Has anyone seen Ghost World yet?

Oh, the studio's first chioce for Enid was...wait for it...Jennifer Love Hewitt.

Very interesting movie though. Oh and Nick - the final scene with Buscemi is back at his mothers with him undergoing therapy.

Also I missed Josh from the comic, especially the scene where Enid goes to his flat and fucks/doesn't fuck him, and then he ends up with Becky - that was mutedly heartrending; also not mainly about Josh (who is by the way lovely in the strip) but about the Becky-Enid friendship, the dying-fall dynamic of which I think got a bit lost in teh Seymour plot, and that was a shame.

Looking forward very much to wanting to fuck Birch throughout.

(Apologies if you are blind.)

(you question my internet freakatude on a webboard, ewing?)

I see what you mean Ellie, but I'm not convinced there is a logic to the Enid/Seymour relationship - and an unfortunate side-effect of the film being about these characters is that what might appear a logicval extrapolation of events without any wider consequence. Becky seems harsh in the film when she expresses concern about the amount of time Enid spends with Seymour - whereas this would be a pretty normal reaction.

I read the comic the other day. Seymour is a just a cameo character! Interesting.

Key point an awful lot of bigots are bigots for the very reason that they do not really interact with the world they are irrationally distrustful of. (Look at Dave Q & the underclass).

yes, I suppose you could.

I agree about the ending, but that could just be because I hated so much to see it end. I'm still waiting for the full three-hour cut of this film. Ghost World Redux, where are you?

I didn't like the ending either, except that it added a level of fantasy to the movie which made it more fairytale-ish (or comic book-ish).

I felt like the movie was mostly about how people change/ finding your own identity. Thora's character grows apart from her first best friend and it's a rather painful thing to have to go through. I could definitely relate to that. I had a best friend in high school who always talked about us moving in together upon graduation. But in the end we wanted different things and she wasn't able to discuss logistics at all to make it a reality.

So what was the point of the last scene? Any interpretations? Was that in the original comic?

So what was the point of the last scene? Any interpretations? Was that in the original comic?

Yes, it was in the original comic also. It relates to what Enid said to Seymour when they were getting drunk - about getting in a car, not telling anyone, driving away, and starting a new life. At the end, by getting on the bus that goes who knows where, Enid is starting over. In the comic, it's explored a little bit more with a discussion between Enid and Becky. Enid explains to Becky that Becky knows her so well, that she feels trapped, because if she were to do something differently, Becky would deem it to be out of character (the best example is the decision to apply to college).

In the comic, Enid clearly loathes herself, which may not be as obvious in the movie. She is often hypocritical, especially when making fun of people. Enid finds college to be an opportunity to step away from her old life and perhaps her personality, too.

I mean, I love the movie, but I don't think it's really as faithful as all that to the (even better) GN - the girls are much closer/more 'equal' in the comic, which makes the differences in their ambitions/destinies (staying put vs. heading off into the sunset), and their ultimate 'break-up', very moving, I think. By introducing the Seymour character, it becomes less abt friendships and more abt relationships - and more, much more than comic, abt Enid in particular.

I'm afraid I don't understand. By "last scene," I'm referring to the final scene where Enid gets on the bus. In the comic, the last thing that happens is Enid gets on the bus, right after she sees Becky and Josh in the diner and says something like, "You have grown into a beautiful, young woman." The stuff on the beach happens before that. To me, both the movie and the comic end the same way.

http://open.spotify.com/album/1OrRbwyqkb0ZQNlTkIvLE2

^^^this really does have a great soundtrack

she looks like my ex-girlfriend in that. whereas enid in the comic didn't.
― ethan, Tuesday, 14 August 2001 01:00 (7 years ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

^proto-Passantino

Blueshammer track is the jam.

both 'tino posts on-point

prototino

it's weird that "blues hammer" has become a common reference, while people never talk about "ghost world" as a movie anymore. it's like the blues hammer concept transcended the movie from whence it came.

Huh, has it really become a common reference?

Agree that Ghost World isn't as remembered as it should be. I thought it would draw more support than it did when decade-end lists and polls started appearing last year. It was on my own list.

i mean "common" means lots of different things but i feel like i hear sarcastic citations of blues hammer fairly often

Ta-Nehisi Coates, today: http://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2011/04/authentic-down-in-the-delta-blues/73395/

I think Buscemi is the only thing this movie has going for it.

You must not like nerd boobs.

Did Thora get her t's out in this? I totally don't remember it if so

not forgotten, but victim of inexplicable delayed backlash

Did Thora get her t's out in this? I totally don't remember it if so

Nah, but between her and Scarlett it did make me wonder if the casting director's prime criteria was cup size.

^^I remember seeing this the day it opened in town and when Thora/Enid had that line about having big boobs meaning you had to be a slut, me and my friend traded a quick "Um, HELLO" look.

Had a HUGE crush on Thora when this came out.

Discovered the great Lionel Belasco through this movie.

the ending is a total knock-out blow :/ MAYBE ambiguous but for mine one of the most devastating endings I've seen

great film

it is. a trend célèbre in its moment, but it seems a bit neglected now. and thora birch wound up making low-budget horror movies for the most part. sad, as she was quite good in this.

she's really great, nails the sort of almost-with-it scorn of an intelligent late-teen displaced from any and all comfort zones & forced to fight desperation

buscemi also great

kinda watched it as a scarjo companion piece to under the skin but it's like two different actors. in this one she's coldly destroying men and

lol

weird to me that scarlett has been "typecast" as a thing over the past couple years. in both her & under the skin she plays an inhuman being that successfully passes, then doesn't. in lucy & her, she plays a character with seemingly normal human emotions who is eventually rendered rather alien/robotic by advancement of intellect (ironically in the case of her).

none of which has anything to do with ghost world, but it's been a while

The Aimee Mann song ? Classic

there’s still a lot to love about this movie but i rewatched it for the first time in a long time a couple months ago and was really kinda disappointed, which is sad because it used to mean a lot to me. my best friend in high school and i loved ghost world and related to it really deeply—more than once i’ve told people that in high school my best friend and i basically were enid and rebecca (n.b. i am a gay man and my friend was/is a straight woman).

i guess over time the graphic novel supplanted the movie in my memory so i had forgotten how much of the relationship between enid and rebecca gets cut out of the film in favor of the new romantic plot between enid and steve buscemi. buscemi is good in the movie but i don’t really get why his character is necessary—he’s a composite of a few different characters in the graphic novel, all of whom have only brief appearances in the original material. if the movie needed more “plot” than the comic, there’s the existing love triangle with josh (in fact, iirc the film replaces josh with steve buscemi in the porn store scene). the art class stuff, which i think is mostly adapted from art school confidential (which was later turned into a terrible movie), has some good moments (“mirror, father, mirror”, illeana douglas in general), but most of it is sophomoric digs at feminist art. the one really interesting subject of the art class subplot, enid’s appropriation of historical racist imagery and the outrage it causes, isn’t really explored, and essentially reads as a “satire” of politically correct liberals. the main thought i was left with after rewatching is that it was kind of gross and sad that a story primarily about the friendship between two teenage girls was minimized in favor of a story about a teenage girl wanting to fuck steve buscemi.

the aimee mann song is great tho

the art class stuff, which i think is mostly adapted from art school confidential (which was later turned into a terrible movie)

you left about 100 exclamation points off that "terrible"

though my memory of the movie is hazy (yet fond), i was always somewhat disappointing in it as an adaptation of the comic, the insertion of the oddly crumb-like buscemi character being particularly irritating. that said, the "sophomoric digs at feminist art" and "politically correct liberals" are certainly true to clowes in general, if not the source material in particular.

worth noting that the Clowes' Art School Confidential comic is great, terrible film adaptation notwithstanding

and thora birch wound up making low-budget horror movies for the most part. sad, as she was quite good in this.

the fact that her dad (who is also her agent) is apparently a complete psycho has quite a lot to do with this

weird to me that scarlett has been "typecast" as a thing over the past couple years. in both her & under the skin she plays an inhuman being that successfully passes, then doesn't. in lucy & her, she plays a character with seemingly normal human emotions who is eventually rendered rather alien/robotic by advancement of intellect (ironically in the case of her).

this is how she's always come off

I've seen Art School Confidential twice; not Ghost World, but I like it.

I've always been curious how much the film is making fun of the girls. I only noticed on repeated viewings how douchey they are at the start. Buscemi was great.

Jim Broadbent was the saving grace of the other film.

"America's top critics agree: The Flower That Drank The Moon is one of the best films of the year!"

I know this did well in the comedy poll, but has it really aged well?

i do love the movie but value ghost world the comic more

i could swear i read years and years ago that a lot of the enid-and-becky stuff from the book was actually filmed and cut out of the final version, and have always wondered if we'd ever see a director's cut or something, but maybe i dreamed that

I actually rescreened this tonight for the first time in forever (hence the revive). I think it holds up well, but it really kind of feels like a time capsule now. In the DVD featurette, the title is explained as about how Enid & Rebecca's town is--like many towns--is becoming more mainstream and suburbanized (symbolized by among other things the fake Starbucks Rebecca works at, and the googleplex Enid gets fired from) with a lot of it's character disappearing. Looking at it now, so much of the film's world--video shops, porn shops, faux 50s dinners--has also gone.

Re: Excised footage. I remember seeing a still on the VHS box of Enid and Rebecca with the latter's grandma, which iirc was in the comic. I wouldn't be surprised if there was a little bit more. The deleted scenes on the DVD are about five minutes of extended bits from the film concerning other characters. Zwigoff mentioned awhile back that Criterion would be handling Ghost World, but after spending a whole year of his life working with them on Crumb and Louie Bluie, he wasn't in a big hurry to do more archival work.

Heads up

Coming soon! 👻👓🥛🎨📺 pic.twitter.com/DD3jVBaef3

— Criterion Collection (@Criterion) May 11, 2017

Anyone seen it yet?

Never heard of it

I saw this in the theater around the age of 21 as a floundering college student, so I probably hold it in higher esteem then I would if I saw it recently. I should rewatch this.

"I don't buy cracked records."

blueshammer is all-time classic

I saw this for the first time in forever a few months ago and it holds up imo.

I saw this when it was in the cinema, liked the directing and acting (especially Birch), but hated the fact that they'd reduced the two girls' relationship and added the completely unnecessary Buscemi character and Enid's romance with him. The examination of her and Becky's symbiotic/co-dependent relationship was the whole point of the comic & what made it so good.

thought this revive might be about Terry Zwigoff's amazon pilot, Budding Prospects, based on the TC Boyle novel. it's not great but i would be curious to watch more.

i got this & am listening to the commentary, so good

are there a lot of deleted scenes? curious if anything from the book got filmed and left out of the final version.

theres only a handful, most involve the convenience store scene w the mullet/nunchuck dude

My least favourite thing about the film.

was GW slept on by cinephiles in '01, as Eric claims? Not cinephiles who know OR are record collectors.

http://www.slantmagazine.com/dvd/review/ghost-world

the Clowes connection led to more press at the time than anything else, I think

I saw it at the dumpy campustown theater during college

The most I remember was some detrius-tide heat behind Buscemi's performance, but maybe I'm mistaken.

It was also pretty buzzy at the time as a coming out party for Birch and--to a lesser extent--Johansson; it was the former's first prestige role since American Beauty, and the latter's first grown-up type role (remember, she was in Home Alone 3 and The Horse Whisperer as a child). Of course, we all know how Birch's career turned out, and the film's role in ScarJo's professional narrative was probably overwritten by Lost In Translation a couple years later.

I love thora birch and am still rooting for her

GW was on everyone's lips the year it came out but almost everyone I knew was a cartoonist so of course it was

I think anybody who loved Crumb was alert to it.

I agree with Jon. I got the impression her career possibilities were curtailed by her management, who were also her parents, and kind of controlling.

I was a teenager when GW came out and most of my friends liked it, but most of my friends were cartoonists or drama nerds

i loved it esp the Maya Deren esque video art

Back in 2001, I had been a movie theater employee recently enough that Enid's half-hour stint as a concessions stand worker rang especially true.

Upselling.

Blueshammer quickly became the perfect shorthand. they hit gold w that. i've heard so many people use that phrase.

It seems like low-hanging fruit today, in the Bonamassa era, but I think it was the first such parody at the time.

There's a lot of low-hanging fruit targeted in this movie -- girl group rapping at the H.S. graduation, the whole convenience store milieu -- but somehow it all works.

It's a number of completely normal situations that are portrayed in a way that isn't hostile, but is skewed to the viewpoint of the main characters just enough that you relate to their feeling of being outsiders among these ridiculous or aesthetically horrible everyday things.

Weird my main takeaway was that enid was insufferable/loathsome (undercut by some "she's just a scared kid" sympathy)

Her worldview's a trap, and the movie is both critical of and sympathetic toward it.

True

Her casual destruction of seymour's life just bums me out to an inordinate degree, probably

I don't think she came off as insufferable or loathsome, just that she was a kid who very much created her own niche as an outsider and viewed anything outside that niche with skepticism. Kind of the flip side of Buscemi's character who has lived a relatively normal, if limited, life with the exception of these interests that have swallowed up his ability to socialize.

"I hate my interests" is still my favorite line.

it's too true

final scene w/ seymour in the therapist's office, where she rolls her eyes in disgust as soon as he walks out the door, is really just crushing to me

Back in 2001, I had been a movie theater employee recently enough that Enid's half-hour stint as a concessions stand worker rang especially true.

― Anne of the Thousand Gays (Eric H.), Thursday, 6 July 2017 18:07 (one hour ago) Permalink

YES me too. I had just graduated from HS and was working at a movie theater when this came out.

That "butter" shit is the vilest concoction known to humankind.

I used to nuke a few popcorn batches in my day with Flavacol.

" Of course, we all know how Birch's career turned out"
I didn't but I just read up on her; what's the deal with her dad? she seems a bit old to still have her dad acting as her manager and making her life awful (apparently she got fired from Dracula when he got in a fight with someone on the crew; and then he also insisted on being present during some sex scene she shot for a movie recently). creep.

oh shit he was in Deep Throat. I didn't even know that. weirdo.

IIRC, her mom was involved in porn too. Looking at Birch's imdb, she's mostly done direct to dvd and tv stuff post-GW, with John Sayles' Silver City being her last reasonably high profile film.

she's on the tv series Colony.

and is in a bunch of things this year, so maybe she got an agent (I just read that she didn't have one a few years ago).

She's one of the three interviewed on the Criterion disc, along with Johansson and Douglas, so there's hope.

Can't quite see her straight on, because literally every girl I had a crush on/dated/tried to date between the years 1990 and 1998 looked like Thora Birch in Ghost World.

she's literally the same Thora Birch as in American Beauty, she just claims she put on 20 pounds and some glasses, buddy

She's one of the three interviewed on the Criterion disc, along with Johansson and Douglas, so there's hope.

― Anne of the Thousand Gays (Eric H.), Thursday, July 6, 2017 4:35 PM (sixteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

didnt know her story, not really a fan, but she seemed 'ok' decently well-adjusted in her interview comments iirc

Watched the film yesterday; I kind of agree that Enid is awful, but teenagers are.

Still going thru the CC supplements, curious to see if Teri Garr has deleted scenes.

Liberal Twitter has turned into Illeana Douglas' character btw

It probably would've been there in 2001 had Twitter existed, to be fair.

incipient lam crack.

what the hell is "lam"?

hope that ian refers to himself as "iam"

only real 78 headz know...

lam crack is a "laminate crack" -- when the outer coating on a laminated (Columbia or Okeh) record begins to crack.

Bill really should have watched this with me, I could explain all the 78 jokes.

There were more than 78 jokes in this movie.

Although I didn’t think the art school confidential film came off nearly as well as GW, the bit with the teacher and his triangle art is all-time.

“I was one of the first”

Terry Zwigoff's booklet essay about the music is classic 1930s blues lover militancy... "How're you gonna parody BJORK?"

https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/4614-on-the-music-of-ghost-world

i can't recall where i saw it, some spinoff book or maybe the original soundtrack or something, but zwigoff came up with a list of seymour's 10 favorite films, and i lol'd because it was terrifyingly plausible as a list i'd make. laurel and hardy were on there!

finally someone taking a stand against Bjork

SHOCKING ILM Confessions!

xp I think the point he was making was that Bjork is so perfect that she's beyond parody

Art School Confidential was *awful*

xp hmmm not how I read it

Simon otm, it had a few moments but it was so deeply cynical and aiming at "dark" that it forgot to be engaging

xp I think the point he was making was that Bjork is so perfect that she's beyond parody

― Anne of the Thousand Gays (Eric H.), Wednesday, November 8, 2017 8:47 AM (fifty-five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Considering his crack about "while Björk and Cream records are rotting in some New Jersey landfill," I doubt he meant to praise Björk.

He comes not to praise her but bury, er, in New Jersey.

To bury her.... jfc, blew that one.

I didn't mind Art School Confidential. The serial-killer subplot was silly, but I thought the satire had some subtlety to it.

Yeah, he apparently lumps in Bjork with “contrived commercial slop” like Backstreet Boys. Real perceptive, Terry.

I'm hoping Lady Bird joins this one in young female adulthood cult status.

Eric's sassiness is wasted on some of you.

Buscemi praises Laurel & Hardy in the film, so the real-estate GF can demur, "Why is the fat one so mean to the skinny one?"

A question for the ages

if you can answer that, you've unraveled the greater truths of L&H

I like that Terry Zwigoff essay, but he's dead wrong on Skip James' recordings from the 1960s. They're great.

i'm not embracing his musical claims, as i like "I Want It That Way."

Rewatched this for the first time in many years. The ending (by which I mean the bus stop, not Seymour and his mother) still intrigues me. I'm guessing that most people take it as guardedly optimistic: Norman finally boards his bus, and Enid does too. Norman boarding the bus could, if you look at from a different angle, be viewed quite despairingly. Enid tells him earlier that his sitting waiting for the bus (the bus that will never come) is the only thing she can count on anymore in her life; "You'd be surprised," he tells her. And then one day she watches as even he leaves.

It is almost that time pic.twitter.com/f8PYS9r9nv

— phantom idiot (@vryprfct) December 26, 2020

Just caught this on MUBI yesterday - one previous viewing at the cinema in 2001. Liked it a lot.

20 years on does lend a certain perspective - both to the film and the early comments on this thread.

MUBI UK, I assume.

I should watch it again. My first viewing was in that era where I had to confront/accept the reality that filmic interpretations of books I love ain’t gonna be identical to those books and as such there was some consternation.

i guess over time the graphic novel supplanted the movie in my memory so i had forgotten how much of the relationship between enid and rebecca gets cut out of the film in favor of the new romantic plot between enid and steve buscemi. buscemi is good in the movie but i don’t really get why his character is necessary—he’s a composite of a few different characters in the graphic novel, all of whom have only brief appearances in the original material. if the movie needed more “plot” than the comic, there’s the existing love triangle with josh (in fact, iirc the film replaces josh with steve buscemi in the porn store scene)…the main thought i was left with after rewatching is that it was kind of gross and sad that a story primarily about the friendship between two teenage girls was minimized in favor of a story about a teenage girl wanting to fuck steve buscemi.

Yes - MUBI UK.

The passage of 20 years has shifted my main identification from the cynical teenager viewpoint to Seymour's perspective (beautifully played by Steve Buscemi). And I think i'm a lot more aware of Enid's faults than in 2001, and a lot more sympathetic to Rebecca.

steve buscemi's character is a look at what enid would become if she stayed on the same course

I don’t know if I agree with that theory: Enid seems to have a cynical edge and slightly mocking cruelty that Seymour doesn’t have.

He follows his interests. She doesn’t know what her interests are.

^^^ Agree

true theyre not a mirror image of each other, but i think its more like her entire self image is built around cultivating a feeling of alienation that allows her to feel superior, and seymour is an object lesson in what a lifetime of total alienation gets you - friendless and suicidal.