Separating the Sheep from the Goats

One good satire is usually a truer reflection of a troubled culture than all its sentimental dramas put together, and it certainly seems to be the case with The Men Who Stare At Goats, now on DVD.

Bob (Ewan McGregor) plays a handsome reporter whose wife has fallen for her slimy boss, who just so happens to have a metal arm. But then Bob's been on a story to which we've been given a hilarious introduction: some military nut with brass on his shoulders is convinced that he can run through a wall, superhero-like, and gets a massive headache for his pains.

Cassady is played by George Clooney, who is at his best when he's sending himself up - this observation probably applies more to men than women - and he is on a mission to find the missing founder of the New Earth Army, Bill Django, played by a wonderfully overweight Jeff Bridges reprising his Big Lebowski slob.

What Django convinced the US military of - apparently this is based on that oxymoron, a true story - is that they needed a section in which troops with extrasensory gifts could learn to read enemy thoughts, pass through walls and kill beings (like the titular goats) by staring at them with bad intent. Cassady was such a talented individual, whose reincarnation looks disturbingly like Tom Selleck.

Hell, if the US could go to war on pure fiction, why couldn't they believe this kind of hokum? And they did, apparently, until it all blew up, so to speak, in their faces. One of the bad - or good, depending on your politics - apples who could have helped them come to that perception is played by Kevin Spacey, once again playing a cynical manipulator of no particular sexual orientation.

This is the only disappointing aspect of a film that may not be of the laugh-out-loud-and-roll-around-in-the-aisles variety, but it does chug along with a quietly wacky chuckle factor that is rather refreshing.

Just Deserts and More Desert

First of all, there is the title, The Hurt Locker. What exactly would that be?

The director describes it as a place of ultimate pain; others describe it as a bomb itself - or the locker that will hurt you real bad - and others describe it as a place where you go and hide your hurt. Fair enough. They all apply in this nerve-wracking film, also out on DVD.

But is it worthy of its Oscar? If so, then Full Metal Jacket - hereafter FMJ - should have won the Nobel prize for literature. We are told up front that war is a drug. Excuse me, but Michael Herr, who co-wrote FMJ for little pay but with much respect for its director, Stanley Kubrick, said this much more eloquently about the Vietnam war in Dispatches. But then that was a long time ago.

Effectively shot in a hand-held, news-camera style, we share the lives of members of a bomb disposal squad in Baghdad, Iraq. The performances of Jeremy Renner, Andrew Mackie and Brian Geraghty as the core trio are flawless, and it's great seeing some new faces.

Plot Spoiler Follows:

It's also very clever seeing most of the "name" actors getting blown up and shot to smithereens. No comfort there, at least.

Plot Spoiler Ends.

But it's worth noting that the writer, Mark Boal, who covered this war and on whose work the film is based, was an embedded journalist in Iraq. Though one could probably be nothing else and live to tell the tale, it's still a question of how you process your information, as the previous review tries to demonstrate.

There is a lame attempt at satire when the Harvard-trained army shrink tells the death-obsessed Specialist Eldridge (Geraghty) that "going to war is a once-in-a-lifetime experience. It could be fun." But this doesn't come half way near the consistent intelligence of the hugely underrated Charlie Wilson's War. Or, of course, FMJ, which is so well made that it actually sells us on war without for one second avoiding its ugliness.

So maybe director Katheryn Bigelow didn't quite understand the nature of her mission, which is to convince us to pity the perpetrators of a great deal of global pain. Maybe she thought that a large portion of the rest of the world still locks away its hurt when it sees an American film, any American film.

Then again, maybe she understood her market only too well.

Neil Sonnekus

*Next week I review the South African racial drama Skin, starring Sam Neill, and Invictus, out on DVD, as well as an analysis on why the World Cup Rugby ad, You Gotta Be There, on TVNZ is, in fact, counterproductive propaganda.