After seeing another piece of junk summer movie today, “Summer Catch”, I passed on reviewing it on the air and went off the board to this movie instead.
Never heard of it, right? Too bad, this one is about as good as it gets. “Ghostworld” is the story of two high school graduating girls who pretty much hate the world and everybody in it. We all know somebody like this, right? That bored, sarcastic teenager who’s well past the age of innocence and ends up mocking just about everything and everybody around them. Heck, I’m still like that some days.
These teens are two girls, played by Thora Birch and Scarlett Johansson. Thora is the sort of nerdy looking one, Scarlett is the pretty one. They start off the movie at their high school graduation, and while everyone else weeps and cheers at the speech made by the girl in the wheelchair, our girls roll their eyes and ask each other “why doesn’t she talk about how she got in the wheelchair, the alcoholic?”. That’s what we’re dealing with here. From there they pass their time trying to figure what, if anything, they want to do with the rest of their lives. But, on impulse, they decide to answer some lonely guy’s personal ad. He’s played by Steve Buscemi. The girls pretend to be some woman he briefly met and would like to see again and they hide out in a diner waiting for him to show up. They expect a poor, pathetic creature and they get one.They decide to follow him around because it makes you feel good to mock somebody else’s sad life.
But the movie then takes a path that may surprise you. The nerdy teen takes a liking to the lonely nerdy guy and it all comes off so naturally. The lonely guy is an obsessed record collector but he has the self awareness to know it’s all pretty dumb. This impresses Thora and she gradually falls in love with him, because, deep down inside, they are a lot alike. He moans and whines about not meeting woman and who would want him anyway and she takes this all in and sees that this is a pretty special guy. You can’t beat the pacing of this movie for setting all of this up and the inside look at what may happen to a couple of bitter, bored teens after graduation is so realistic you get caught up with them as if they were real. A very good movie has the ability to do that. It puts you so inside the story you feel like you’re watching people when they’re not looking. And in the end, the Thora character is like most teens, hard to figure out since they don’t even know what they want yet. She frustrated me, but then, I don’t have any teenage children. That’s what it must be like.
“Ghostworld” is special and you should go out of your way to see it, especially during this sad sack of a summer, one of the worst I can remember. I give this movie a “9.0”.
