Forget the X-Men and even next year’s Spiderman movie. The best-ever cinematic adaptation of a comic book is Terry Zwigoff’s Ghost World, based on the work of the same name by Daniel Clowes. Ghost World was, admittedly, my least favorite of the serialized stories that appeared in Clowes’s brilliant Eightball comic book, but it remains head and shoulders above most anything drawn and written by hand. Zwigoff has turned it into a sublime and incisive feature film that’s likely to leave just about anyone laughing satsifactorily at its pathetic cast of characters and their prosaic circumstances and there’s no simple, Hollywood-esque redemption at the end, no tidy comedic denouement, no happily ever after.
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