"You guys up for some reggae tonight?"
United Artists / Granada Film
Crumb filmmaker Terry Zwigoff directs both Thora Birch and a pre-fame Scarlett Johansson as dissaffected best friends spending the summer after high school graduation in their own world of artsy nonsense. It's rather impressive how Clowes and Zwigoff, as co-screenwriters, stitch together a cohesive plotline from the short, standalone comic book series, which notably lacked any substantial character development or ongoing story threads and traditional serialized elements.
Produced by actor John Malkovich, a pitch-perfect Steve Buscemi co-stars as the eccentric but lonely sad sack, Seymour, who reluctantly befriends Birch's Enid after she and Johansson's Rebecca become inexplicably infatuated with his uptight demeanour after first answering his personal ad as a cruel prank.
As a proper film, Ghost World shines in its sweet but earnest depiction of out-and-out oddball characters with real emotional cores despite their cynical behaviour and off-putting natures. Each one has their own ticks and habits that endlessly annoy others as obvious defence mechanisms to prevent them from getting close enough to anyone to get hurt.
Zwigoff’s coming-of-age adaptation of Clowe's celebrated comic strip captures this sad but hopeful world of loners so vividly with a darkly humorous vigour. The impressionistic way it sharply observes age and emotion through its characters is graceful and rich. It wonderfully explores unhappiness and disaffection in lost souls with deft sombre comedy.
Ghost World is a near-perfect, post-millenium indie film adaptation of an alternative visual storytelling art form that speaks to a hyper-specific time and place before our internet-poisoned minds took control of us. There's nothing quite like its feminist art school humour about friendship between young adult women and middle-aged men.
More | YVArcade / Atlantic / Cineaste / Criterion / IGN
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