| | Director Terry Zwigoff follows up his 1994 breakout success, CRUMB, by somehow capturing 90% of everything that made Daniel Clowes' Ghost World comics so haunting. Clowes (Eightball, etc.) is on the short-list of people we are sold on 100% as major contemporary artists, and we were delighted when he received an Oscar nomination for his screenplay. Buy and read all his stuff–you won't regret it. Thora Birch (American Beauty) and Scarlett Johansson star as Enid and Rebecca, an inseparable pair of alienated high school girls who look down on everyone, and find satisfaction only in the bizarre. After graduation, Rebecca gets a menial job at a coffee shop and starts looking for an apartment, while Enid remains utterly dysfunctional; believing that all jobs are sellouts and people are creeps, geeks, and losers. But when she plays a practical joke on the biggest dud of them all, Seymour (Steve Buscemi), a lonely man who lives only for his collection of classic 78s, her life gets turned upside as she finds herself needing him in ways she never thought possible. In comic adaptations there's the problem of how things look when you actually see them in the flesh, and Clowes and Zwigoff seem to have anticipated how cruel and wrong-headed some of our heroine's comic book adventures would seem in "the real world", and adjusted by making Enid's effect on other people central to the plot. They miscalculated slightly by opening with Enid watching the "Jan Pehechaan Ho" musical number from the 1965 Indian film Gumnaam, which is so genuinely spectacular that almost no succeeding film could compete. If you are as blown away by that scene as we were, it's included complete as a DVD extra, along with some deleted material. With Bob Balaban, Teri Garr, Brad Renfro, Illeana Douglas, and David Cross. |
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