The Men Who Stare at Goats

I am on a run of movies that I liked, but didn't seem to impress others as much as they did me.
Based on journalist Jon Ronson's nonfiction book of the same name, the movie chronicles a 1970s military program in which an idealistic New Age-inspired officer trained a group of "warrior monks" in honing their transcendental skills to Jedi perfection; one of their exercises, as the title indicates, was to stare at a goat until it keeled over, kaput. Jeff Bridges plays the Jedi hippie comander, George Clooney his star pupil, and Kevin Spacey the man who is ideal military, who wishes he had the talent, and knows he does not.
The script is laugh out loud hilarious. But also profoundly sad at times as well. And director Grant Heslov -- who wrote Clooney's "Good Night, and Good Luck," and who makes a promising directorial debut here -- mines the material for its most antic outlandishness. After a windy, characteristically twisty preamble in which the film's protagonist, journalist Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor), explains how he came to meet Cassady, "The Men Who Stare at Goats" becomes a bent, hallucinogenic road picture, as Wilton "embeds" with Cassady -- by now a private contractor -- on a mysterious mission in Iraq.
Clooney has the wattage in his performance to pull this off believably, and Spacey has the evil genius persona to play opposite him. It is a bitingly funny dig at what the film would most likely call "military intelligence". It is not everyone's cup of tea, but I loved it.