Get your ‘Goats’

In 1982 George Clooney was not yet a professional actor, but he was young and very poor. That year he befriended fellow actor Grant Heslov who loaned Clooney $200 to buy his first headshots. Now Clooney and Heslov are producing partners at Smoke House and their latest film, the dark comedy The Men Who Stare at Goats, stars Clooney himself as one of the U.S. military’s top “psychic spies.” Instructed by Jeff Bridges’ ponytail-wearing hippy sergeant and Kevin Spacey’s martial arts master, Clooney is trained as a “warrior monk” to read enemy minds and decipher future events before they occur. Tethered to Ewan McGregor’s journalistic quest for a good story in modern day Iraq, Goats could be the most pointed, oddball satire of military unintelligence since Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Larned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.  And besides, it is great to see both Bridges and Spacey doing smart comedy again. Robert Patrick and Stephen Root co-star. Rated R.