Men who stare at movies

If you’ve come here looking for George Clooney, I owe you an apology. In this week’s issue of the magazine, a page promoting highlights on Macleans.ca promised an Opening Weekend review of The Men Who Stare at Goats, which stars  Clooney as a whacked-out U.S soldier trained in paranormal powers. But we were jumping the gun. The movie doesn’t open until Nov. 6, so you’ll have to wait a week. Mea culpa. But I’d like to blame this scheduling dyslexia on the screwy way the film critic racket works. What happens is we’re force-fed All The Important Fall Movies in first few days of the September binge called the Toronto International Film Festival. Crazy. Then we wait for them to come out so we can tell you what we think of them. That can take weeks, months, or in some cases, years. Sometimes we toss off mini-reviews during the festival, but we’re generally too busy gorging on movies to stop and think about them, or even keep them straight. Also, distributor etiquette requires us to hold our fire until the film’s commercial release.  I guess I was so keen to review The Men Who Stare at Goats that my mind was playing tricks on me. Like the soldiers in the film who try to train themselves to walk thorough walls and move objects with their minds, this trigger-happy critic was trying to will George Clooney’s goat movie to come out a week early. Or at least that’s my story. So check in next week for the review, and in the meantime if you want a hit of the real George, sharing the red carpet with real goats at a swanky TIFF party, go to a previous blog in which I ask Mr. Clooney, politely, to stop stalking me and messing with my head: Men who Stare at George Clooney.