Goats, Boxes, Staring...

George Clooney stares at goat.

A strange pair of random, head-scratching movies landed in the multiplex this week. "Men Who Stare at Goats" & "The Box" are big studio flicks mining the territory usually reserved for quirky "indie" fare.

"Men Who Stare..." chronicles a strange (and roughly factual) convergence between black-ops military tacticians and the kind of strange pseudo-pscience usually featured on late-night radio shows devoted to psychic spoon benders.

George Clooney is quite a hoot as a shadowy military contractor convinced he possesses psychic powers that allow him to reconfigure clouds while clouding men's minds. Kevin Spacey, Ewen McGregor and Jeff Bridges show up as fellow mystic warriors of varying degrees of sincerity and ability. It's a psychic sausage-fest with nary a significant female speaking role in site (except for a hot-tub montage featuring ample cleavage.)

"Men Who Stare at Goats" is a rather peculiar old-fashioned comedy. It's akin to those 1960s wide-screen extravaganzas peppered with weighty actors in fluffy roles. Lightweight? Perhaps, but it's nice to see a leisurely comedy that doesn't cram jokes down your throat at a million miles an hour. Maybe that makes for a less-than-stellar joke per dollar ratio - compared to any Judd Apatow vehicle of recent vintage, say - but it's still pretty damn funny

"The Box" is the film director Richard Kelly should have made after his cult-fave rabbit from hell opus, "Donnie Darko." Kelly's spasmodic aesthetic would have better served had he followed up with this instead of the entertaining (and over-cooked) "Southland Tales." I liked "Southland..." quite a bit. It's a sprawling, overblown mess of a flick but it's also entertaining, weird and quite funny in places -although sometimes it's hard to tell if bringing the funny was intentional or just a byproduct of so many strange ideas crowded into such a small space.

"The Box" takes a story by Richard Matheson (seen in a vastly different version in the John Landis "Twilight Zone" feature film) and elongates the quirk and weirdness a bit too thin for a full length flick but for at least half the film it works quite well. These folks definitely live in the same world as the Darko family. Hell, it looks like they live on the same block.

Many mysterious folks parade in and out of the story like refugees from "Twin Peaks" but ultimately the more wildly the narrative spins, the less interesting it becomes. Like "Twin Peaks" at its best, "The Box" has its moments. You would be hard pressed to say what exactly is going on at times but when it treads the line between slightly off-kilter suburban banality and full-tilt weirdness, it can be satisfyingly unsettling. Like -dare I say- "The Twilight Zone."