Heavy Metal (1981)

Title: Heavy Metal (1981)

Director: Gerald Potterton

Writers: Daniel Goldberg, Len Blum, Dan O’Bannon, Richard Corben, Bernie Wrightson, Angus McKie, Jean Giraud

Review:

Heavy Metal is an animated film based on the long standing sci-fi/fantasy art magazine of the same name. For those of you who don’t know what Heavy Metal magazine is all about, well, basically, it’s a monthly magazine that showcases fantasy and sci-fi art from all over the world. Artists from everywhere submit their short stories and they get printed on the legendary magazine. It’s an amalgamation of some of the best and worst art you will ever see. This months issue might be awesome, next months issue might suck. That’s how it goes with Heavy Metal magazine. But one thing is for sure, no matter how good or bad the artwork might be you will always be amazed and entertained! The stories will sometimes be so diametrically opposed that its interesting to jump from a science fiction tale to a fantasy tale, and sometimes even a horror one. It's a magazine aimed at adults, the ladies in the stories always wear the skimpiest dresses, and sometimes, nothing at all. This is a magazine that has nudity, foul language and violence and for all these reasons, it's a magazine that is treasured by lovers of science fiction and fantasy art across the world. And its still running strong! So this movie came out in 1981, when animation was mostly something strictly for kids.

Keeping true to the magazine format, the film is an anthology film. The wrap around story is about this astronaut who one day comes home; after flying around the cosmos in his 1960 Corvette. He lands his car and walks home, were he is greeted by his daughter. He says he has something to show her! When he opens the suit case we see that he has found a strange green orb that glows! Immediately, the orb melts the girl’s father into a puddle of goo. Then the orb introduces itself as “the sum of all evils” and proceeds to let the girl see how it has affected different worlds and different civilizations. As the girl looks into the orbs green glow, the different stories in the film begin to unfold. These are the six different stories:

HARRY CANYON 

This story is about a taxi driver who lives in a futuristic city filled with flying cars and numerous sky scrapers. On a particularly sucky day, a fare comes into his cab running away from some gangsters. He soon discovers that this beautiful fare is hiding the green orb from the gangsters who will stop at nothing to get it! The interesting thing about this one is that as I looked I it, I realized where the filmmakers behind The Fifth Element got their inspiration. They saw Heavy Metal and said: lets change that a bit and make it into a movie! And they did. A fantastic film that I still love to this day. But it originally came from this story. Lets count the similarities shall we?

1- Pissed Off Cab Driver who does voice over narration? Check!

2- A beautiful girl running from somebody gets into his cab? Check!

3- A chase sequence through a futuristic landscape? Check!

4- Landscape filled with sky scrapers and flying cars? Check!

5- Cab Driver takes the girl home and tries to make a move on her? Check!

6- The girl holds the secret to a powerful artifact? Check!

7- Cabby lives in a tight little apartment? Check!

8- Cabby gets mugged by a crazy guy with a gun at the door of his own home? Check!

9- Cabby takes the gun and puts it in a pile with all the other guns he has taken from muggers? Check!

Is that Bruce Willis carrying Leeloo Dallas?

So as you can see, the similarities between these two films are many! Hell, even the buildings are colored the same way in The Fifth Element! I never expected this movie to be so influential! But still, The Fifth Element doesn’t have a hardcore sex scene like the one we see on this story! This is something that Heavy Metal did a lot of; they had nudity galore through out the whole film. No matter what a story is about, odds are that a girl will most likely be naked at some point. Fantasy art has always had this element of nudity to it, so I guess the film is holding true to that.

DEN

This story is about a teenager who finds a round green meteorite. He doesn’t know it, but the meteorite is the mysterious green orb seen through out all of the stories in the film. He picks it up takes it home, and during a lightning storm, the green orb opens a portal to an alternate dimension! A world called Neverwhere. Interesting part is that when the boy transports himself to Neverwhere, his body mutates into that of some kind of superhero! When he gets to Neverwhere, the boy must save a beautiful virgin that is about to get sacrificed to some god by a group of religious nuts!

CAPTAIN STERN 

This one is about a crazy space captain called Lincoln F. Sternn who has to go to court because he is being prosecuted for various criminal charges. He says he is going to plead guilty because with his new witness, he has an “angle” that will help him walk away free. The witness is called upon the stand and as soon as the witness starts to speak he begins to transform into a huge hulking dude capable of smashing everything in his way! Will Captain Sternn get away with getting away? Captain Sternn was voiced by Eugene Levy!

B17

This one I liked because it has a zombie angle to it, but that doesn’t surprise me since the story was written by Dan O’Bannon the guy who wrote and directed Return of the Living Dead. This particular story is about a group of soldiers returning home from the war when suddenly, their B-17 gets hit by the green glowing orb. Soon, the orb kills everyone on the plane, and then the dead soldiers turn into zombies!

SO BEAUTIFUL AND SO DANGEROUS

This one is about a girl who gets sucked into an alien spaceship! While on the ship, she ends up having sex with a robot! And the crew of the ship are flying around their spaceship while being coked up out of their heads! This one was the weakest entry for me really, it kind of goes nowhere with its story, its very much a pointless story.

TAARNA

In this tale, the green orb crashes inside of a volcano transforming everyone in the land into horrible mutated creatures. Taarna, a beautiful and sexy warrior maiden comes into town to avenge the death of all the dead. She flies around in this dragon that looks like a featherless chicken or something trying to discover the mutated barbarians stronghold so she can make them pay.

The film has a very offbeat nature to it. It doesn’t follow any rules at all. Good guys end up being bad, there’s a lot of backstabbing. Many characters are selfish pricks and have no moral whatsoever. I mean, these guys were trying to do something entirely opposed to what you had come to expect from animation. So you could say that the guys behind this film were really breaking the rules by making an animated film for adults filled with nudity, violence and foul language. Three things you would never see on a saturday morning cartoon or Disney movie. They were breaking with these old stigmas that had been placed upon animation, so I applaud them for that.

Speaking of animation, it can sometimes be crude and raw. The kind of animation seen on this film is the traditional 2-D animation. Now we are used to all sorts of computer animation in films, and heck, even traditional animation like the one seen on this movie is dissappearing or only used for animating saturday morning cartoon shows. But back in the early 80s, this is where animation was. It was old school, but it got the job done. And theres something to be admired about people going through so much work, drawing each frame by hand in order to get this one done. Also, this film was done with the collaboration of a couple of animation studios, so it was a collaborative effort. Its probably why the art work might seem different with each passing story.

A word of warning, this movie has a lot of animated sex sequences! Characters indulge in sexual acts, and I have to admit the excessive nudity on this film makes it look like an immature film, like a teenagers wet dream. A film made for kids to oogle at breasts, even if they are animated. But I really think this film was just trying to break some rules and establish animation as a valid form of adult entertainment and not just something for The Smurfs and Strawberry Shortcake to thrive in. Nowadays adult animation is all over the place and it’s understood that adults can enjoy animated stories just as much as a kid can. This new form of animation was firmly established thanks to the work done in films like Heavy Metal, Rock and Rule (1981) and a lot of the stuff that legendary animator Ralph Bakshi was doing with films like Fritz the Cat (1972) Heavy Traffic (1973) and Coonskin (1975). This film was followed by its sequel entitled Heavy Metal 2000, cant remember much about it, but Ill be giving it the old re-watch and reviewing it soon! Even more interesting is the fact that director David Fincher is very interested in making yet another Heavy Metal film! Many A-class directors want to direct a segment, so Im looking forward to the next Heavy Metal film. Animation has grown by leaps and bounds, so it should be interesting to see where this new Heavy Metal movie thats in the works will take us.  

Rating: 4 out of 5
  

Prince of Darkness (1987)

Title: Prince of Darkness (1987)

Director: John Carpenter

Written by: John Carpenter

Stars: Donald Pleasance, Victor Wong, Alice Cooper, Dennis Dun

Review:

John Carpenter’s career is filled with really high ups and some medium size downs. By this I mean that when Carpenter makes a good movie, it’s a really good movie. And when he doesn’t make them great, they are just “watchable”. For example The Thing (1982), Escape from New York (1981), Halloween (1978) and In the Mouth of Madness (1994) (to name just a few of the really good ones) are all excellent in my book. Unfortunately in between those films Carpenter also made films like Memoirs of an Invisible Man (1992), Escape from L.A. (1996) and Ghost of Mars (2001), which are some of Carpenters not so great films. In my opinion, they don’t really represent Carpenter at his full potential. Prince of Darkness, the film I’ll be talking about today, falls somewhere in that second category of “not so great” yet watchable Carpenter films. Not great, not horrible, just watchable.

Story is about this group of scientists who are brought together to try and decipher a great mystery that the Catholic Church has been keeping from all of humanity for far too long. You see, the church has a secret sect called “The Brotherhood of Sleep” which has been guarding a container that holds the entity known to all Catholics across the world as the Anti-Christ! Yes my friends were talking about the son of Satan here! The scientists are called in by a priest to try and decipher the mystery behind the container. This container lays hidden deep within the catacombs of an old church in the middle of the city. Little by little the malevolent force within the container starts to exert its evil influence over the small group of scientists. Will the evil contained within escape? Or will the end of civilization as we know it commence?

The main problem for me with this movie is that there is absolutely no pay off. The movie is all build up, build up, build up without a satisfying climax. Basically, the whole movie consists of this group of people being scared of the green slime that swirls inside of a container thing. Supposedly the green slime is the ultimate evil in the universe! The Catholics think it’s the anti-Christ, but the scientists think that it might be alien in origin. One thing is for certain, the green slime does make weird things happen. The green slime escapes the container and turns people into ravenous murderous zombies! It makes homeless people turn into murderers as well! And for some reason, it turns ants into flesh eating creatures! Pretty nifty stuff for a vat of green slime huh?

In Prince of Darkness, there’s always that ominous feeling, like we are going to get to see whatever is inside the container at some point. The characters keep talking about it, they feel the room getting colder, they feel an evil presence, and they keep looking at the container like it’s the most evil thing they have ever seen. After all this build up, I’m expecting something cool because after all, this movie comes to us from John Carpenter, the guy who gave us The Thing! Unfortunately, when the movie is close to finishing and no creature, monster, demon or devil shows up, you feel like you’ve been had. All we get to see of the ultimate evil in the universe is its hand! I’m thinking that Carpenter was trying to make a film in which he could scare you without showing you a whole lot. And that’s a valid notion; unfortunately, the movie feels like a half hearted effort that keeps repeating the same themes all the way to the end. It stretches things to make up for the fact that the story wont go any further!

But I guess for a movie made with a budget of 3 million dollars, this isn’t that bad at all. Carpenter made a deal with a company called “Alive Films” in which he would get to make various films with them, at a budget of 3 million each. He only ended up making two movies for Alive Films: They Live (1988) and Prince of Darkness. This low budget approach that Carpenter took with Alive Films is probably the reason why Prince of Darkness and They Live never truly live up to their full potential. They Live for example is a film about an alien race trying to invade earth, which is really an epic storyline; but keeping true to its low budget nature, the film only reveals the true appearance of the aliens only when they use these special glasses that allow us to see them. And when we do get to see the aliens, its nothing spectacular, they look like bug eyed purple skeletons. A simple yet effective make up effect. The film is deliberately kept at a small scale, and I love that movie for what it is. On Prince of Darkness, we can tell the films story is kept deliberately small because the film is about a container that holds the greatest evil in the universe; yet all the movie gives us is a bunch of scared scientists turning into zombies inside of an old church.

But I don’t want to sound like I absolutely loath this movie because I don’t. I enjoyed the science vs. religion angle. There is always that constant debate of religious myth versus scientific fact. The movie does a good job of mixing the two. Carpenter plays with catholic secrecy on this movie, where the “Brotherhood of Sleep” has kept guard over the container for years and years without anyone knowing much about it. This secrecy within the Catholic Church is a theme he later revisited in Vampires (1998). There’s some gory fun to be had on this one, though it’s not too over the top. Lovers of heavy metal get Alice Cooper playing the leader of the homeless zombies that hover outside of the church’s gates. And it was cool seeing some of the cast members of Carpenter’s Big Trouble in Little China (Victor Wong and Dennis Dun) working with Carpenter again. I also enjoyed the films dreadful atmosphere, this is something that Carpenter has always been good at. Creating that feeling of dread.

The movie has many elements in common with John Carpenter’s own The Thing. The green slime inside of the container is probably alien in nature and it spits out this liquid that transforms people into zombies, making people turn on each other. Like in The thing, Prince of Darkness has that element of distrust amongst people by turning people you once considered friends into deadly enemies. The only difference between both films being that the levels of tention felt in Prince of Darkness are nowhere nearly as high as those displayed on The Thing. This film also reminded me of Phantasm (1979) because it mixes science fiction with religion, and it has that dimensional portal thing going for it as well.

I guess the thing with this movie is that it pales in comparison with Carpenter’s bigger films like The Thing and Big Trouble in Little China. It feels like it deliberately took a minimalist approach with its storytelling. If there’s an upside to Prince of Darkness it’s that it was interesting seeing Carpenter trying something different, stretching his storytelling muscles by telling a story that’s smaller in scope. Prince of Darkness and They Live both have that epic-ness in their background, but their budgets never let that epic side emerge. My advice is, if you want to see a movie about people locked up in a spooky church with some real demons, watch Michelle Soavi’s The Church (1989). Now there’s a movie that won’t disappoint ya!

 

Rating: 3 out of 5

 

Mario Bava's Kill Baby Kill (1966)

Title: Kill, Baby Kill! (1966)

Director: Mario Bava

Written By: Mario Bava, Romano Migliorini, Roberto Natale

Review:

In Kill Baby Kill (Operazione Paura) Dr. Paul Eswai is called in to try and solve a mystery that is plaguing a small town in Italy. People are dying left and right in strange ways. Upon further inspection, it is discovered that the dead victims all have a silver coin in their hearts! Dr. Paul Eswai must investigate the mystery behind the deaths. Why are these people dying, and why is there a silver coin in their hearts? The Villagers are all scared; could their superstitious fright have a justifiable and believable cause? Or are these people just a bunch of frightened ignorant fools?

Kill Baby Kill is a fine example of Gothic Horror at its best. Like many of Bava’s films, Kill Baby Kill never lets go of its atmosphere which is something that I always appreciate of Mario Bava’s films. That constant never ending atmosphere. At times, Kill Baby Kill feels like an old Hammer horror film. Specially because the story centers around a small village/community in which everyone is collectively scared of something. What it is, non of them seem to want to say. The townsfolk in this film are so scared that even speaking about the origins of their fear is not an option for them. This reminds me of old Hammer films, when a stranger walks into a pub, and all the villagers gathered there look at him strangely, and don’t give too much information save for “leave while you still can!” or the traditional “this town is cursed! Forgotten by god! I can go no further!” So this is a Gothic Horror film through and through, of the likes that Hammer use to make. In my opinion, these Bava movies sometimes surpassed the old Hammer films in terms of over all gothicness.

We follow Dr. Paul Eswai as he arrives at this superstitious town right after a strange death has occurred. No one wants to tell him wants going on, but he is a determined soul, he is not a superstitious individual at all, so he goes onward with his investigation. It reminded me a lot of Ichabod Crane in Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow (1999). You know; the scientist/investigator type whose world views are firmly planted on reality vs. a group of scared highly superstitious individuals. In fact, I think Burton was extremely influenced by Kill Baby Kill when he decided to make Sleepy Hollow. That Burton movie has so many similarities with Kill Baby Kill. A scientist/investigator comes into town having to perform an autopsy on a victim. The people of the town are scared, superstitious and unwilling to help. There is a family mystery involved, a deep rooted secret that on one seems to want to talk about. Similarities between these two movies abound, let’s not forget how drenched in atmosphere Sleepy Hollow is! But I also found some similarities with films like The Wicker Man (1973) as well. The idea of a stranger coming in to investigate something that the town already knows all too well.

The spooky little ghost girl in Kill Baby Kill was actually played by a boy actor called Valerio Valeri

The supernatural takes center stage on this film because it is after all, a ghost movie. I place this one highly amongst ghost movies, particularly amongst ghost movies dealing with the ghost of dead children, like The Changeling (1980), The Shinning (1980), The Ring (2002) and The Devils Backbone (2001). On Kill Baby Kill we get lots of images of the ghost girl looking through windows or simply appearing in hallways to spook people. The thing about this movie is that the ghost girl doesn’t really do much save for looking at people through windows and spooking the shit out of them! This movie is all about that, the little ghost girl looking at you really seriously from somewhere. Interesting thing: the ghost girl was actually played by a boy! His name is Valerio Valeri. Bava probably did this to give the image of the ghost girl an off kilter element. You might get the impression that something is not quite right here just by looking at this little ghost girl.

Bava has us follow Dr. Paul Eswai, through out the film. He is the protagonist we go on the journey with. We stick with this character throughout the whole film because he is the one character who is not spooked by superstition and the supernatural. To him, these things are all hocus pocus, and people are simply acting out of fear and ignorance. What I like about this kind of story is that this character, who’s beliefs are firmly grounded on reality is suddenly thrust into a world of ghosts, magic and the supernatural. So we have that contrast, reality and science vs. the supernatural and magic. Aside from it being a ghost story, we also deal with a theme that Bava loves to deal with in his movies: witches! Many of his films are centered on or star a witch in one way or another. Black Sunday (1960) was about an evil Satan worshipping witch who is trying to come back to life, Baron Blood (1972) has a witch who placed a curse upon the Baron, and on Kill Baby Kill a witch tries to protect the people of the town from the vengeful ghost. Little by little I’m getting to know what Bava is all about, but witches, the supernatural and pagan beliefs are definitely a huge part of what makes a Bava movie a Bava movie.

On this film, the witch is actually the good guy!

Bava also likes for you to take a good look at his sets. He has a lot of these swooping shots where we are simply meant to admire the lighting and the art direction. It’s as if Bava suddenly said “look how cool we illuminated this place! See how spooky it looks? Isn’t that great?” I have to admit, though I love how Bava lights a set and I love the art direction in his films, I don’t like how much he does these shots of people just walking through rooms so we can get a look at them. Some times a scene simply scans through a set, and goes nowhere storywise. He has a lot of shots like this one on Kill Baby Kill. Too much valuable movie time is spent on those shots that go nowhere, shots that are simply there for an aesthetic purpose. Id rather just appreciate the art direction while the story is flowing, instead of stopping everything dead on its tracks so we can get a glimpse at the cool sets. But this is a minor squabble I have with Bava. 

One of Bava's signature visuals is an evil entity looking through the window

This movie also benefits from having some excellent localizations, and that’s something that Italian horror directors like Bava and Argento always took great advantage of. They used all these beautiful old buildings  on their films because they knew these buildings would work wonders in a gothic and atmospheric horror film, and they use these localizations to full advantage. Kill Baby Kill is filled with spooky looking castles and buildings. Streets made of cobble stone, creepy looking homes. It just adds a lot of credibility to the proceedings that all these structures are real and tangible as opposed to the CGI fests we are getting nowadays. What happened to the good old days of shooting a film on an exotic location? But anyways, all in all, Kill Baby Kill was an enjoyable ghost story. It’s a bit slow paced, but that’s the kind of film this is. Its not the action/horror like we are getting nowadays, this is old school slow burner type of horror, where the emphasis is on atmosphere and dread, where the film slowly creeps up on you.

Rating: 4 out of 4

The films original poster translates to "Operation Fear"

Movie Posters with Skulls in them Part 2!

Skulls and skeletons remind us of the inevitability of death. Its no wonder so many horror movies have skulls and skeletons on their covers. Theres a few in there that are not horror like John Sayles Lone Star (1996) which is a movie about an investigation on an old murder, highly recommend that one by the way. But anyways, since the first Movies Posters with Skulls in them was such a hit, I decided to do another one today. Its been fun searching out these old posters! Hope you find them fun to look through!

The Expendables (2010)

Honeymoon (1985)

Creepshow (1982)

The Burrowers (2008)

Deathship (1980)

Death Warmed Up (1984)

Tales from the Crypt (1972)

Army of Darkness (1993) (Italian Poster)

Lonestar (1996)

Return to Horror High (1989)

Return of the Living Dead (1985) (Alternate Poster)

Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead (2006)

Return of the Living Dead Part II (1988)

Zombie Death House (1987)

The Final Destination 3-D (2009)

The Last Wave (1977)

The Lost Skeleton of Cadabra (2001)

Ghost World (2001)

Title: Ghost World (2001)

Director: Terry Zwigoff

Cast: Thora Birch, Scarlett Johansson, Steve Buscemi

Review:

Director Terry Zwigoff made a career for himself out of making movies and documentaries based on the peculiarities and the lifestyle of the art world. His first documentary was Crumb (1994) which depicts the story and life of legendary cartoonist Robert Crumb. Now, if there’s anyone out there remotely interested in cartooning and sketches and graphic art, this is a documentary that you simply have to see. Not only does this documentary give us an insightful look into Robert Crumbs art across the years, but it also gives us a glimpse at his 100% bizarre lifestyle. You get to meet Robert Crumb’s brother, who will turn out to be one of the strangest and most bizarre individuals you will have ever seen in your whole life. My main interest in the film was to learn more about Crumbs cartoons and art through the years, I greatly admire the guy for his contributions to the art world. After watching this documentary, Crumb became an even bigger inspiration for me artistically. But damn does the guy have a strange life!

But hell, most artists have that ‘bizarreness’ to them. Artists tend to see things just a little differently then everybody else. And that’s what Zwigoff’s second feature Ghost World (2001) focuses on. The story revolves around two best friends, Enid and Becky. Two girls who hate society and the status quo of things. Two very cynical, very witty teenagers. They hate graduation; they don’t want to go to college, they make fun of everybody. All they want to do is get a job, find their own apartment and live their lives the way they want to. Or do they? At one point, Enid’s and Becky’s objectives suddenly become opposing objectives. Enid wants to live the artsy fartsy aimless life for a while, while Becky wants to join society, get a job, pay the rent and live a same-o same-o kind of life. But Enid wants none of that. Pretty soon, best friends turn to strangers, and Enid goes on a journey to know her self and what she wants to do with her life. Will she ever find her way?

The film is based on the Ghost World story arc found in Eight Ball issues #11 through #18

This film is based on Daniel Clowes comic book Eight ball issues #11 through 18. The Ghost World story arc was such a huge hit that it was later reprinted in graphic novel form. Its interesting that when the time came to make the movie, it was comic book creator/artist Daniel Clowes himself who wrote the screenplay and consequently won an Oscar for best adapted screenplay in 2001 for it! So at least we know that the film is going to be pretty faithful to the comic book its based on because its own creator wrote the screenplay! And this faithfulness to the source material translates in many ways, amongst them in the casting. It’s almost uncanny how much Thora Birch looks like the comic book version of Enid! She was perfectly cast as the rebellious teenager! I’m actually kind of sad she hasn’t been used in more films recently; she does such a great job on this one.

I’ve never read the graphic novel (I’m looking forward to it that’s for sure!) but I have to admit I love this character Enid. She’s this girl who is at war with the world, with boredom and fakeness; she just doesn’t know how to focus all that anger towards the world. She’s trying to find herself, what she wants to do, where she wants to be, who she wants to become. She wants to belong to something, be somebody, do something with her life. Problem is she still hasn’t figured out what that is. In the mean time, in the midst of all her confusion, she makes everyone else’s life a confused mess as well. Including Seymour, Steve Buscemi’s character.

In her continuous search for evading boredom, she decides to become friends with an obsessive record collector named Seymour who is about 30 years older then she is. She finds him interesting because he isn’t like everybody else. Because much like her, he “can’t relate to 99% of humanity”. So they are kindred spirits in that sense. He is also into old art, old Jazz/blues records, basically, he likes collecting cool stuff from the past. He isn’t into “guitars and sports” and isn’t a pseudo hippy. The relationship that forms between the two takes up a large part of the film because Enid becomes hell bent on finding Seymour a date because as she puts it, she doesn’t want to live in a world where a guy like Seymour can’t even get a date. This part of the film presents us with an interesting situation. Should Enid and Seymour have a relationship? He being so much older then she is? Can a relationship like that work?

Enid also has to take a summer art class because she flunked it. Not because she isn’t any good, but because she cant take the bullshit and the judgments that go on inside of an art class. In an art class room, everything revolves around the point of view of the art teacher, and if you don’t necessarily fit within that point of view then surviving (or passing) an art class can become something of a chore. This is a theme that is also explored in director Terry Zwigoff’s third feature Art School Confidential (2006), which by the way was also based on a comic book of the same name. I should mention that the comic book on which Art School Confidential was based on was also written and illustrated by Daniel Clowes, the same guy who did the Ghost World graphic novel and wrote the screenplay for the film. Though if you haven’t seen Art School Confidential let me warn you that it’s a very dark and bitter film, don’t go expecting something as light as what we see in Ghost World.

In contrast, Ghost World is a joy to watch. Most of the main character are cynical, bitter, but never stop being funny. I find it interesting how much they reflect the American way of life. One particularly funny character is this crazy white thrash dude who hangs out at the parking lot of the seven eleven. When the owner of the store tells him that he can’t be in the store without a shirt the guy replies “It’s called America dude, learn the rules!” and then he proceeds to practice his abilities with his nun chucks on the parking lot. Another way in which the film mirrors society is by showing us how big corporations are slowly taking over small towns in the United States. The town depicted in Ghost World has no name, it could be Anywhere U.S.A. But for example Becky the character played by Scarlett Johansson ends up working in a Starbucks-like shop called “The Coffee Experience”, Enid ends up working in a multiplex theater. She gets fired on the first day because she doesn't like how sleazily they try to push bigger sizes on their customers. In a way, the Ghost World in this movie is really the town that is getting crushed by big companies. And the world that Enid leaves behind when she finally makes her choice.

Daniel Clowes, the writer of Ghost World went to art school, he knows how frustrating these schools can be and how many wannabes and eccentrics inhabit the hallways of these schools. He knows how infuriating it can be to try and please an art teacher, who either doesn’t know jack of what he or she is talking about or is trying to cope with the fact that he or she never made it in the art world. Through his scripts and on both of his comics he captures the competitive vibe felt on these art schools where usually the less artistic and more commercially viable art is the one that garners the attention. In Ghost World, Enid goes to art class in high school, and the art teacher is one of the funniest characters in the film as well. Zwigoff and Clowes cannot help but show these teachers as losers, as has beens who never quite made it in the art world and are now taking out their frustrations on you. I have to say that I fully agree. There are good art teachers out there, I’ve seen them myself, but most of the time, they feel like the art teachers on both of these films. So Id say Ghost World accurately portrays what it is to deal with these individuals and the atmosphere breathed inside of an art class. Art School Confidential explores these themes a bit more deeply, and from a far darker angle. So much so that the film turns completely bitter by its third half.

Ghost World is entertaining, well written and directed. It is inhabited by funny witty characters, who love to criticize everything. Its one of those movies that illustrates that moment in life when we don’t know exactly what we want to do with ourselves, but we are sure its not what we currently have. It’s about that pivotal moment in life when you have to decide which way you are going to go.

Rating: 5 out of 5