Hacker Cinema
Ghost World
2001 · Film · 111 min
Directed by Terry Zwigoff
Two quirky, cynical, teenaged girls try to figure out what to do with their lives following high school graduation. After they play a prank on an eccentric, middle-aged record collector, one of them befriends him, which causes a rift in the girls’ friendship.
4 positive9 neutralfrom 13 commenters
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14 comments on Hacker News
Would the void of physical medium like VHS and DVD be part of the issue?
Younger me would go to Blockbuster Video and search the new release section for non-blockbuster movies. "Ghost World" was found this way with other cult films.
With the decline of purchasing physical media it makes it hard to bring in revenue to produce obscure art. Even big blockbuster movies that failed in theatres would often be uplifted from media sales.
I didn't know that about Buscemi's character.
Ghost World was such a rare film for me. The story wasn't anything I was expecting when I randomly turned the TV on that day.
Is that where the subplot of the chicken poster in that movie came from? I was just thinking about Ghost World as I was reading the comments above, thinking, "now that's a subject Hollywood doesn't want to touch anymore."
Along similar lines, Steve Buscemi's character Seymour in "Ghost World" (2001) is pretty clearly heavily inspired by Robert Crumb. Seymour collects old blues records and it put off by rock music, not to mention normal mainstream American culture. "Ghost World" was based on a comic book and was directed by Terry Zwigoff, the director of "Crumb".
she was Maxine, Enid's father's new-old girlfriend who was re-introducing herself back into Enid's family-life (to Enid's dismay).[0]
apologies for the horrible picture URL, it's a picture of the character Maxine.
[0]: https://c7.alamy.com/comp/2K83FJR/bob-balaban-teri-garr-film-ghost-world-usaukde-2001-characters-enids-dad-maxine-literaturverfilmung-comicverfilmung-based-on-the-comic-book-by-daniel-clowes-director-terry-zwigoff-16-june-2001-warning-this-photograph-is-for-editorial-use-only-and-is-the-copyright-of-united-artists-andor-the-photographer-assigned-by-the-film-or-production-company-and-can-only-be-reproduced-by-publications-in-conjunction-with-the-promotion-of-the-above-film-a-mandatory-credit-to-united-artists-is-required-the-photographer-should-also-be-credited-when-known-no-commercial-use-can-be-gra-2K83FJR.jpg
Ghost World is one of my favorite movies and I don't remember her character either.
Damn. She's in the category of people who were all over the place in my childhood, then disappeared and never aged in my memory, and suddenly she's nearly 80 and now dead. The cast list of Mom and Dad Save the World, a stupid as fuck movie that is one of the lowest rated on Rotten Tomatoes, but for whatever I reason I loved as a 12 year-old, is practically a who's who of these people. Jon Lovitz, Jeffrey Jones, Wallace Shawn. Jones got outed as a pedophile and is hopefully gone forever from public life, with Tim Burton pretty creatively writing his character's head out of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice so they could recast him. God knows what happened to the rest.
Apparently Teri Garr got MS in the late 90s (which is ultimately what killed her), significantly scaled back her work, then retired. She was in Ghost World? I don't even remember her in that.
Half of this story seems to be about the ScarJo "Her" voice story, which was more or less debunked by the Washington Post --- OpenAI hired several voice actors, months before reaching out to ScarJo, and the voice suspected to be a clone or performance of ScarJo's own voice was the natural speaking voice of one of those actors, who was not instructed to mimic ScarJo or given any reference to "Her". †
The rest of it is about "safety" whistleblowers. That's something that seems like it could be a real problem for OpenAI, if you believe that transformer models are something that raise genuine safety issues, or if you take seriously OpenAI's founding commitments to be something more like a monastic society than a company.
For some time now, I've mentally bucketed OpenAI in with all the other tech companies, and I find that perspective pretty refreshing; there's just not much to think about here, apart from the technology, because, to my eyes, it's not reasonable to expect a lot more of OpenAI than I would from Apple or Google. Is OpenAI becoming less and less like a religion and more like a hyper-rational technology business? To me: that's a good thing. It is fine that we disagree.
† I anticipate many responses about the subtle angles of this silly voice actor story that I am not capturing, like Altman's professed love for the movie "Her", and to all that I'll preemptively respond: you do you, we (again) can simply disagree, I would have delighted in a news cycle where a giant tech company actually gets shredded by Rebecca from Ghost World, but I found the WaPo story dispositive.
>That’s why she was the voice actor for the AI voice in Her.
She was used in Her because she has a dry/monotone/lifeless form of diction that at the time seemed like a decent stand-in for an non-human AI.
IMDB is riddled with complaints about his vocal-style/diction/dead-pan on every one of her movies. Ghost World, Ghost in the Shell, Lost in Translation, Comic-Book-Movie-1-100 -- take a line from one movie and dub it across the character of another and most people would be fooled, that's impressive given the breadth of quality/style/age across the movies.
When she was first on the scene I thought it was bad acting, but then it continued -- now I tend to think that it's an effort to cultivate a character personality similar to Steven Wright or Tom Waits; the fact that she's now litigating towards protection of her character and likeness reinforces that fact for me.
It's unique to her though , that's for sure.
When I saw the can design I immediately thought that it looks like the art style of "David Boring" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Boring), turns out it was really Daniel Clowes who designed it. "Ghost world" is one of my favorite stories & movies as well, but I didn't hear about O.K. soda before. Fascinating!
While I really like the art style and dark touch I think it was probably too niche or too off-putting for most people.
That was my first thought too. I'm not a native English speaker, but have heard about this term actually in the american film "Ghost World"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_World_(film)
I immediately thought of the end of the movie 'Ghost World' for some reason.
This reminds me of the old guy in Ghost World who waits for the bus that doesn't run anymore, until it picks him up at the end of the film.
Having passion about your interests is a great thing, but it's important to be able to relate to other people, and monomania is often pretty insulating. Steve Buscemi's character Seymour in the movie Ghost World comes to mind: Enid asks him what his interests are, and after a bunch of buzzwords about musical categories that I don't remember, she says, "Ok, let's just say, 'music'. What else?"
I'm very interested in programming, but I also really like to cook, bicycling, and several other things, and find those are usually easier for people to relate to. Maybe you like to write, or skateboard, or you love paintball, or have a growing interest in photography, or something. An interest in programming and being able to have a social life are in no way contradictory. (Seemingly unrelated interests also tend to cross-pollinate.)
Also, let's please not fill up the front page with rebuttals to rebuttals to rebuttals.