jon ronson Tagged Articles at Cinematical

I'm not sure why, but Overture Films has chosen to downplay the "based on a true story" aspects of their high-profile new satirical film The Men Who Stare at Goats. The film finds Ewan McGregor as a journalist looking for a story in Iraq who stumbles across a former member (George Clooney) of a special platoon of psychics employed by the U.S. military. While many moments in the film seem outlandish and ridiculous, they become even more jaw-dropping with the knowledge that the film is based on fact.

Author Jon Ronson first explored the topic of remote viewers and psychic super-soldiers in a three-part Channel 4 television documentary, The Crazy Rulers of the World, the first part of which ("The Men Who Stare at Goats") he turned into a book in 2004. It's amazing to see the very real people behind the First Earth Battalion (renamed the New Earth Army in the film) recounting the bizarre stories that are brought to life on the big screen in the quasi-fictional movie by writer-director Grant Heslov.

It's a must-see if you plan on catching the film, and absolutely fascinating. There's a cynical side of me that would like to assume the members of the First Earth Battallion all are crackpots, but there's too much fact mixed in with the weirdness for me to dismiss it outright.

You can see the first episode of Jon Ronson's original documentary, in its entirety, over at SciFi Squad.

War, as they say, is hell. So what's to be said of peace, of employing any and all means necessary to avert violence instead of propagating it? If The Men Who Stare at Goats is to believed, the forces of peace are crazy and covert and even at war with themselves, and if fellow Fantastic Fest attendees are to believed, it's at best a loose adaptation of journalist Jon Ronson's truly remarkable true-life tale.

After all, Ronson from Wales is now Bob Wilton from Ann Arbor (as played by Scotland's own Ewan McGregor), a journalist newly keen on covering the Iraq invasion after a cheating missus robs him of a purpose and a place to call his own. While waiting in Kuwait for a story, any story, he bumps into Lyn Cassady (George Clooney), who is not the contractor he says to be, but rather a man on a mission, and sensing a story, any story, Wilton decides to tag along...

Do you remember a George Clooney project, green-lit in May, Men Who Stare at Goats?
Not only does it boast the coolest title in the world, but it's racking up a cast of equal greatness. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Ewan McGregor, Kevin Spacey, and Jeff Bridges are joining Clooney, under Grant Heslov's direction.

The film is based on Jon Ronson's book of the same title, and follows his investigation into the secret wing of the U.S. First Earth Battalion, a paranormal research unit created in 1978. Its goal was to create "Warrior Monks," supersoldiers who could do all sorts of comic-booky things like walk through walls, become invisible, read minds, and kill creatures by staring at them long enough. One soldier in Ronson's book claims he killed a hamster and a goat doing just that.

The adaptation is already switching things around a bit -- it's set in Iraq (where some of the supersoldiers have been reportedly deployed), and McGregor will be playing a stand-in for Ronson named Bob Wilton. He's desperate for a story, and stumbles upon the craziest one of a lifetime when he meets Lyn Cassady, played by Clooney, who claims to be a secret psychic soldier, reactivated after 9/11. As they travel through Iraq, investigating the story, they meet Bill Django, played by Bridges, who is the founder of the program and Cassady's mentor. Spacey will play Larry Hooper, another former psychic who is running a prison camp in Iraq.

While the topic of psychic supersoldiers seems to lend itself to comedy, Iraq and prison camps don't, so who knows what tone this will strike. Every actor in this can switch effortlessly from dramatic to quirky -- it's going to be a treat seeing them all in one film. Especially one with psychics and goat murders.