documentary

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, after the jump.

[Welcome to the Sci-Fi Lunch Break, where (mostly) every day we'll be supplying you with a cool bit of audio/visual goodness to break up the monotony of the work day. You bring the turkey on rye, we'll bring you something out of this world to watch while you eat it.]

Stonehenge has long been one of the most recognizable monuments in England, which is saying a lot considering you can barely drive for ten minutes without finding something of great historical significance on the relatively small island. And it's easy to understand why; it's baffling to think of the prehistoric human endeavor required to construct such a monument, which intrinsically bestows their hidden purpose with a romantic sense of mysticism. Such mystery is often exploited in fantasy storytelling, be it in a variation on the legend of King Arthur that cites Merlin as the artist behind the massive calendar or a similar series of megalithic stones used as a UFO landing pad in the sci-fi-horror-comedy Evil Aliens.

Yet it is not widely realized that prehistoric monuments like Stonehenge are common throughout the United Kingdom. In fact, there are hundreds of them in all shapes and sizes, several of which are still unexplained thousands of years after creation. Today's lunch break is a trailer for a documentary called Standing With Stones that attempts to demystify the awe-inspiring megaliths scattered across Britain and Ireland.