Powerful

Please don't spend money on this.

Awesome Movie

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

This movie really surprised me. I thought it would be another movie about outsider teens and how bad they have it, with no real message. But I was wrong. Ghost World is one of my favorite movies of 2001, and probably even of the 2000s. It is a little too mature for young kids, but once you turn thirteen you should be fine (it's not violent or anything). It definitely deserved its Oscar nom. If you haven't seen Ghost World, then check it out. Seriously.

Dear Terry Zwigoff, We often look towards art for comfort. When you're watching some movies, you feel like the characters are like your best friends and that they are talking directly to you. Almost as if the director and the writer know exactly what you are experiencing in your life.Ghost World is that sort of a movie. When the movie ends, you feel like your best friend just left the bar you were both drinking at and talking in the most honest way possible.I have watched this film many times now. Enid is one of my favorite movie characters of all time. She embodies the anomie and acedia that we all experience as teenagers or even as adults. The same is the case with Seymour. I could completely relate to his sense of despair and isolation in a society which is not artistically inclined and lacks moral values.You extracted a terrific performance out of Thora Birch . What an intensely brilliant actress. I was surprised by her choice of films after Ghost World. In 2001, she was definitely the greatest young American actress. Steve Buscemi - well, is he ever bad? Seymour's feelings of insignificance and frustration are perfectly portrayed by Buscemi. Perfect casting, Terry. Every single actor in this film delivers a pitch perfect performance. There are hardly any mistakes. It is almost as if you could hardly put a foot wrong, Terry. Everything from the choice of songs used in the background score to actors in the smallest of roles are simply perfect. What a great director you are. I wish you would make more movies. Ghost World is definitely one of the most important American films of the last 20 years. And my favorite film of all time. (10/10)Ps: Why aren't you making more movies?

Reviewed September 6th, 2015 - 1st viewing (IFC HD) Based on the comic book by Daniel Clowes, the film centers around two teen outcasts struggling to find their place in the world after they graduate high school. Rebecca (Scarlett Johansson) has plans to get a job and an apartment, however Enid (Thora Birch) is decidedly less motivated, having spent her whole life just skating by. She must inevitably learn that there are very real consequences for her actions—even in indifference.The film makes for a very interesting social commentary about the difficulty of maintaining relationships and our struggle to find our place in the world, the quintessential tug-of-war to find the balance between being true to ourselves and hiding pieces of us to fit into society's accepted norms. It makes a provocative statement about how society and media make us feel we have to choose between acceptance and being who we are. The word normal is constantly thrown around, particularly by her best friend Rebecca, serving to illustrate the fundamental differences between the two girls, with Enid spending most of her life seeing what she wanted to see, only to discover her and Rebecca were not as alike as she thought.Enid's boredom leads her to play a practical joke on a lonely man searching for a woman he met in a personal ad. After the two girls observe his melancholy and follow him to his home, Enid discovers he collects and sells records. They hit it off and she starts to see that he's not so different than her. Believing she's found a kindred spirit in a man twice her age, she takes an interest and starts spending time with him, promising to find him a date.Her journey is an illustration of how we can get so caught up in our own lives that we fail to see that we are neglecting those important to us—our relationships—the very thing we rely on for emotional support. And when someone we care about fails us, we either internalize it or lash out. Enid's required art class poignantly illustrated that artistic license cannot so easily be acquired, but instead of working to cultivate her own creativity, she chose to use an old art piece borrowed from Seymour. This unfortunately would also prove to have dire consequences.Seymour finally got that call from the girl he'd been looking for in the ad and Enid encouraged him to meet her. After they hit it off, he sadly became self-involved and blew Enid off, never giving thought to the fact that she had genuinely cared for him. And so with that disappointment causing her to only think of herself, frustrated that he was settling for a woman he had little in common with to be 'taken care of', Enid recoiled back into her comfort zone—Rebecca. Unfortunately, she failed to see that while she was caught up with her infatuation with Seymour, she wasn't being a friend to Rebecca.Naturally, it hurt her when Enid only wanted to hang out with her because Seymour blew her off. Rebecca did not lie to be malicious, but to protect herself, as she was beginning to see for the first time that perhaps their 'friendship' was based more on convenience than true affection. I can relate on this point, as people continually undervalue the importance of balance in their lives in terms of their relationships as a whole. If you only focus on one, the others will suffer, and you can't play people like fiddles and expect them to still be around when the fog clears. Part of discovering how to be happy is figuring out how to balance all the elements within it, instead of ascribing to the misguided belief that you can hand pick a few and that will be enough.The story seemed to stretch a little beyond its reach as Rebecca grew increasingly frustrated with Enid's attitude. Instead of Enid simply admitting she didn't feel she could be honest with her, she insulted her, causing Rebecca to lash out. This hurt Enid, penetrating the walls she thought she had in place, and her pain sent her fleeing to Seymour for comfort, succeeding in getting out of him what she wanted only to turn on her heels and run. She practically begged Rebecca to let her move in with her, only to disappoint her by not keeping her promise. I found it odd the two girls never hugged despite supposedly being best friends since childhood, and I was a little miffed by Rebecca's disregard for Seymour's feelings, coming off as more malicious than jealous, which seemed wholly unjustified.The title represents Enid feeling as though she's a ghost in a world filled with people. She feels invisible and inconsequential, something I think we can all relate to. She struggled through the whole film to figure out what she wanted instead of settling on complacency. Once she realized her only dream was to disappear, she had to find the courage to take that final step.Throughout the whole ordeal, Enid didn't seem to understand that her irresponsibility and feigned indifference had real consequences, and that her actions were hurting people. The end felt a little disjointed to me, as if they were trying to wrap everything up in a bow so we knew where we left each of the characters with little statement on the friendship she had taken for granted, which is what I found more interesting, especially considering the comic focuses more on both girls which I would've found to be more intriguing.FINAL VERDICT: More interesting that it appears, the in-depth look at what lies just beneath the surface of our lives and the intricacies of our relationships made for a profound watch, if only left feeling a little bewildered by the end.6.5 of 10.0

This film is about our main character Enid trying to figure what she's going to do with her life and the film does a pretty great job of telling this kind of story. Our main character is eccentrically interesting, and the film is funny in a quirky way and all her silly teenage problems don't feel annoyingly forced. In fact I actually empathized her and cared about her. I don't think I've ever seen a film that made me empathize with a character with such worries and it impressed me that they were able to do it here. It was surprisingly empathetic and entertaining and I really, really liked this movie and I suggest you give it a watch.