IRREVERENT Magazine - Movie Reviews
The Men Who Stare at Goats (2009)
Ever wonder what would happen if the U.S. Government bankrolled a hippie to figure out how the Army could take advantage of psychics? Probably not, if you're like most Americans, but nevertheless someone went ahead and made a movie about it anyway.
Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor) is your typical Ann Arbor newspaper reporter. His wife's just left him for a guy with one arm and he feels a burning need to do something important. So it's off to Iraq (this is 2004 or so) via Kuwait, where he meets a very strange guy named Lyn Cassady (George Clooney) at a bar. It turns out Bob (McGregor) has heard the name before. See before he trundled off to the war zone, he interviewed a local whack-job named Gus (Stephen Root) who told him all about Lyn, psychic stuff, and how he learned to kill a hamster "with his mind."
When it comes to paranoid ravings, it doesn't get much better than Stephen Root.
Inception (2010)
How hard is it to make someone form an idea that you suggest? That's the subject of Inception, Christopher Nolan's latest foray into semi-confusing jump-cuts, flashbacks, and asynchronous story telling ala Memento.
It's sometime in the near future, and mankind, for some reason that's not entirely clear, has developed the technology for people to jump into the dreams of other people. Unlike 1984's Dreamscape, however, this time nobody has to be a tortured psychic longing for redemption to do it: now you just hook up some electronic gizmos and you're off. You can even do it sitting next to a guy on an airplane.
Like most new technologies -- especially those that are perfect for hardcore abuse like this one is -- a shadow economy has developed. In this one, trained dream invaders hire themselves out to the highest bidder. Enter Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio), a dream ronin looking for redemption. Desperate to see his estranged kids again, Cobb takes a conspicuously dangerous final assignment for a rich corporate clod (Ken Watanabe), who wants Cobb to plant an idea in the mind of a business rival (Cillian Murphy).
No, that's not the same guy from Sixteen Candles. That's Gedde, this is Ken. Yes, I looked it up.
The Fourth Kind (2009)
A psychologist in Nome, Alaska (Milla Jovovich) and her husband notice a lot of their patients are having similar sleep disturbances, and a few more than normal are committing multiple murders in this normally quiet, drunken Northern town. They begin to dig deeper using hypnosis and make everything much, much worse in this controversial sci-fi thriller from Olatunde Osunsanmi, the man with Hollywood's second most improbable moniker next to Manoj Nelliyattu Shyamalan (that's M. Night to you, slappy).
Paranormal Activity (2009)
For fans of The Blair Witch who longed for more inside footage and less tension, Paranormal Activity is just for you.
A guy (Micah Sloat) and his girlfriend (Katie Featherston) buy an expensive new video camera to tape themselves in bed. No, they're not looking to break into the glamorous world of amateur porn (which actually may have been more exciting). The woman, it seems, has a history of strange things happening to her and the guy thinks catching it on video will help for some reason. So he duplicates the set-up from T.A.P.S. (see Ghost Hunters on Syfy does serve a purpose!), and starts taping everything in their lives, increasingly annoying his girlfriend.
Knowing (2009)
An odd movie about a girl who writes down a bunch of numbers that apparently predict 50 years of major disasters, including date, geographical coordinates, and the number of dead. When the "scientist" son-of-a-preacher-man John Koestler (Nicolas Cage) discovers the list 50 years later, he realizes their significance and ultimately how the world will end in this very strange mixture of occidental religious fables, super-advanced aliens, and great CGI.
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