One of my correspondents has asked that, since I have taught a film course at a major university for several years, I write about movies on the blog, so in response to popular request here goes: This one's for you, Deedee.
First of all: I tend to talk about "movies," not "film" [a medium that is rapidly becoming obsolete in this digital age] or "cinema" [too pretentious, too French, but I repeat myself]. You shouldn't read too much into my insistence on the term "movies." I just think that it's the most accurate description of my subject -- pictures that move, whatever their format. I'm not, for instance, a "Paulette" [follower of Pauline Kael] although, like me, she favored the term "movies" and I more than most enjoy and appreciate her perspective. She won my heart with her denunciation of Stanley Kramer, my least favorite major movie maker. And, like her I am less than overwhelmed by the French nouvelle vague, Cahiers crowd. My favorite film theorist [some would call him an anti-theorist] is the prolific and iconoclastic David Bordwell. Although I would not consider myself to be a "cognitivist" like him, I do appreciate and applaud his attacks on S.L.A.B. [Saussure, Lacan, Althusser, and Barthes]. What I'm saying is that, although I can dance with the film theorists, I am not one of them. Nor am I just a buff. I view movies as a vital art form in the modern world and adopt a critical stance toward even the best and worst of them. My training is as an historian and I try to place movies within an historical context and by doing so to understand better the times and people who produced and consumed them [maybe I could best be described as an "historicist," but I find such labels too confining].
What have I been watching?
IFC [Independent Film Channel] has recently been rerunning one of my favorite films from 2000: Ghost World starring Thora Birch, Scarlett Johannson, and Steve Buscemi, directed by Terry Zwigoff [who finally hit it big with "Bad Santa"] , based on a "graphic novel" [a comic book for adults] written by Daniel Clowes, who also collaborated on the script.
Both Birch and Johannson are former child stars who are making impressive marks now that they are entering adulthood. I first noted Thora Birch as the cute little kid who played Harrison Ford and Anne Archer's daughter in a couple of Tom Clancy films. She then went on to make a series of mediocre to bad Disney films where she was just mailing in her performance. The best of these was Hocus Pocus where she shared the screen with some major talents; the worst by far was the execrable Dungeons and Dragons where she also shared the screen with some major talents, like Jeremy Irons. I guess talent doesn't matter as much as I thought. For a while it looked as if Thora's short career was over, but she made a major impact as the alienated teen in American Beauty and followed it up with a star turn in Ghost World. Now she seems to have settled into supporting roles playing screwed up young women.
Johannson first came to my notice as the crippled daughter in the Horse Whisperer. She has bounced around through a variety of projects such as Eight Legged Freaks and the Spongebob Squarepants movie, but scored major successes in Girl With a Pearl Earring and Lost in Translation. She is now a major star despite having just turned 21. At the time she made Ghost World she was only sixteen, playing an eighteen year old. This was typical. She usually plays much older than her age. I'm looking forward very much to her current project, a film version of James Ellroy's Black Dahlia, far and away the best detective novel ever written [although he is best known for L.A. Confidential], directed by the brilliant but uneven Brian DePalma who is always interesting [strange to remember that early in his career he was considered to be more important than Stephen Spielberg].
Both of the girls turn in brilliant performances in Ghost World, but the real revelation is Steve Buscemi. Buscemi has long been one of our best character actors and is constantly in demand to play sleazy, slightly off-center roles [remember him in Fargo?]. This is his quintessential performance -- the ultimate Steve Buscemi role. He plays a nerdish, middle-aged record collector who enounters the two girls during a period when they are drifting thoughtlessly, trying to figure out their lives after High School. What brings them together is a very nasty and hurtful prank the girls play on Buscemi's character, just for casual fun. Feeling guilty about what they did to him, the girls seek Buscemi out and befriend him. His loneliness and need awaken a response in Birch and they become lovers [sorta] while Johannson's character embarks on a responsible path, getting a job, earning money, paying the rent, etc. The two girls begin to drift apart as Birch's involvement in Buscemi's life deepens and Johannson sets her sights on a career.
Not surprisingly, the burgeoning relationship between the middle-aged man and the cynical teen does not go well. Through ignorance and self-centeredness Birch's character destroys Buscemi's career, forcing him ever further into the nerdish fantasy land he already inhabits part time, but she, too, is changed by the experience, suddenly realizing how close she came to cutting her own ties to the real world. At the end of the film, armed with newfound wisdom, Birch's character embarks on an optimistic exploration of the real world we all inhabit, although an incident right at the end seems to indicate that the "real world" is not so real as she imagines and suggests that we all inhabit a "ghost world" of the fantastic [I'm talking about the bus scene].
The writing is excellent, the dialogue spot on, the direction and design competent, and the acting wonderful. I like Zwigoff's sensibility. He has a perfect sense for the bizarre elements to be found within normal life and of the fantasies we all forge to cope with harsh reality. One might ask, certainly he does, whether the Johannson character's "realism," which consists of working at menial labor, is any more fruitful and any less a "ghost world" than the fantasies constructed by Birch and Buscemi's characters. This is a small film, but it is one to treasure, one of the best in recent years -- well worth your time.
OK Deedee, happy now?
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