First and foremost, people need to know that this is a ghost story.  Don’t forget that the original title of the Charles Dickens classic was A Christmas Carol in Prose, Being a Ghost Story of Christmas.  Decades of diluted adaptations featuring the likes The Jetsons, Elmo and Xena: Warrior Princess have caused people to forget just how macabre this story actually is.  And, seeing as how it stars Jim Carrey and has the “Disney” logo plastered on every piece of marketing material, it would be easy to believe that Disney’s A Christmas Carol would be yet another in a long line of watered-down takes on the holiday classic.  Nothing could be further from the truth. 

"More of this is true than you would believe," we are warned at the beginning of The Men Who Stare at Goats. Which is a roundabout way to say “based on a true story” without having to be bound by any real facts. The story purports to tell us the story of Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor) a reporter for a midsize newspaper who falls into the story of his life while reporting on the Iraq War. He desperately wants to make his way from Kuwait and into Iraq but, unable to find a way in, is instead languishing in his hotel’s bar. It is here that he comes upon Lyn Cassady (George Clooney). Lyn is a former Army man who claims to have been in a Special Forces unit whose sole purpose was to harness the power of the paranormal for patriotic purposes. They were trained in the art of cloud bursting, walking through walls, mind control and the aforementioned “goat staring” (which was a means by which they would stop their hearts).

The Fourth Kind claims to be “based on actual case studies” of psychologist Abbey Tyler. The film begins with Milla Jovovich telling us that she’ll be playing the role of Tyler while the film will also show us “actual” footage of the “real” Tyler and her patients. Tyler is practicing in Nome, Alaska when she begins to notice a common theme among her patients: they’re all being awoken at 3:30am to the site of an owl, an overwhelming since of dread and gaps in their memories. Using hypnosis she attempts to fill in those gaps. But problems arise when her methods result in depression and extreme panic, culminating with one of her patients killing his family before turning the gun on himself. The film views this as tragic but since they won’t have to watch the rest of this movie, I prefer to think of them as lucky. But I’m a glass-half-full kinda guy.