Notes on The Goat

In the Summer of 2004, a comedy popped up and disappeared without much fanfare. It was called The Terminal. I liked this movie, but it didn't get a lot of attention. It was a small, unambitious movie, drowned out by bigger, louder and dumber projects like Troy, The Day After Tomorrow and I, Robot. It's biggest downfall was the one-two punch of director Steven Spielberg and star Tom Hanks. Both were huge names in the movie world, and to tackle something so small seemed like an underachievement.

Are you not entertained?!

Regardless of public opinion, this film holds up. It receives my full endorsement, but that's not what I'm here to talk about today.

2004 was a weird time to live. Music was bad, and had been for about eight years. TV was on the cusp of a new golden age. Broadband internet was finally becoming widely available to the masses, ushering in the new concept of digital media. And movies were getting gritty.

This was post-9/11 America. It was a time when citizens were still afraid, still looking over their shoulders, still keeping their heads down. The Iraqi and Afghani wars were going full-steam ahead with no signs of slowing. Insurgencies kept popping up. Soldiers kept getting ambushed. Planes and boats were being shot at. It was a terrifying time to be alive. Please, oh please, just let us live another day, mister terrorist man.
 

Reasonable solution. Shoot the fear.

It was also the year Michael Moore became a box office draw. He had previous, moderate success with Roger & Me, and Bowling For Columbine, but they were still just documentaries. You had to go out of your way to see them. The average person wouldn't have bothered. Fahrenheit 9/11, however, was a wide release. In the Summer. At the multiplex. It won the Cannes Film Festival. It was the number one movie in America at one point. This was no coincidence.

A subsection of Americans got tired of the constant paranoia in 2004. They were just done. I was a white suburban male high schooler, so of course I was on that liberal bandwagon, just as all angry, young 17 year-olds are to do. I'm neither pointing fingers or excusing my actions. We were all scared, and angry, and irrational back in 2004, and we all coped in our own ways. Some made radical, overly-simplified political statements, and some just tried their best to cope with the nonsense our world had become.

Semi-accurate portrait of the writer as a young man.

But what does any of this have to do with The Terminal? Back in 2004, Tom Hanks' character of Viktor Navorski was a mystery. He came from some non-descript, tumultuous, eastern-European nation called "Krakozhia," a stand-in for any soviet bloc nation. Due to language barriers and other such confusions, we don't know much about Viktor. He came from a war-torn homeland, he suffered from isolation, hunger, poverty, and due to a catch-22 in travel laws, he was forbidden from leaving the New York City airport.

The largest mystery is an omnipresent tin of Planters peanuts Viktor carries with him. Viktor's struggles with hunger plays a large, comedic role in the film's first act. Factoring in the age and dilapidated state of the can, it's strongly implied the tin no longer contains nuts. So what is inside?

The 2004-era mind races furiously. A bomb, or some sort of incendiary device? Chemical warfare? Nuclear waste, ready to serve? Retribution against American troops and figureheads? It all seems so insane that Tom Hanks, the nicest guy in Hollywood, could be a merchant of evil, but that was 2004 America's thought process. The voice of Woody the Cowboy could have been a sadistic madman.

Seems legit.

I watched the film again recently. If it hadn't been my own thought process, I'd never had believed anybody could have mustered such a ridiculously inept analysis of the film. Viktor Navorski is a clown. He's a happy-go-lucky guy caught in a bad situation. He makes the most of it. It's a testament to the indomitable human spirit against unfair odds. He has zero grudges towards anyone. He just wants to live. It's a far more innocent mystery today.

Films are a product of their eras, but also a product of all subsequent eras. It's amazing to see how a film can change, evolve, and dither based on shifts in public perception. More than that, how a film with no ill-intentions can trigger feelings and emotions based on personal identity. It just goes to show, sometimes something small and unassuming can reflect something grandiose.

My Favorite Film and 99 Runners-Up

Everybody has a favorite film. Some people have ten favorite films. Some people flesh out their list to a full hundred. How and why people choose their favorite film is subjective. Some choose a film of important personal significance or inspiration. Some choose a film of extremely high regard to impress other people. Some pick the movie they could watch over and over again. But in the end, a person's favorite movie is more indicative than they may realize.

This is my story.


I grew up on a steady diet of cartoons and sitcoms. From my first day of kindergarten, I set out to be a comedian. The jokester. Mister funny man. I thought making somebody laugh was the surest way to make them like you

As I aged, my tastes didn't necessarily refine, but grew to encompass most everything. I was like the Blob, I just wanted to consume everything in my path. Unfortunately, I had the tragic misfortune of
A) Being a minor,
B) Living in suburban Missouri and
C) Having conservative parents. My mother and father had a strict kibosh on anything they deemed too racy, too violent, too inappropriate, too raunchy, or too controversial. I wasn't allowed to watch The Simpsons from seasons four through ten. My father overheard Bart relentlessly chanting the word "Bastard," and banned the series from our house. That was the freaking golden-age of The Simpsons. I'm still mad about this.

 

Come to think of it, my dad was a pretty ardent Bush supporter...

At about age 13 or 14, my parents either lifted the ban or stopped caring enough to enforce it. We didn't have cable, so they didn't feel it necessary to censor any of my TV-watching; there was nothing too inappropriate on broadcast television.

In early 2000, there was an advertisement for a TV show. It looked funny, and I wanted to watch it. It was that simple. I didn't know who was responsible for creating it, any of the actors appearing in it, or even the background that led to its fruition. I just knew the TV show from a brief 30-second promo. I watched it. Low and behold, if it wasn't the single-funniest 30 minutes of my life, it was damn close. I tuned in next week, and it was even funnier.

And then it was cancelled.

After a mere two episodes, the TV show that changed my life was cast into the garbage by ABC to make room for more episodes of Who Wants to be a Millionaire.

This show was Clerks: The Animated Series.

 

This two minute scene was funnier than the final three seasons of The Drew Carey Show.

As mentioned, at this point of my life, I was trying to experience as much media as possible in any form. The internet was still in the days of dial-up, so it was no help there. I could spend an evening downloading a single song from Napster if my parents didn't need to use the phone, or I could spend 22 bucks on a new album. Hard copy media was still the name of the game. Sam Goody, Funcoland, Wherehouse Music and Best Buy were my homes away from home (That's right, Best Buy. That's where you stand.)

But the king among kings was Blockbuster Video. You remember Blockbuster, right? For five bucks, you could leave your home to pick a movie from a limited library, take it home for three days, (assuming nobody else took the single copy of the movie first) then leave your home again to return it.

9000 my ass. Also, a director from Amsterdam wouldn't use this many Dutch angles.

The one advantage Blockbuster and other video rental outlets had over modern internet streaming services was the ability to browse. You could instantly see hundreds of video boxes, all right next to each other. If you couldn't find something you wanted, you could look at everything else, maybe finding a diamond in the rough. Maybe finding something else entirely. Something serendipitous.

The Baumbach/Raimi Dichotomy

Every film fan at one point or another has attempted to compile a list of favorite comedies. And every single time, nobody amasses more than forty films without getting disgusted at themselves. At a certain point, everybody begins to doubt their own tastes and preferences, or begins to second-guess their instincts. They begin making observations like, "Why do I have Arsenic and Old Lace two points behind Jackass 2?" or, "I haven't even seen What About Bob? in fifteen years, and I don't remember any of it."

It's not a coincidence; this happens to everybody. It's the direct result of the Baumbach/Raimi Dichotomy. The film rule that comedies cannot be objectively compared to each other.

Let me explain:
Sam Raimi makes films that are funny, which are not comedies.
Noah Baumbach makes comedies, but they are not funny.

Raimi employs heavy black humor, over-the-top acting and ridiculous situations, but ultimately stay in the horror/thriller genre.
Baumbach makes slice-of-life dramadies more akin to the ancient Greek definition of comedy, providing uplifting lighthearted tales rather than belly-laughs. There are humorous instances, but none that provoke belly-laughs or actual guffaws.

Comedy is not a fair or accurate word. The spectrum is too broad, too grand, too all-encompassing to accurately define a film. It could mean any number of things, and does mean any number of things. The word can be used to describe both Noah Baumbach and Sam Raimi's works, but the two filmmaker's catalogues could not be any more different.

The real irony is, neither are truly representative of the modern definition of comedy.

Smile and wave, try to behave, be happy that they've made you a celebrity

There is a pre-requisite for reading this post. I'd like you to watch two separate viral videos:

We Are The World 25.75 from Kurt Russell

Okay. On we go.

What does it mean to be a celebrity? A celebrity is anybody whose deeds, actions, or career has made that person known to individuals without having personally met them. There are different grades of celebrity. Most well-known are A-listers, the superstars known by many, even if their fame is not particularly justified. A-list stars are money machines, the result of marketing and exploitation. They're not in the entertainment industry for noble reasons, they want awards and money and fans and more money. When you get a bunch of A-listers together, it usually turns into something like this:


GAH!

KILL IT!

KILL IT WITH SOMETHING STRONGER THAN FIRE!

You could firebomb the whole building, and the only loss would be Jeff Bridges and a recording studio. Why the hell is Vince Vaughn even there? Jeff Bridges won an Oscar for playing a musician in Crazy Heart, so he can justify showing up, even if his reasoning is half-assed. But Vince Vaughn looks like he got lost somewhere and needs to call a taxi. And another thing, when did Vince Vaughn start sucking? He was the coolest guy in the world in 2005, then he and Owen Wilson spontaneously decided they would rather suck. Did the awesomeness of Wedding Crashers result in their collective talent collapsing inward and destroying itself like a neutron star?

Sometimes celebrities just fall out of the limelight. The first video is full of this type of celebrity. Celebrities who once had clout and could once grace magazine covers, but either through bad decisions or personal reasons, have receded to the shadows.

Sometimes celebrities and audiences refuse to admit this. Look at Cameron Diaz and Nicole Kidman. Both of them haven't been in a decent film since 2002 (Gangs of New York and The Others, respectively). Mike Meyers and Eddie Murphy used to be comedy legends, now they couldn't tell a knock-knock joke without crapping all over it. Hell, Tom Cruise used to be the biggest draw in Hollywood with six consecutive films grossing over $100 million, but he couldn't keep his personal life separate from his career and completely screwed himself over.

And yet, despite Vince, Owen, Cameron, Nicole, Mike, Eddie and Tom not having a leg to stand on, they're still considered A-listers and still receive upwards of $25 million per film.

The other type of B-list actor is featured in the second video. The kind who work, and work, and work, but never reach A-list status. They put forth twice the effort, and earn a fraction of the fame. When these types take on a job, it's not for a paycheck, it's an actual honest-to-god career move. They work on the projects they want, they work with the people they want, and they produce quality. Even if this means very few people will ever see their projects.

They usually get a leg-up from the few honest-to-goodness quality actors who manage to crossover to A-list status. While I've never considered myself a Will Ferrell fan, Funny or Die has been a driving forces for aspiring comedians, and has done wonders for the field.

With these two factions clearly defined, we ask ourselves the question: which group of B-list celebrities is the truer representation of the B-list status? If advertisers were clamoring for celebrity spokesmen, who would make a bigger impact: a celebrity very few would recognize, but would greatly appreciate or a celebrity many would recognize, but few would appreciate?

Just some food for thought.