GOAT (Feb 28)

Had a friend who saw this movie last week. She sort of looks young? She told me that she tried to buy a ticket for Wuthering Heights. They asked her for ID because it’s rated R and she didn’t have any on her. So they said no, you can’t see that movie, and the only other thing playing was GOAT, so she saw GOAT, which, she said, happened pretty much how you expected “from the first five minutes”. When I asked her if she ever got around to seeing WH, she said that the experience of being denied access the first time sort of poisoned the whole thing for her, so I guess from now on whenever she thinks of Emerald Fennell’s adaptation, she’ll remember an enterprising young goat who wanted to play basketball.

My first real interest in this movie came from this reaction to a trailer I had not seen or had not noticed when going to the movies with my gremlims. Zack Zwiezen had published the mesmerizing article on Kotaku entitled, “Excuse Me, What the Hell is This?” about the fact that in a follow-up trailer to GOAT’s marketing tour, it had included a clip of two baby rhinoceroses farting into the CPAP machine of a monkey. I kind of recommend reading that article more than the movie itself if you don’t have gremlins of your own or a real hard-on for semi-autobiographical animated features about Steph Curry.

The movie, as Friend insists, is about a young Caleb McLaughlin–fresh off of his Stranger Things finale–trying to make it BIG in a copypasta of Zootopia’s competitive sports industry. Despite a dominant meta of playing large animals in a battle arena with ever-shifting terrain suited to the natural abilities of the home team (think Boston Red Sox’s Green Monster giving them the uncanny ability to score more home runs but in this version you can get stranded below ice flows and I guess not die), a young KID aspires to disrupt the sport with his–slightly more than 180 vision?–his free throws?–agility? Unclear, but in the process of being drafted in the middle or TAIL end of the season (unclear how many games these four teams play to constitute a season), he urges a bunch of has-been players to rediscover their love of the game all the way into the conference final, at which point (and this is a spoiler, but also sort of what you saw coming), a setback–which is so deeply in the weeds of the politics of team finances that I am shocked that it is a major plot point in the movie–leads the team to temporarily break up before solving their differences through montage and timely self-discovery, before finally winning everything by Wanting It More than the other team.

Which I guess is when I should continue to beat the drum of the praising the genius of the first two seasons of Ted Lasso for its ability to render it impossible to unsee the obviously correct trajectory of any underdog sports comedy which is to embrace loss and redefine the parameters for success.

GOAT is marinaded in the idea that hard work and heart should immediately pay off for anyone who is sincere in their earnest belief in a just world without reflecting on the idea that that highly focalized view of competition suggests that one’s competitors do not have an entire narrative of their own for why they deserve it more, like the famous foil for Aeneas in Latium, Rutulian Turnus, who steals the show in the second half of the epic for his bold leadership and eccentric taste in friends. Not so in GOAT, the antagonist is a (dark) horse (confusingly as a visual pun) who likes to publish diss tracks of his rivals and engage in social media spats while getting his hair braided at the barber shop. He doesn’t really have the charisma to win over any but the most deranged fans who watch this movie.

Last bit, but if you have ever heard John Mulaney’s standup, you’ll recognize a line that they have undoubtedly cribbed from this joke here: Little is SMALL. I am MEDIUM.