I guess I should have figured that you two would do something different.
Ten years ago today Ghost World went into limited release (after opening in New York and Los Angeles two weeks earlier because of course it would), and when I finally got to see it one month later it turned out to be quite a watershed film for me. Not only was it my first exposure to director Terry Zwigoff (who was similarly making the leap from documentary to fiction), but it also introduced me to the work of artist Daniel Clowes, who created the comic that served as the basis for the film and also collaborated on the Oscar-nominated screenplay with Zwigoff. As adaptations go it's fairly loose, but that's hardly surprising since the comic was serialized in Clowes's Eightball over a period of several years. To take something that was episodic by design and turn it into a linear story can't have been easy, but the film perfectly captures the comic's melancholy tone as recent graduates Enid and Rebecca (Thora Birch and Scarlett Johansson) navigate their post-high school lives and find that ironic detachment can only take you so far.
Many of the events in the first half of the film come straight out of the comic, including Enid and Rebecca's encounter with a pair of supposed Satanists and a visit to a faux-'50s diner where they're served by a waiter they cruelly nickname "Weird Al" (and not without reason). The film goes off on its own tangent, though, with the introduction of Seymour, the vintage art and 78 collector (played by Steve Buscemi) whose interests mirror Zwigoff's to a large degree. As a result, it winds up being more weighted in favor of Enid (who strikes up an unlikely friendship with Seymour) than Rebecca, who turns out to be the more responsible one of the two, holding down a steady job and looking for an apartment for them to move into. Meanwhile, Enid suffers through a remedial art class she needs to take in order to earn her diploma (which is taught by flaky performance artist Illeana Douglas) and is horrified when her milquetoast father (Bob Balaban) starts seeing an old girlfriend (Teri Garr) who didn't make a great impression on her the last time around. Hardly surprising, then, that the film finds its way to the same conclusion as the comic, with Enid boarding a bus headed out of town. After a certain point, there just isn't much holding her there.