion either way. I didn't figure I'd love it or hate it. I just wanted to see what they came up with. And, to be honest, my first impression was that I was underwhelmed. Needless to say the film looked amazing, and it's clear from the first five minutes that little Max Records is a real find. But the story still felt pretty thin to me.

Then I went to sleep that night and dreamed about it. And when I went to sleep the next night I dreamed about it again. Somehow the movie stuck with me in a way the book never did.

I don't have a lot critically to say about this film, because my reaction was largely impressionistic. Yeah, Jonze and Eggers provided a genuine narrative framework, not only to Max's real world (he's the youngest child of a divorced single mom, and he desperately wants his sullen teenage sister's approval) but to the imaginary world he escapes to. The conflicts (completely absent from the book) that erupt between Max and the Wild Things deftly mirror the conflicts going on back home. Overly clever and on the nose, sure, but to harp on that seems to me to miss the point.

What makes the movie work is the way in which Eggers and Jonze slyly nudge the audience back into a child's-eye-view of reality. The Wild Things themselves -- surly Carol (voiced by James Gandolfini), distant KW (Lauren Ambrose), morose Ira (Forrest Whitaker) and his irate girlfriend Judith (Catherine O'Hara), Carol's best friend Douglas (Chris Cooper) and perpetually picked-on Alexander (Paul Dano) -- all think and behave with the logic of children. They're neurotic, affectionate, imaginative, jealous, and occasionally temperamental.

Max, of course, fits right in. He bonds immediately with Carol (I have to admit that hearing Tony Soprano coming out of the creature's mouth was pretty distracting at first) and KW, the two of whom are eye-rollingly obvious reflections of Max and his distant sister. Carol is jealous because KW keeps wandering off to hang out with a couple mysterious friends on the other side of the island (this leads to one of the movie's funnier and more bizarre reveals). By trying to be friends with both, Max inadvertently exacerbates the problem. Meanwhile Judith and Ira are jealous because Max -- their newly elected king -- seems to favor Carol and Douglas over them. His solution, of course, is to propose a dirt-clod fight. "Good Guys" vs. "Bad Guys." You can guess where that leads.

I can't quite articulate what it is Jonze and Eggers -- along with their actors -- do to make this feel like a genuine reflection of childhood rather than an adult's feeble attempt to mimic childhood. It's a pretty diaphanous thing they pull off, hard to wrap one's head around in any sort of intellectual way. Somehow they manage to tap that well and slop the memories out. Whatever it is they do and however they do it, it works.

At the end of the day, I wouldn't call this a brilliant movie or any sort of masterpiece. I still think it's pretty slight. The themes, beautifully and lovingly presented as they are, are pretty small and terribly obvious. To my mind the film still lacks the richness, emotional resonance, and fullness of imagination that The Neverending Story had in spades.

Of course, that might only be because I saw that movie when I was an actual child, rather than a guy in his 30s trying to remember what childhood was like. If I had seen this movie as a kid, I don't know if I would have felt any more strongly about it than I did the book. Maybe. Maybe not. Who's to say?

But as an adult who feels more and more disconnected from that hyperimaginative child I used to be with every inch that my gut expands and my hairline recedes, Where the Wild Things Are touched a soft spot on my heart I didn't expect.