Ghost World

Rating:
Summary: An perfect realistic teen dramatic comedy film.
Review: Two teenages girls named Enid and Rebecca (Played by Thora Birch and Scarlett Johansson) have finish thier high school and the two of them, are planning to live together. But when one of them Enid plays a crude prank on a oddball loner named Seymor (Steve Buscemi). Enid and Seymour beings an unlikely friendship and a lot more than that but it`s slowly hurting the Friendship of Enid and Rebecca.

This is the first time, i realize after watching the film, it was closer to Real-Life but the thing, i find sad about this film is it was, i didn`t want to see the world of Enid to End. Based on a Comic Book by Daniel Clowes, he also written the Screenplay with Director:Terry Zwigoff (Crumb). Which Clowes and Zwigoff are Oscar Nominated for thier Best Adapted Screenplay. Steve Buscemi did win for Best Supporting Actor in the Independent Spirit Awards including Clowes and Zwigoff also win for thier Best First Screenplay. Zwigoff was Nominated for First Best Feature at the Independent Spirit Awards. Actor:John Malkovich is also one the film Producers. Wonderful Performances by Birch, Johansson and Buscemi. The Movie also has a fine Supporting roles for Actors-Including:Bob Balaban, Illeana Douglas and Brad Renfro (Too Bad Renfro didn`t have a Bigger Role in this One). DVD`s has an clean anamorphic Widescreen (1.85:1) transfer and an clear Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Sound. DVD Extras are:A Music Video, Outtakes, Trailer and Behind the Scenes featurette. This is a coming of age film, which is beautiful, touching, sad, dramatic comedy, i have never seen before. A Instant Cult Classic. Teri Garr appears Unbilled. Grade:A.

Rating:
Summary: Greatest movie of the year
Review: I went to this movie with low expectations. My mother saw it and drove me an hour away to the nearest art theater, insisting that i would love this movie. She said the main character was just like me. I had no idea what i was in for. Enid is a classic adolescent character, reminiscent of Mick in the heart is a lonely hunter. she is discontented with her world and more insightful than anyone around her. Many teenage girls might find her a cynic or depressing, but for a few of us (those who enjoy retro kitsch and easily become infatuated with middle aged misfits) this movie is a perfect caracature of our world.

Rating:
Summary: disputed ending
Review: I enjoyed this film a great deal. The characters were well conceived, and the actors gave them a real depth. Parts were exceptionally poignant, and other moments were riotously funny. The momentum of the plot reminded me of a Greek tragedy...(...).

Rating:
Summary: An outcry against banality..........
Review: Ghost World expounds one of least sugar-coated views of American surburbia the make the screens in recent years. Director Terry Zwiggoff is fascinated by the banal ugliness of strip-mall excess, and Ghost World takes place in a sort of nightmare American neverland - everything's coming up hamburger joints, garage sales, porn shops and hick-town headcases. The town is never named, but the scnery will be familiar to anyone whose ever stepped outside an American city.

Its a perfectly awful backdrop for one of this years sleeper gems, a brave, insightful and refreshingly different take on a fairly tired theme - the coming to terms with reality in late adolescence. Enid (Thora Birch in an elaboration of her American Beauty role)and Rebbecca are high school grads who just about cope with their existences within Hicksville by berating everything and everyone. And who can blame them? This is American culture at it's most facile. Among there objects of fun is Seymour (Steve Buscerni), an old record collecting greaseball whos lonely hearts ads the girls answer for fun.

Its at this point the story begins to diverge somewhat. Enid and Rebbecca begin to drift apart, as Enid isolates herself more, hanging on to her determination not to play any part of such a facile culture, whilst Rebbecca is slowly forced by practicality in to compliance and submission. Enid becomes fascinated by the pathetic Seymour ("He's the opposite of everything I hate...") and a poignant relationship develops which becomes the focus of the film.

Ghost World was a film whose course was very much charted during its filming - Seymour had originally been intended as only a peripheral character. But the screen relationship between Birch and Buscerni was so strong as to encourage to director to change the film's emphasis completely. The result is, by turns, halarious, poignant and its own way, tragic. Zwigoff is clearly contemporary culture's worst critic and his view of America is as glib, if far more human , than that of Todd Solondz. And its humanity which gets you here; despite their flaws, Zwigoff has genuine compassion for his ensemble of oddballs and its hard not to touched by their plight.

The films end is almost epigrammatic in its ambiguity - the Ghost World of the title a sort of dream existence which both Enid and Rebbeca have spent their teenage years floating in, refusing to aknowledge a terrifying reality. The ending suggests that whilst Rebbecca has left this world far behind, Enid has forever been lost to it. Its an ending which, like the film, has a perculiar poetry to it.

Rating:
Summary: One of the best movies I have ever seen!
Review: Ghost World is that rarity-a movie which transcends the screen and keeps us fully involved the story. The script and the acting are both spectacular and the movie looks great too. This is an in depth character study of anyone who felt alienated in high school only to find herself more alienated after graduation--and that's most of us, right?

You will be fascinated and you won't want the thing to end!

Rating:
Summary: Tragicomic, comic book Edward Hopper.
Review: No matter how unmanagable, anti-social or hopeless a teenager is, it's always assumed that it's just a phase, that eventually you will take your proper place in society, get a job and home, begin relationships, have a family, generally contribute to your community and society, if only by paying tax. this process should be increasingly likely is you are as pretty, intelligent, witty, self-assured and creative as Enid in 'Ghost World'. but what if you don't? what happens if you bypass or postpone the 'right' decisions? You find yourself out of the loop, outgrown by friends, ignored by family, a lack of social identity resulting in lack of identity full stop. You become a ghost, and 'Ghost World' is a film defined by absence and lack - of people not having what they want, with major decisions taken by others as if they didn't exist; when even your ideal better half is more of a waning shadow. Some of the crucial scenes pivoting on Enid's life occur when she isn't even there. in such a scenario, familiar reality, with its hierarchies and compartments and classification, stops looking familiar and real, becomes a ghost world of grotesques, empty dream landscapes, randomness, spectral impossibilities. But you can disappear from and for everyone except yourself - Enid is afflicted with an infernal self-consciousness.

'Ghost World' is a very funny and smart film, the ultimate teen movie. But because the reassuring resolutions and socialisations of the teen movie are dislocated, it is an incredibly sad, almost tragic film, a kind of downbeat accompaniment to 'Amelie', another heroine as ghostlike manipulator of others' lives, threatened with her own empty solitude.

'Ghost World' is based on a celebrated graphic novel by Daniel Clowes, and this aesthetic is pushed (for the first time on film it seems to me) to powerful emotional effect. As in a comic book, the characters are mostly one-dimensional, often caricatures, the film's look broad and flat - even Enid's front of calm, contemptuous self-assurance. the emotion of the film, as in the classic Hollywood melodrama, is displaced onto the bright, almost day-glo colours; onto the wonderful clothes Enid wears (increasingly red, tactlessly suggesting the border between adolescence and adulthood she is reluctant to cross); onto the locales, especially Enid's and Seymour's rooms, beautiful pop culture attempts to reveal personalities ignored in the real world; onto the rich musical soundtrack, from Hindi rock'n'roll to classic, eerie country and blues; to Zwigoff's creeping, methodical camerawork. For the patient viewer, the pay-off is devastating, in an accumulative, low-key way.

this faith in popular culture (Enid's remarkable illustrated diary; graffiti; porn shops; jumble sales; old corporate logos etc.), the transient, quickly obsolescent, quickly rewritten or surpressed alternative history of America, of our own lives, the ghosts that won't stay buried, forms a merciful release from the current mind-numbing obfuscations of both high and low culture. An Americana masterpiece.

Rating:
Summary: Best Of The Year
Review: "Ghost World" is the best film of the year. It's intelligent, sarcastic, hilarious filmaking. Thora Birch (American Beauty) plays overly-cynical and helplessly sarcastic Enid. Scarlett Johansson plays her best friend Rebecca. Steve Buscemi plays the dorky Seymour. A quick outline of the plot is as follows: Enid reads a personal ad written by Seymour which he hopes will reunite him with a woman he met. So, Enid decides to play a cruel joke on him by leaving a message on his answering machine pretending to be the woman, just so she, Rebecca and Josh (Brad Renfro) ,the boy they like to torure, can go and watch Seymour at the restaurant waiting for a woman who never shows up. Enid and Rebecca then decide to follow him home, making quips about what they envision his personal life to be like. Enid eventually meets Seymour at a garage sale he is hosting and actually begins to like him.
You might think the film would trail off into an "opposites attract" love story, but it keeps it edge and this simply allows for more sarcasm. Enid likes him because, ever-guarding herslf, "He's the exact opposite of everything I hate." Birch's performance as Enid is sometimes a slight continuation of that of American Beauty, but it showcases her talent
far better and the character here is more interesting. Buscemi is his usual quirky self, but here his performance is perfectly matched with the subject matter. Illeana Douglas (The Sixth Sense) plays Enid's summer-school art teacher who is so politically corect she praises art for what it represents rather than what it looks like, and she has her share of funny moments. The funniest continuing joke is the appearance of Josh's convenience store boss and a mullet wearing wife-beater sunburnt guy. There is some more plot progression, like how Enid and Rebecca's relationship starts to dwindle, Enid's relationship with her father and Seymour. The ending has an open endedness to it that is the only plausable way to end it rather than giving it a cop-out ending. "Ghost World" is directed by Terry Zwigoff, the mastermind behind the fantastic documentary "Crumb", and based upon a comic by Daniel Clowes, who co-wrote the script with Zwigoff. The best film of the year. May Birch be nominated for an Oscar.

Rating:
Summary: Birch deserves the Oscar
Review: Ghost World is certainly not a "blockbuster" by any means. It's was a comic book first, and the movie is very different. I thought that both the book and movie were very good. But they have their differences, such as some characters were taken out of the movie, and replaced with different ones.
Steven Buscemi's character was based on a comic one, but is basically new. He also directs the movie.
The movie is basically about Enid, played to perfection by Thora Birch, but it starts off at high school graduation. Then Enid and her friend, Rebecca, spend the summer contemplating what they want to do with the rest of their lives.
The movie is funny, and a refreshing change from the ... that has come out this year. It certainly isn't totally uplifting. It is Thora Birch who really makes this film worthwhile. She is so great in this. It's as if this role was made for her.
The characters in the movie are all great, and very entertaining. This is for that day you say to yourself: I'm tired of all that's out there in the movies, and want something different.
I promise you won't be disappointed. Oh, and stick around til the credits stop rolling. There's a hysterically funny outtake.

Rating:
Summary: Funnier than American Beauty, and more believable.
Review: This movie is a scream. The comic timing is almost perfect. The humor is close to the pain, and that's what propels this movie forward from incident to incident in Enid's life.

As she almost leaves high school, Enid is her own person, filled with bravado and vulnerability. She's wandering around, tragically unsure of where she wants to go and how to get there.

I've met Enid several times in my life. Maybe that is why I became so fond of her in this movie, why I had such high hopes for her, and why I didn't want the movie to end. For that matter, all of the characters in this movie are familiar and sometimes all too real.

Both Ghost World and American Beauty involve the collision between a middle aged man and a young woman, but otherwise have little in common. American Beauty started with an almost realistic portrayal of a man in a midlife crisis, and ended up as a wad of cartoon cookie dough. Ghost World began life as a comic book portrayal of a young lost soul, and resulted in a movie that is creme brulee.

Rating:
Summary: Great start, drags 2/3 of the way through....
Review: This is a teenage angst film based on the comic strip, starring Thora Birch as Enid, just graduated from high school and wearing a militant, too-cool aloofness, and Steve Buscemi, playing a shy retiring blues-vinyl-collecting nerd 30 years her senior. The movie shifts back and forth from the course of their relationship and Enid's more-or-less aimless roaming around the city, making cynical AND paradoxically poignant observations ("The bus doesn't stop here anymore" -- "You don't know what you're talking about"). The best scenes are the ones in the remedial high school art class, where the teacher values cheesy, sophomoric political messages over artistic self-expression and skilled technique. Also, the curmudgeonly swipes at clueless elements in our society are funny because they are ubiquitous: the teenage video store clerk who's never heard of "8 1/2", the barfly who values a young, raucous pseudo-blues band more than THE REAL THING, and, toward the end, the immediate suspension of all perspective, proportion, and due process for anyone denounced as having acted in a manner interpreted (correctly or not) as racist. The problem with the film, however, is that it drags about one half to two-thirds of the way through. Delighted after 30 minutes, I was hoping it would never end; toward the end I was looking at my watch. I think the plotline, so suitable for a comic strip where it is doled out in small portions, is too flat for a continuous two-hour presentation (i.e. a movie). Thora Birch's performance begins to seem like it's stuck on the same note, and begins to get a wee-bit tiresome. I can't tell if that's just Thora Birch (too early) or the script. Pretty good film, though, and a much-needed respite from the horrors infesting movie theaters this year (Glitter, Pearl Harbor, etc).