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George Clooney is a man on a paranormal mission in Grant Heslov's dark comedy "The Men Who Stare at Goats," taking Venice film festivalgoers Tuesday beyond Iraq to another dimension.
Clooney, who arrived Monday, was expected to take to the red carpet for the gala screen with Italian showgirl Elisabetta Canalis on his arm.
In the film, scoop-hungry journalist Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor) happens upon Clooney's character, Lyn Cassady, embarking on a mission to find Bill Django (Jeff Bridges), founder of the US Army's secret "psychic soldier" programme, in Iraq.
Shown out of competition in Venice, the film is based on a book by Jon Ronson about the army's experimentation with New Age concepts and the paranormal, for instance the ability to kill goats by staring at them, begun in the 1970s.
"As funny as it is, some of the dumbest parts of the film are the true parts," said Clooney, whose character claims to be a former psychic soldier who was reactivated after the September 11 attacks in 2001.
"That's what made us laugh the most."
The mission takes Lyn and Bob to prison camp run by another psychic soldier, played by Kevin Spacey.
"This wasn't an Iraq war film, but a comedy about some of the crazy ideas that went on starting at the end of the Vietnam war, and then carried on," Clooney said.
Predictably, Clooney, a regular at the Venice festival, fielded moronic questions at the press conference.
So he had his schtick ready on Tuesday when a questioner professed his love and began pleading for Clooney's heart.
"It's always embarrassing when you swing for the fence and it just falls flat," he sympathised -- using a baseball metaphor -- as the man stripped off his shirt, leaving his tie.
"But the tie looks good," Clooney said as security started wresting the microphone away from the unhappy suitor.
"You stay there, we'll get back to you. There's a little ambulance on its way," Clooney said.
Also Tuesday, claustrophobics were warned off a real war movie, "Lebanon," by Israeli director Samuel Maoz, shot entirely from inside a tank assigned to search a town that had been bombed by Israeli warplanes.
The intensely personal project tells the story of the first Lebanon war, reliving the director's own experience as a young Israeli soldier in 1982.
"I needed distance to do this film as a director and not just as someone who lived through it," Maoz told reporters.
"I can't tell this story in a classical cinematic style."
The viewing sight of the gunner is "the filter through which I intended to tell my emotional story," said Maoz, one of several first-time directors vying for the prestigious Golden Lion at this year's Mostra, the 66th.
The sight's crosshairs are always in the frame as the action unfolds, with closeups of terrified civilians, charred bodies, or scenes of everyday life in the town.
Inside, the three young soldiers and their commander play out a tense interpersonal drama.
"I want the audience to be in the tank and to know only what the characters know," he said, adding: "I don't want the audience to understand, but to feel."
To train the actors for the part, Maoz put them "in a certain state of mind. I left them in a small, dark, hot container for hours" to experience claustrophobia.
"Then I banged it with metal pipes to simulate a scary explosion and being attacked."
