Month: November 2009

I loved and laughed nearly every scene in “Pirate Radio” (released as “The Boat That Rocked” in the UK).

I adore the plot line of a rag-tag group of rock and roll rebels challenging the stifled, stiff-uppper-lip British officials.

I want a copy (legal or not) of every song on the soundtrack. The soundtrack contains 36 of the over 60 songs from the actual movie. That’s a good start.

And the movie left me wanting more. Mainly, how did Quentin (Bill Nighy) come to own and operate the boat/radio station? He seemed an unlikely entrepreneur. Was he the station manager, the captain, the owner, or some combination of all three?

But in the end, it was just a cute little comedy that plays very well on my internal anti-authoritarianism.

Still, I can’t imagine it being 3 hours long, as Wikipedia claims. Glad they edited it down for US release. But I’d probably watch every deleted scene if I buy the DVD.

There may be spoilers in this review.

At about 45 minutes in to “The Box” I was pretty sure I could see the ending.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing, especially for a suspense/horror flick. As the master of the genre, Hitchcock, explained, suspense is built when the audience knows something’s going to happen but the characters don’t.

The question is, is the journey there a satisfying one? Does the end make sense for these characters?

Well, I thought so. Mostly. I didn’t entirely feel that the punishment fit the crime, but… OK.

But some of the odd turns and plot points seemed superfluous. Mars? The wedding? The creepy student? Waiting through all that made the movie a bit tedious. Just a tad.

Hearing Ewan McGregor ask, innocently and warily, about Jedi, is a wonderful bit of self-referential humor.

And it nicely sums up “Men Who Stare at Goats”.

These aren’t real Jedi that Bob Wilton (McGregor) are finding out about, but members of a secret group within the United States Army, who are practicing and honing their psychic warrior skills, like instant complete awareness of their surroundings (Level 1), intuition (Level 2), and invisibility (Level 3). George Clooney as Lyn Cassady, doing his most earnest, deadpan reading, patiently explains all this to Wilton, on a road trip from Kuwait into Iraq during the early stages of Iraq War 2. It isn’t until later that we learn about Level 4, the ability to stop a goat’s (or other living animal’s) heart simply by staring at it.

The tales are told in flashback, as Cassady describes how a New Age guru, Bill Django (played by Jeff Bridges), a loving, peaceful kind of warrior, passing out daisies and smiling beatifically, becomes a force for good within our military, giving training exercises in dance and handing out psychedelic drugs to unleash the soldiers’ inner children. All of which is a response to spy reports that the Soviets are working on developing their own Jedi, which they started in response to false reports that we were working on it. Which explains why it all needs to be kept secret; can’t have the Soviets finding out that the project they falsely learned we were developing was in fact, not a secret.

The serpent in this new camo-colored Garden of Eden is Larry Hooper (Kevin Spacey, who makes a great Dark Sider), a former sci-fi writer who tries, but just can’t seem to get all this crazy empathy stuff, and who works to undermine the unit. It’s he who introduces Level 4 – which causes Cassady to balk.

Every time Clooney tries to explain psychic warfare to McGregor, he appears oblivious to the fact that he’s wrapping a bit of magic around a balls-out crazy physical attack; the way he talks about getting into an enemies’ mind to dissuade him from attacking, before giving the punch-line of stabbing the enemy in the neck with a pen to create a fountain of blood. Uh, wouldn’t the stabbing part be the effective part? Clooney tacks that on almost as an afterthought.

And McGregor, playing an emasculated and cuckolded reporter for a small-town paper, buys into it all. Eventually. He wants redemption for losing his wife to his boss. And given Clooney’s charm, I very much could see someone overlooking the crazy to see the message underneath.

But then, I’m one of those crazy dirty fucking hippies who hate war in the first place. Of course, I’d buy it all.

But I’m not going to leap into a fight without even a knife, trusting in the Force to guide me though. That’s just nuts.