RECOMMENDED: At the screening we attended, The Men Who Stare At Goats got more actual LOL-laugh-out-loud laughs than any other movie in recent memory. The best part? Those laughs weren’t cheap; OK, the ones about goats falling dead to the floor because George Clooney was looking at them were kinda cheap, but mostly, these were deep guffaws, coming from a painful place about the absurdity of war and modern-day America. To that end, The Men Who Stare At Goats — an adaptation of Jon Ronson’s book of the same name, which examines the purported experiments by the U.S. Army over the last 50 years in creating “psychic soldiers” — belongs to canon of absurdist works like The Magic Christian, Dr. Strangelove, and so on. Ewan McGregor, Kevin Spacey and Jeff Bridges (of course he’s the ringleader) round out this tale of The New Earth Army, which sought to spread a curious brand of “peace” to prevent conflict, using bits and scraps of ESP, the martial arts, dimestore self-help and the New Age movement. Was any of this real? Probably. Is it hilarious? Absolutely.

ALSO NEW IN THEATERS: The Box, a psychological thriller in which Frank Langella comes to Cameron Diaz and James Marsden and tells them that if they PUSH THIS BUTTON RIGHT HERE, they’ll get a million dollars but someone in the world will die because of it; The Fourth Kind, your standard UFO grossout jive; and Disney’s A Christmas Carol, in which Robert Zemeckis pixilates Jim Carrey as Scrooge.

For more recommendations on films currently in theaters, visit Philebrity’s Film Sweat archive. And click here for movie times.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 6th, 2009 at 2:57 pm.