Monday, 2 May 2011

Ghost World (2001) dir.Terry Zwigoff

Ghost World is a little known adaptation. The graphic novel of the same name told the tale of two teenage girls finding their way in life after leaving high school and realising that their ambitions and hope went necessarily going to come true. It's a real coming of age story and in my opinion on par with the likes of "The Breakfast Club".

The problem faced with this as well as many other adaptations is that if the director was going to make a like for like copy to the original then films would likely last 3 hours and over. For this reason a lot of films make abridged versions of the original work. In Ghost World this is most obvious in the character Seymour, who is a character who was a mixture of various different characters from the graphic novel. What this technique allowed Zwigoff to do is manage multiple story arcs into one nicely packaged whole.

I believe due to its clever way of compositing the whole story together as well at the accolades it has received (it has made comic book film top lists from IGN, Empire and more) that it is a film in need to be archived in a list such as ours.

Ghost World Excerpt:

1 comment:

  1. I feel this is a rather good adaptation of a comic, the weird feeling of the original work is well pervayed by brilliant casting. Thora Birch and Steve Buscemi play their characters well with Steve looking very much like a character that Daniel Clowes would invent. I dont think a shot for shot remake of the comic would of been bad but would of worked well as a generation x tv series.

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