The Men Who Stare at Goats by Jon Ronson

Stuck in Kuwait City, he bumps into “Skip” (Clooney), who initially claims to be an Arkansas trashcan salesman but is actually Cassady, who’s been reactivated and is on a super-secret black-op mission to Iraq.Īs the two bond, and Wilton persuades Cassady to take him along, it’s clear Cassady’s elevator stops well short of the top floor. Wilton heads for the Middle East in spring 2003, looking for a good war story.

The most gifted of the group, says Lacey, was a certain Lyn Cassady. In a nutshell, Wilton, assigned to interview Gus Lacey (Stephen Root), an apparent wacko who claims he has special psychic powers, stumbles across an even crazier story: Back in the ’80s, the government had a top-secret unit of “psychic spies” who were trained to kill animals by staring at them. Straughan’s screenplay takes many of the stories from the book - apparently true, per Ronson, who’s made a career from recounting “true tales of everyday craziness” - and, as a way into the material, invents the character of a small-time, Ann Arbor, Mich.-based journalist, Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor), who’s desperate to get into Iraq at the time of the Bush invasion.Īfter a comically cautionary intertitle (“More of this is true than you would believe”) and an opening gag (repeated, with a variation, at the end) that immediately sets the tone, the first reel is thick with info and time shifts from the present (starting in fall 2002) back to the early ’80s, which are a tad difficult to digest on first viewing. military’s more outre ideas for policing the world, terrorism in particular. “Goats” is officially “inspired” by Ronson’s book, which accompanied a three-part docu series, shown on Blighty’s Channel 4 in late 2004, called “Crazy Rulers of the World,” tracing some of the U.S. Coming in at a tight, well-paced 93 minutes, Grant Heslov’s second feature - after his little-seen anti-corporate golf comedy, “Par 6” (2002) - clearly benefits from his close working relationship with star George Clooney, following their writing collaboration on “Good Night, and Good Luck.” It also benefits from the dense but pacey screenplay by Brit playwright Peter Straughan, whose credits include “How to Lose Friends and Alienate People” and “Mrs.

The Men Who Stare at Goats by Jon Ronson