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The Men Who Stare at Goats - the movie!

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barfing_pumpkin

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Yep - it's seems Jon Ronson's disturbingly hilarious look at the weird underbelly of the US military is getting the a-list movie treatment, and should be ready for release at the end of this year.

However ... judging by the synopsis on IMDB, the whole thing has been...'livened' up a little, with a proper plot an' all that. And it looks like the names have been changed to protect the innocent, as well. No mention of General Stubblebine in the character roster, for instance ... and no Ronson either, which is a pity 'cos I think Stephen Marchant would have been tailor made for the role. Weirdly enough, to judge by what's on the IMDB page, it looks as if the film's producers are trying to make a largely fictional and fairly po-faced thriller/actioner out of it all ... which would be a sad thing indeed if we should be denied the chance to see a senior American General get very cross with himself upon his continued failure to walk through his office wall.

Still, early days, so it might yet turn out to be good. Details available at http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1234548/
 
From what I understand, it's going to be a black comedy with shades of Catch-22 and Strangelove.
 
George Clooney's Men Who Stare at Goats 'based on real US army experiments'
A new George Clooney film about soldiers in Iraq who attempted to kill goats only by staring at them is based on real military experiments, it has emerged.
Published: 7:00AM BST 23 Oct 2009

Project Jedi was a top-secret military project to create a breed of "super-soldier" who would be fantastically strong and possess superior intelligence, cunning and intuition.

They would use psychic powers to spy on the enemy, disable nuclear bombs with telekinesis, and effortlessly kill with the power of thought alone, the Daily Mail reports.

The soldiers would also have the ability to become invisible at will and to walk through walls.

While Project Jedi is the subject of the soon-to-be-released Hollywood blockbuster The Men Who Stare At Goats, starring George Clooney and Ewan McGregor, it is not entirely fictitious.

The US military did try to create such a breed of supersoldier. And that killing goats with psychic powers was just the tip of the iceberg.

Indeed, the fruits of Project Jedi, and several other clandestine paranormal projects, have been actively used in battle.

"You have to understand that these ideas were not considered wacky," Sergeant Glenn Wheaton, a Special Forces soldier seconded to Project Jedi, told the Mail.

"They were seen as the next military frontier. We needed to know whether it was possible to use paranormal forces for military ends. We also needed to know how to protect ourselves should they be used against us."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film ... ments.html
 
rynner2 said:
A new George Clooney film about soldiers in Iraq who attempted to kill goats only by staring at them is based on real military experiments, it has emerged.
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Emerged? Yup, the book's only been out for 4 1/2 years after all.
 
It also seems to completely ignore American military torture for a quasi-comedy road movie. Ewan McGregor also has the worst American accent ever in that trailer, possibly revenge for Keanu Reeves in Copppla's Dracula.
 
Mob1138 said:
It also seems to completely ignore American military torture for a quasi-comedy road movie. Ewan McGregor also has the worst American accent ever in that trailer, possibly revenge for Keanu Reeves in Copppla's Dracula.
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I don't understand why Hollywood hires famous Scotsman Ewan McGregor then gets him to change his accent. Maybe Sean Connery had the right idea after all.
 
gncxx said:
Mob1138 said:
It also seems to completely ignore American military torture for a quasi-comedy road movie. Ewan McGregor also has the worst American accent ever in that trailer, possibly revenge for Keanu Reeves in Copppla's Dracula.
Click to expand...

I don't understand why Hollywood hires famous Scotsman Ewan McGregor then gets him to change his accent. Maybe Sean Connery had the right idea after all.
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He's not being hired as a Scotsman, he's supposed to be an actor. If 'former Eastenders star', Michelle Ryan, can play, 'The Bionic Woman' and Old Etonian, Hugh Laurie, can play, 'House', without falling back on English regional accents, then why can't McGregor mangle an American accent, too?


:lol:
 
"Mangle" - exactly! They even had him doing his American accent in that cartoon he did, where you wouldn't think it would have mattered at all.
 
George Clooney caught up in row over latest film 'Men Who Stare At Goats'
George Clooney has been dragged into a row between the writer of his latest film, Men Who Stare At Goats, and a documentary maker who claims his contribution to the production has been sidelined.
Published: 7:30AM GMT 03 Nov 2009

Jon Ronson, a journalist whose work inspired the film, credited his one-time best friend and film maker John Sergeant in the pages of his book.

However, Sergeant claims to have been "airbrushed out" of the film adaptation and has aired his grievances about the snub in a letter to George Clooney.

Ronson's work is a non-fictional account of the American government's attempt to harness paranormal abilities as part of a top-secret military programme.

Sergeant alleges he spent two years researching and gathering material for the television series Crazy Rulers of the World, which was broadcast on Channel 4 in 2004, and from which Ronson's best-selling book was spawned.

He says he identified key figures on which the story was based, and persuaded them to speak on camera.

Sergeant told The Independent: "I worked intensely through 2003 and 2004 on it." He said that, had the material remained within the context of a documentary, he would happily have let the matter go.

"I never formally agreed for the material I unearthed to be used in other media," he added, "and I was extremely uncomfortable when it was, especially when I was airbrushed out of things. Ewan McGregor is playing this character who finds the story. [Jon] presents that person as [himself] but really, it is me."

The film-makers state that the work is "inspired by Jon Ronson" but do not acknowledge Sergeant in any way.

He wrote to Clooney after he was not invited to the film's screening at the London Film Festival on 15 October. The letter was passed to the festival's artistic director who said she passed it to Clooney's publicist.

However, Stan Rosenfield, Clooney's Los Angeles publicist, said: "George is not aware of any attempt to reach him."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstop ... Goats.html
 
I saw the film on Friday, a preview, Ronson was there for Q&A afterwards. Excellent, very funny. No goats were hurt during the making of the film. Obviously its different from the book but I think the essence of it got across. Great performances from Jeff Bridges and George Clooney, Kevin Spacey is particularly nasty.
 
ramonmercado said:
I saw the film on Friday, a preview, Ronson was there for Q&A afterwards. Excellent, very funny. No goats were hurt during the making of the film. Obviously its different from the book but I think the essence of it got across. Great performances from Jeff Bridges and George Clooney, Kevin Spacey is particularly nasty.
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I enjoyed the book a lot but have had grave reservations about the film, both from the little I've seen of it and the hype around it. I appreciate the the book and the film are two very different fish but I'm always suspicious of American 're-imaginings' of texts. It makes me wonder why the film makers have had to sell it to an American audience - and American audiences are first and foremost in film-maker's minds - as a 'comedy'.
 
The film is different in so far as there is the framing device of Ewan McGregor meeting George Clooney in Kuwait and travelling to Ieaq with him, during the journey we learn the back story. Ronson is happy with the film.
 
ramonmercado said:
Ronson is happy with the film.
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He probably has 500,000 reasons to be happy with the film. All $'s.
;)
 
merriman_weir said:
I enjoyed the book a lot but have had grave reservations about the film, both from the little I've seen of it and the hype around it. I appreciate the the book and the film are two very different fish but I'm always suspicious of American 're-imaginings' of texts. It makes me wonder why the film makers have had to sell it to an American audience - and American audiences are first and foremost in film-maker's minds - as a 'comedy'.
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To be fair, the screenplay is by a Geordie, so it's not entirely an American reworking.
 
A Philosopher Stares at "Stares at Goats"
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/scienceinsi ... her-s.html
by Greg Miller

In the new movie The Men Who Stare at Goats, which opens today in the United States, George Clooney plays a former member of a secret sect of soldiers trained by the U.S. military to deploy a host of paranormal weapons against the enemy. Their deadly talents supposedly include the ability to kill a goat via psychokinesis—by staring at the beast they can make its heart stop with thought alone.

The movie takes some liberties in the name of comedy, but the program it's based on is real. During the Cold War, the U.S. military became convinced it was losing the "mind race" against the Soviet Union, and as recently as the late 1980s was investigating a range of paranormal phenomenon and their potential uses in espionage and combat, says Jonathan Moreno, a philosopher at the University of Pennsylvania who studies military applications of cognitive science.

For more details, Moreno referred me to a 1988 National Research Council report on enhancing human performance. According to the report, some military decision makers believed that extrasensory perception ("if real and controllable") could prove valuable for intelligence gathering, while psychokinesis could find an even wider range of uses, from jamming enemy computers or weapons, planting thoughts in individuals without their knowledge, or even killing enemies at a distance. And that's not all.

The report says: "One suggested application is a conception of the 'First Earth Battalion,' made up of 'warrior monks,' who will have mastered almost all the techniques under consideration by the committee, including the use of ESP, leaving their bodies at will, levitating, psychic healing, and walking through walls." This is the elite squad Clooney's character belonged to.

Moreno says that as far as he knows the military has abandoned its research into the paranormal. These days, he says, they're more interested in the fruits of neuroscience research—cognitive-enhancing drugs to keep soldiers sharp, for example, or brain-machine interfaces that could take over a plane if the pilot becomes incapacitated.

Meanwhile, The Men Who Stare at Goats seems to be earning mainly mediocre reviews in the United Kingdom, where it has already opened. Maybe this is one case where reality didn’t need any help from Hollywood.
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ramonmercado said:
"One suggested application is a conception of the 'First Earth Battalion,' made up of 'warrior monks,'
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*proudly wearing his First Earth Batallion t-shirt* 8)
 
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