Ghost Wold portrays what it's like going through high school and then you graduate and what do you do. Thora Birch really delves into the role of Enid and you can see her struggle with trying to be an adult and still teen forced to make decisions shes never had to make before.
Two misfit best friends, Enid (Thora Birch, brunette in American Beauty), and Becky, (Scarlett Johansson, The Horse Whisperer), graduate high school and meet a strange man, Steve Buscemi, in this bittersweet teen story about misfits and longing. Not really a comedy, but has comedy moments. The best movie of 2001. Certainly the best Hollywood meets Art house movie of the genre, at the time. (Until Brokeback Mountain unseated it). Set in the world of a comic book series which became an underground hit among collectors, Terry Swigoff and writers clearly know the material and pull stellar performances from the young cast. Birch should have won best actress of this one, as she really convinces you she IS the character from the book! Amazing. "Can I call you Weird Al? Because you look just like Weird Al." Classic.
i found it a really sad film about alienation and friendship. i could relate to enid's character of not quite fitting in and how she's trying to find someone who'd understand her just a little. but i have to say, seymour is freaking annoying. how can someone as cool as enid like him?
Based on the not so well known graphic novel by Daniel Clowes, "Ghost World" is the story of two best friends Enid (Thora Birch) and Rebecca (Scarlett Johansson) that just graduated high school. The two outcasts finds a ad in the personals section in a newspaper and decides to call him a set up a prank meeting. The main focus of the movie is on Thora Birch's character and she does a great job as the lead. Steve Buscemi who plays the role of Seymour, and he never disappoints. The story is filled with fun sarcasm and black comedy and I find the movie very entertaining. Worth watching if you like 'black comedy' dramas in the style of "American Beauty"
It is really good. It is well writen and reflect the reality of some of growing up of some "excentric" kinds of teenagers. THe jokes are dry and sarcastic, wich suits the movie perfectly. Thora is great, Scarlet is great, steve is gret, everyone is good in this movie, one that garanteed will make you laugh and think about the world around you.
"Ghost World" was one of my favorite films throughout all of high school. For a coming of age story, it's incredibly unique and unconventional. Also, the two leads are irresistibly compelling and their relationship develops into an unforgettable romance. Now, years later, watching this again... i've never seen a movie get something so right. It's not a perfect film by any means, but it's a movie that "gets it". For all of us losers wondering aimlessly post-high school after the entire world has seemingly passed you by, this is the ultimate comfort film. It's depressing, but just knowing that there's someone out there who knows what you go through and makes art out of it... it's just beautiful. You don't often find films with legitimate emotions that you can relate to. It's incredibly unique in that way.
"Ghost World" starts off with Enid (Thora Birch) and Rebecca (Scarlett Johansson) at their high school graduation. It's the day they've been waiting for their entire lives - all they can do now is mock their classmates and revel in the moment of realization that they'll never have to see these familiar faces anymore. However, after high school - their friendship dwindles. Both had chosen to get an apartment together and not go to college... but, while Rebecca is moving on in a more conventional manner with a real job and fancy apartments, Enid still hasn't come close to finding herself.
Also putting a damper in the relationship is a new found friendship between Enid and Seymour (Steve Buscemi), an old record collector far older than herself. She's attracted to Seymour because he's the opposite of everything she hates about people. He's a dork, but he knows he's a dork and he's true to himself. Their relationship starts off cute as Enid helps Seymour meet a woman, however problems start to arise when she wants him for herself. Or does she? Well, she doesn't know what she wants.
Part of "Ghost World"'s charm is simply all of the nostalgia. There's something so irresistible about old blues records, advertisements, and the various memorabilia in Seymour's apartment. And Enid, dressing like a punk rocker from 1975 with childish bedroom decor, also embraces the past. I get the sense that Enid is going to end up a lot like Seymour in the future. She'll be lonely and feel like time has passed her by, but she'll still have these inanimate objects to cling to.
Thora Birch delivers a great performance. For a character that is on the surface nothing more than a selfish teenager with deadpan delivery, her character evolves at the same rate as the movie. We come to understand her pain and in a way we root for her... even though she isn't exactly "likable" in a conventional sense. Steve Buscemi is absolutely perfect as Seymour, and I doubt you could of cast a better person to play him. Buscemi is odd looking and can play the geeky older guy very well... but, he's also very endearing. He's a guy that we grow to love and feel for. In some ways I hoped for his happiness more than Enid's, as Enid's approach to finding happiness had been nothing more than selfish.
A lot of problems arise in regards to how well Enid and Seymour were developed. Because they get so much screentime together, every other character doesn't seem like a real person. Rebecca doesn't have much to her at all, and Enid's father and his girlfriend aren't worth caring about. Also, a side story involving Enid at a summer art class didn't give me much more than a few cheap laughs. However, I must say, there's another thing this got completely right. It's astounding that the director is as old as he is, because this is an incredibly youthful film. It's a portrait of just about anyone in that 18-23 range.
While "Ghost World" is not a film without it's flaws, i've found that it's held up well over the years. I seem to go back to it two or three times a year and always get a little bit more out of it. It's a coming of age tale that is honest. Nothing is tied up in a pretty little bow - all we can do as the audience is hope for the best. But, in the world of "Ghost World", the "best" is surely an unlikely outcome for everyone involved. And it makes you smile because of it's honesty.
The reason I love Ghost World so much is because it combines everything I like the most seeing in a movie. It has dorky yet attaching characters, a quirky storyline, weird music, "retro-ness", humour paired with drama and an amazing graphic novel to back it up... not that the graphic novel changes my opinion of the film much (but it did incite me to embark on a crazy graphic novel shopping spree that lasted a week).
Ghost World was, for me, an instant personal favorite. It's just so... real. The adolescence crises, the way people can't face reality and often shut themselves out from things that would normally be seen as immoral and even love in its most complex form.
Scarlett Johansson and Thora Birch both give amazing performances and fit their roles perfectly. Especially Thora Birch. Seriously, the girl was born to play Enid! And Steve Buscemi? He's a god. 'Nuff said.
P.S. Watch out for Dave Sheridan and his pepperoni sticks. That had me crying with laughter!
Abstract and slightly obscure, I love Ghost World for being incredibly unique and amazingly accurate. One of the few films I enjoy seeing Scarlett Johansson in, because it's an ultimately 'real' movie.
Ghost World has its dark humorous moments. I loved every characters in this film, and I love the ending. Life isn't as easy as it seems, and you might be trying to find the solution all your life.
Funny, witty and weirdly kind of loveable - just as the characters are. A film for the misfits and the oddballs, the cynics amongst the pristine. Quite brilliant, really.
One of the few comics adaptations that might be better than the book. I love Dan Clowes comics, but this movie has a life beyound and maybe above it's original material. Funny, poignant, cathartic, and genuinely emblematic of it's times.
WTF? Why is this film held in such high regard? I saw a slow, boring film about snotty, bitchy highschool girls continuing to be snotty and bitchy after graduation. Steve Buscemi's performance was great, but that's the only saving grace for this shit. This had to be based on the most boring graphic novel ever written. . .
An honest examination of what happens after high school between two best friends. Thora Birch plays Enid in an almost uncomfortably honest performance as a misfit who's looking for an identity post-graduation/pre-adulthood. Scarlett Johansson plays Rebecca, the more mature of the pair and more self-assured. This movie is all about how to grow as individuals, Enid and Rebecca most grow apart as people. Throw in Steve Buscemi in a career best performance as Seymour, the most hapless and hopeless mid-life crisis ever committed to a screen, and Illeana Douglas as the hilariously pretentious summer school art teacher, and you've got one tremendously funny cast. The dialogue is infinitely quotable, and the ending the correct mixture of poignant and mysterious. Did Enid just get on the bus and go some place far away like she wanted, or is the bus symbolic of her suicide? We never really know for certain.
While I had seen Scarlett Johansson before in other movies, this was the first one where I had "fallen in love" with her. I always liked Dan Clowes comicbook work. He definitely subscribed to the idea of having a "style that was all his own". And for my money, this style fits in even more effectively in the medium of film than it does in the comicbook version of what is known as the "alternative" genre ( which already, it does so quite successfully). Dan Clowes' movies bring a well-welcomed shot of something new & different to watch in films as his comics bring to the experience of reading.
A fun, quirky film, with a great deal of attention given over to looking great. I found I could relate to the characters, and that the film did an admirable job of expressing the confusion which comes during that barrier between adolescence and adulthood - the floudering which so often occurs at the precipice at finishing school. Unfortunately, I feel the film suffers slightly in direction - it really needs to be tied together a little between on a scene by scene basis. Still highly enjoyable, and thoughtprovoking. (I haven't read the comic, so can't really comment on similarities - but the film does have a stylized 'comicbook' look.)
tbh i don't seen what is so amazing about this film, loads of folk told me to watch it as it was the best thing they had ever seen.
i did really enjoy it is was really good as it was original and fresh, it showed how that no matter what you think of other people, weather you and better than them or not, we are all the same deep down. i think the reason i did not find it amazing was because i did not fully understand it. i think it was really just about a very confused girl who liked to be different and thought she was better than others because of this.
thora birch plays enid. enid has just finished that dreg known as school. she has a friend called becky (scarlet). enid makes friends with a loner called seymour (buscemi) who ends up meaning alot more to her than she first imagined he could. it's bizarre but good. at times it's funny. it's played out well. first time i've enjoyed watching thora birch in a role
Enid: "Josh. Rebecca: Josh. Enid, Rebecca: Josh! Enid: God, I'll bet he's in there jerking off. Rebecca: I'll bet he never jerks off. Enid: Yeah, he's beyond human, and stuff like that. Rebecca: Should we leave him a note? Enid: Sure. You got a pen? [Rebecca pulls out a pen, Enid takes it] Enid: [writing] Dear Josh, we came by to fuck you, but you were not home. Therefore... you are gay. Signed Tiffany, and Amber."
Based on the acclaimed, cult graphic novel by Daniel Clowes (who co-wrote the screenplay with director Terry Zwigoff), Ghost World is the most accurate account of contemporary teen life ever filmed. It joins American Graffiti, Dazed and Confused, and The Graduate as a love letter to that time in one's life when the security net of school is pulled away, and The Great Beyond looms ahead. But unlike such previous coming-of-age films, Ghost World feels like something from the new millennium, a time when honesty seems truly extinct.
Like the cynical teenage perception it illuminates, Ghost World is a film which never quite lets you figure out what it's about. It's always shifting focus and viewpoint reflecting that phase in human life which characteristically is about finding a path and finding something reliable to depend on or believe in at a time when everything is changing and nothing is really what it seems. At the beginning we think it's about two very alienated teenagers graduating from high school looking at a not very inspiring range of choices of future. What initially seems to be an unshakeable alliance in disgust between Enid (Thora Birch) and Rebecca (Scarlett Johansson) at the conformity and posing they see around them quickly starts to disintegrate once they leave the familiar milieu of school.
Finding they don't fit in at school is easy. Their non-conformist role helps them identify themselves at least by what they don't relate to. Their jaded revulsion for all the posers who have apparently successfully adapted to the superficial world of strip malls, fake theme franchises and Barbie doll values leads them to pick on specific targets to torment, losers who have no hope of fitting in. At least some sense of power and superiority results. Rebecca has always attracted the boys because of her blonde natural beauty, and has never needed to play up to get their attention. Darkly intense Enid is more likely rudely to put those boys down, revealing an inner insecurity while denying secretly being in love with one of them, Josh (Brad Renfro), a local convenience store clerk who fancies Rebecca. Enid unsettles people she doesn't like by a deliberate non-responsiveness, doing the opposite of what is expected.
What becomes more difficult when they leave school is a divergence of personality brought about by their changed environment. Rebecca seems content to work in a coffee bar, saving to get their own apartment. Enid, on the other hand, finds herself unable to conform to the fake, happy, up-selling salesperson persona demanded by her employer and is fired during her first day. Enid accuses Rebecca of selling out to false societal values. Rebecca can no longer understand Enid's apparently universal negativity and is impatient with her self-absorbed unreliability.
What is diverting Enid from her alliance with Rebecca is that a prank which she perpetrates with Rebecca and Josh, falsely answering a personal ad by Seymour (Steve Buscemi) in order to exult in his humiliation, backfires. Perhaps it is because something in Seymour's lonely outcast status resonates within her that she follows him to his home. Finding him to be a passionate vintage blues record collector she gradually becomes his friend, discovering a similar love in herself for the authenticity of the voice of legendary blues great Skip James. Rebecca is astonished. "You actually like that guy?", she asks. Enid replies, "Well, he's the exact opposite of everything I hate."
Seymour's visual unpretentiousness appeals to Enid. There's a purity about him - a realness - that she finds attractive. Could it be that Seymour is Enid's ticket back into the human race? The two hang out together. At a blues bar, Seymour complains when the roar of televised sports coverage interrupts a guitar-strumming blues musician. "Turn off their stupid sports until he's done playing," the purist protests. Later, when a blaring, commercial party band called Blues Hammer takes the stage, Seymour makes a hasty run for the exit. "I can't relate to 99.9% of humanity," Seymour complains to Enid after their escape. "Give most of these people a pair of Nikes and a Big Mac, and they're happy."
It's here that the true heart of Ghost World is revealed. The film's characters are caught in a battle between honesty and survival, between holding true to their beliefs and selling out. The "ghost world" in question is a nameless town inundated by mini-malls, coffee shops, film theatres, and people desperately and hopelessly trying to get rid of yesterday's stuff. Enid can't bring herself to sell a toy during a yard sale not necessarily because the potential buyer is a perceived "loser" but because it's easier to keep it than to perceive someone else reinventing the life of something she once held dear.
Ghost World is a teen film only in the sense that the two main characters happen to be teenagers. Other than that, it shares nothing in common with the glut of teen films that have filled the screen in recent years. Many of these films have been amusing and entertaining, but too often they are vapid affairs that have little interest in their characters and how they fit into a commercialized world. More than anything, Ghost World stands apart because it is a striking film about the difficulties of asserting individuality, particularly for young people who are on the cusp of adulthood and must begin to define themselves outside of mocking the realm of adolescence that has consumed them for the past decade. The constant danger for Enid and Rebecca is that they are always on the verge of becoming the very losers that they define themselves by ridiculing. With little in the way of prospects ahead of them, the film's humour is constantly tempered by the fact that they may be the young version of all that they hate in adulthood.
The performances are electrifying. Thora Birch, two years after American Beauty, is absolutely brilliant, effortlessly combining the featureless of the cartoon character of the original Ghost World comic with a deeply layered portrayal of a complex, introverted teenager. Her reactions have all the more impact for her stillness. Fifteen year-old Scarlett Johannsson, playing an 18-year-old with confidence, delivers her lines with conviction and matches Birch absolutely. Steve Buscemi is riveting as Seymour, his energy, body language and posture conveying a hopeless resignation that Enid refuses to accept for her own future.
The film is visually impressive. Brilliantly evoking the satirical premise of Ghost World, Zwigoff's direction is never intrusive or showy and we don't get excessive camera movement or quick-cuts, or little visual hiccups and burps to accentuate how cool and hip the film is supposed to be. The dialogue and performances are all uniformly terrific. Zwigoff's comic timing is miraculously dead-on in all but one short scene (an over-the-top character does a slapstick kung fu type of routine early on in the film - which actually almost pays off at the end). Zwigoff's timing (visually, in the edit room and with his actors) and instincts are so perfect that the quirky and unique material is not just sporadically funny, but consistently amusing and affecting. You'll be laughing out loud many, many times during the film.
The music is a mixture of punk, new-wave, traditional jazz, blues and pop that is part of the fabric of the film and never substitutes for or tries to dishonestly short-cut a response from the audience. Even when the characters are listening to specific music, we are still more caught up with them and what they are doing then with the music. That doesn't happen very often.
If you try to say Ghost World is a little bit like... say Rushmore or Clueless, or maybe Welcome to the Dollhouse or American Beauty, you don't come close at all to describing what it really is - only what it isn't. Ghost World isn't like any other film you've seen. It's hilariously funny and depressingly grim, endlessly original and strangely familiar and real. It's all too appallingly real. An astonishing film, graced with one of the most beautiful, haunting, hopeful, and magical endings I've seen in a long time. A remarkable achievement. The stuff that great American cinema should always be made of.
Rebecca: "So, what do you do if you're a Satanist? Enid: Sacrifice virgins and stuff. Rebecca: I guess that lets us off the hook."
This movie is outstanding. I really enjoy the unique characters in this film. There are very funny moments and the actors all do an excellent job. The ending is also interesting. I highly recommend Ghost World.
teen angst movie at its best with great performances from all involved. I really wanted to be like enid(but that passed), sharply written script with some really funny and witty dialogue you'll be quoting for days. This movie represents all of us who've been called a loser, nerd , freak , outcast. Rejoice in this film we're finally accepted huh or are we ?
An interesting movie, another cult film, the characters are great and the situations are fascinating, the way they changes according the problems is incredible.
MCT:August 7, 2008
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