Ghost World is one of the best movies of the decade,

^^Is an incorrect answer. Substitute 'most boring' for 'best'.

and what is your replacement for a 'best of' per chance you have one or two?

AWESOME AWESOME AWESOME

Holy Jesus, Tony WTF with your sig image!?

I'm with NumberTenOx. Give me any ol' movie by Pixar any day.


Yeah, that is good ol' fashioned fun. If you liked that, check out Vanishing Point or even the original Rollerball.

What the hell does Pixar have to do with a film like 'Ghost World'? GW was very complex in its point of view, attitude towards its 'heorine' and what it had to say about post-modernism and its influence on the culture in general. Some pacing issues don't do away with all of that do they?

it's obviously and poorly photoshopped is what it is.

edit: and the guy's facial hairs look like just-trimmed peubs on a sweaty groin. PLUS the guy is obviously gay b/c he has a tongue ring (for blowjobs)

They have absolutely nothing to do with each other.... except....
Well-played (yet only casually intriguing) characters or no, the GW story went nowhere for me.
No real surprise there - I felt the same way about the comic.
Oh yeah - I forgot about the pacing errors 'til just now! Stuff like that also throws me out of a picture.
In short, Ghost World bored me.
I loathe being bored.
So I turn to Pixar.
They've never bored me, even tho their stories (and characters - let's be honest) tend to be formulaic.

It was about characters whose lives are going nowhere. But the relationships between them evolve considerably. Watch it again.

Yep. That's precisely my problem with the movie.

And also I don't really care about post-modern hipster irony. It's played.

The movie was a critique of 'post-modern hipster irony' not an instance of it.


EDIT: Also the term 'postmodern irony' is an oxymoron.

I wouldn't say that. Can a photoshopper expertly put a crease into the lower part of the tongue where the cat's fang protrudes?

(now that is a sentence that will never be typed again in this millenia! )

Uh-uh. Sometimes a film falls into the trap of the thing it tries to critique.



The entire term is 'postmodern hipster irony'. And if you've got a point about it being an oxymoron, make it.

We ain't gonna agree about this one Tony. I found that the movie was boring, ponderous, and dim. Probably because I've known too many people like the characters in the film who were also boring, ponderous, and dim.

The only saving grace of the film was the way it was shot. The frame composition was wonderful, and really caught Clowes' effortless design sense (I love the unbalanced panels, and the way the eye falls through the page-- the cinematographer managed to grab that, particularly at the bus stop). If the flim's on TV, I turn down the sound, pull out the guitar, noodle away, and just look at the movie.

It was about people leading boring and ponderous lives and the tragedy of said lives and the cultural logic (postmodernism) that makes them so. It's explicitly anti-pomo...all the references to specific decades and the fashions of said decades and the inability of anyone to differentiate. Hence the flatness of signification that pomo theorists talk about.

And as for the oxymoron part, the definition of 'irony' is where one layer comments in unexpected ways on another layer. Postmodernism is flat...just one layer....hence no irony.

If you're looking for smarmy hipster irony look to the Wes Andersen ouvre.

I know there's no way I post this without my balls getting nailed to the wall but



enjoyable throughout despite the complete nonending after 167 episodes

This sounds terribly made up.



Ah. I understand now. You're talking about the movie's voice overall. I'm talking about the characters in the film. I found them deliberately ironic, mannered, and dull for that reason. Probably because, as I said, it's too much like people I know and find enormously boring.



I dunno about that. I like aspects of the Wes Anderson movies I've seen (Rushmore, Tennenbaums), but I don't particularly like the films, for reasons other than what's been discussed with GW.

What's made up? My definition of pomo or the examples I cite from GW? Both are very real.

Of course I meant the voice of the film. Lots of great works of fiction are centered around unlikeable characters. The voice in Wes Andersen's films is smarmy not just the characters. If it's simply a matter of you having been so turned off by people of that sort that their mere presence turns you off the film no matter its overall quality then that's another matter.

Tony, I can't decide if you're our most boring smart poster or our smartest boring poster.

Thanks for your thoughtful contribution to this argument.

See? That's some intelligent-yet-mundane sarcasm.

I have a quiet intensity? A certain noisy relaxed quality? Or maybe a quietly noisy relaxed intensity?

Not to take away from this great cinematic debate here about the distinguishable aesthetics that lead to snoring but were there some that you took to be better than GW?

I don't really understand the frame of your question-- do you mean for the year released? Comic book to film movie?

well the orig statement was of the decade so of the 00-08' period. what would you say beats GW?
I hadn't even thought of the whole comic comparison deal as that's just a very different rationale to me.

There's no "of course" about it. And the characters in GW being likable or unlikable as people is only part of why I don't care for the film.

I didn't say I liked the characterization aspect of Wes Anderson's films. Like GW, I like the visual aspect of his movies. His thematic use of color is interesting. (I don't think it helps the story so much, though.) He's got a strong visual sense. He makes interesting choices in terms of camera placement and editing. His blocking and staging make some sub-par material at least watchable. The tree gag in Rushmore is right up there with Keaton or Laurel and Hardy.


I don't find his characters smarmy or unctious. I do find them flat and slightly cookie-cutterish. That's where his movies fall down for me.


That's the other half of my problem with GW.

ugh

Lemme get this straight - you want me to willingly watch a movie about characters who develop - albiet well-played - from nowhere to nowhere?
Sounds like a rip-snortin' time to me.
I'll pass. I'm, uh, waching my hair that night.

I remember liking Ghost World a lot. Going nowhere isn't always about literally going nowhere. The characters in that film do evolve and change. There's a certain aspect at play of giving up childish things and becoming an adult, something that the Scarlet Johanson character finds unexpectedly and that the Thora Birch (right?) character reluctantly agrees to.

Good stuff.

They develop emotionally from somewhere to somewhere. And it's a much more nuanced picture of alienated teens then the generic ones we usually see. Even played by the same Thora Birch in American Beauty.

watched The Village.
thanks library for saving me real money. what a joke of a movie.

^^True dat. Even seeing it for free made me feel cheated of my lost time.


This was good, however. I do wonder why he felt compelled to include a prophecy--it was hokey, and the movie would've worked just as well without.

Great. Was laughing at something or other pretty much from start to finish. Like a consistently funny version of Before Sunset (which I preferred to Sunrise). Nice Fast Food Nation reference from Delpy, too: "I heard they put shit in the meat..."

Just got in Caché from Netflix. Might watch that before I head out tonight.

Yeah - but it was still less disappointing than Signs. If yer gonna have a Serling-esque twist ending, it'd better be a damn good 'un.

anyone make it through 'girl in the water' or whatever the fuck it was called. i couldn't make it through five minutes. is it at all worth watch?

Space Mutiny


Overdrawn at the Memory Bank

Nothing like an evening of classic cinemas.

Disappointing.

Totally. Total suckage. I wondered if the bad acting was just bad acting or good actors acting like bad actors as a plot device and decided it was a combination of both.

I liked The Village. The ending's a bit pat for me, but the rest of the film is really involving. Lady In The Water is another one I liked.

In fact, I haven't disliked any of M. Night's films and am looking forward to the next one.

Offside

Notes on a Scandal

A History of Violence

Grizzly Man

Lost in Translation

Superbad

Eastern Promises

Eh, Signs wasn't so bad, I thought. What angered me about The Village was that the threat was completely imaginary--I had been duped into caring about people for no good reason. If I'm going to be manipulated, don't rub my nose in it.

That was the fun of it for me. I don't mind being totally duped if it's an interesting ride along the way, which The Village was for the most part.

is this a comedy photoshop

Uhhhh, yea, apparently. I didn't even catch that, just googled it and pasted it in without really paying attention

i'm with velocity in that signs didn't bother me so much. but with the village, my suspension of disbelief was challenged in ways that could have been avoided had its author spent more than one night to write the script. [spoiler]the elders created a myth, perpetuated the myth all to keep the kids believing the world outside of their little community was fucked. and you had to skin animals to do this? wouldn't one or two random sightings have accomplished this? (in fact, the one or two random sighting did accomplish this!) and let's see, the blind woman made it to the border after a brief jog through the woods, meaning this town was constructed and existed in secrecy only a few miles from normal civilization. right. and then when she does reach someone from the real world, we are to believe she just lucked out in coming across this young, naive park employee...keeping the secret alive for generations to come! it's the little things people. this was an interesting movie but the payoff was borderline juvenile, rendering the entire piece useless.[/spoiler]
but anyways, watched this and it was pretty good:

The only thing I really disliked about signs:

[spoiler]In the beginning, they bury someone, and the tombstone says 1800 or something. If you're setting up this fake society, where the people you're trying to protect don't know what's in the outside world, what difference does the actual year make? you could put the year 4,000. Without a civilization to connect the number to something, what's the point in lying?[/spoiler] seems like a clue put there to purposefully mislead us, which I'm definitely against

i watched this twice this weekend, fantastic little movie.

Agree.

Also agree.

M. Night has got to get over his Rod Serling complex.

I've not like one of M.Night's films, every single one annoyed me. I've not seen Lady In The Water but it has annoyed me anyway.