Worth Seeing More for Its Historical Value Than As Entertainment

Rating: 5/10 (13 November 2009)

The Men Who Stare at Goats (R, 1:33) — 5 — Borderline, 2nd string, original, OSIT chauvinists
Your tax money paid for something very similar to what you see on screen. In the Pentagon's never-ending quest to keep America safe, they left pretty much no stone unturned. The Air Force, for example, spent loads of time and money on Project Blue Book, investigating claims of alien visitations via UFOs. And why not? There could have been something to it, and knowledge is way better than ignorance when it comes to preparedness.
The Russians, meanwhile, were doing something similar, checking out women who claimed to be able to detect colors thru their fingertips. And both sides, wanting to spare their spies the dangerous necessity of actually infiltrating the enemy camp, poured truckloads of dollars and rubles into experiments in "remote viewing", whereby supposedly someone sitting safely in an office in Langley could pick up "impressions" of the contents of a file drawer in Lubyanka.
None of this ever produced squat, but, as Einstein once remarked, "If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?".
The Pentagon didn't entirely abandon these efforts after the initial negative results, however. They kept on looking, right up thru the beginning of this decade, when the movie (and the 2004 book by Jon Ronson on which it's based) is set. The title refers to America's would-be Jedi warriors, who can kill a goat just by staring at it hard enuf while thinking death-like thots. Or at least goats keel over often enuf that the brass keeps the funding rolling in.
Starring George Clooney as supremely confident psychic warrior Lyn Cassady; Ewan McGregor as Obi-Wan, uh, journalist (and the film's narrator) Bob Wilton; Jeff Bridges as Bill Django, founder of the 1st Earth Battalion; Kevin Spacey as Larry Hooper, envioius of Cassady's success; and Robert Patrick as T-1000 (oops, sorry, wrong timestream) entrepreneur Todd Nixon, with nary a female in sight, this is a total testosterone trip from beginning to end, despite all the lip service Django pays to New Agey flower power.
It's been pitched as having some comedic elements, and I guess it does get kind of goofy when somebody laces the powdered eggs with LSD, but most of the humor arises from the idea that anybody would take this stuff seriously at all, let alone with the deadly earnestness displayed by all concerned.
So if you were expecting a barrel of belly laffs, think again. But the flik is mildly entertaining, and it offers just enuf hints that there MIGHT be something to Cassady's supposed mental powers that I nudge it into the "borderline" category.