After all the buzz, Precious is finally coming out in select theaters this weekend, and even after winning unprecedentd back to back awards at Sundance and Toronto, for once this film lives up to the buzz. We reviewed it here back in January after it premiered at Sundance (then under the title Push), and I loved it (see the review here). Not a “fun” movie by any means, and probably not a great date movie, but a must-see nonetheless.

For those looking for something more upbeat, The Men Who Stare at Goats may do the trick. Ewan McGregor plays a journalist hot on the trail of a potentially scandalous story — a secret paranormal military “black ops” program that somehow involves characters played by George Clooney, Jeff Bridges and Kevin Spacey. It’s a bizarre film, and even with its star-studded cast, it’s hard to imagine who would read this script and say “this HAS to get made”. But that’s not to say it’s bad. The Men Who Stare at Goats is enjoyable enough, thanks to a rare, off-beat, almost bewildered kind of humor that rides throughout the film. To give away one small joke in the film as an example, at one point Ewan McGregor is riding in a car in the desert with George Clooney. McGregor reads about a psychic maneuver called the “sparkling eyes technique” and asks Clooney what it is. Clooney says “okay, you ready?” and looks away from the road for a moment (still driving) and stares at McGregor with eyes wide open for a moment and then asks “You got it?” That was it, we just witnessed “sparkling eyes technique” and like McGregor we can only wonder if Clooney is completely nuts, because it didn’t look like he was doing anything but staring for a moment. Dark humor, but effective at times. Although these moments are a lot of fun, unfortunately I can’t say it really adds up to what you’d normally think of as an engrossing film. But it’s good low boil fun, and you could do a lot worse with your Friday or Saturday night.

Last, and in this case least, is Turning Green, which is possibly a worse date film even than Precious. The star, an angry teenager played by Donal Gallery, spends about half the film masturbating, which eventually leads him to porno magazines and a realization that he could make some real money selling those magazines to the locals (the realization comes to him in a vision in which a pinup girl encourages him to start the business and tells him she’s proud of him!). His hope is to make enough money to go back to America, where he grew up as a kid. Timothy Hutton, Alessandro Nivola and Colm Meaney round out the cast with solid performances, but there doesn’t seem to be enough to the story to make the whole effort worthwhile. As the story approaches it’s key turning point later in the film, we see small-time gangsters Timothy Hutton and Alessandro Nivola pitting a big dog against a small dog as a fairly obvious foreshadowing of the inevitable conclusion to the film. Both dogs are pulling on a leash or something similar in a kind of tug-of-war and eventually the big dog tires of this and lets just say that things don’t end well for the small dog. As foreshadowing goes, you couldn’t make it much more obvious than that, and in a lot of ways it represents my thoughts on the film generally. The scene works okay enough, but it’s pretty obvious, a little forced, and more than anything underwhelming. This one you can probably skip. (Turning Green opens in LA this weekend and in NYC next weekend).