"it sounds like your determination in uncovering inside jokes and pop culture references may have comprimised your overall enjoyment of the flick."

Is this above remark directed at me? I wasn't the one who mentioned inside jokes-- I think that was REDeye. I could believe it if there were a lot of inside jokes in the film, but I wasn't disappointed by a fruitless quest to seek them out, if that's what you're implying. As far as I'm concerned, there could be all the damn inside jokes in the world-- the movie should still stand up on its own merits and work at least on some level as a stand-alone piece. And I think it did.

The pop culture references are one small thing that I think prevented me from enjoying the movie more than I could have-- I just think that if there are references to pop culture, they should mean something within the film and not just be obvious "wallpaper" references (like in that crappy movie FINDING FORRESTER where the camera lingers on a stack of books sitting on a table and you're just supposed to read the titles and get something glorious out of it that's contained very little elsewhere in the film).

I don't think GHOST WORLD had those kinds of references, and I suppose I *did*, in fact, "get" what was going on with each of the pop culture things. Still, I would have liked to have been more familiar with the real-world connections when I saw the film, so I could have been more assured of my interpretations.

As I said before, I thought the movie was good, but if I sounded like I was disappointed in some things, that's probably because I was. This is what I didn't like:

1) The beginning of the movie is pretty weak. The first 20 minutes' worth of dialogue and scenarios just seemed so phony. After that it got better for awhile.

2) I hated how Rebecca was marginalized and all but absent for about a 20-minute stretch of the movie 2/3 of the way through. During the whole second half, she becomes progressively less and less of a character (I realize you could say "That's the point," but I think it would be a much better film if Rebecca were allowed to join in the relatively complex characterizations that Enid and Seymour benefited from).

3) Rebecca and Enid made amends too easily. Their whole relationship was grossly oversimplified at the end. Actually, EVERYTHING about the ending was too "pat", including the actions contained in the final shot, Rebecca and Enid's resolution, as well as Enid's "fix" with Seymour.

4) The characters were too archetypical for my tastes. This applies to Rebecca, Enid's father, Josh, "Doug" (the nunchuku guy), and the art teacher. Basically, the only two fully-realized characters were Enid and Seymour. It allowed for too many easy jokes (and there were A LOT of easy jokes, especially with the art teacher) and not nearly as rich an experience as it could have been.

5) The movie seems often confused about where it stands ideologically. The art class scenes in particular bothered me. At the beginning, it's a scathing (albeit very predictable, as suggested above) satire/parody of "mainstream culture" and "art," and yet somehow it seems we're supposed to sympathize with Enid's "triumph" in art class when she submits her Coon's Chicken poster as a found object piece. Sure, you could say that ultimately, her piece is rejected and taken down from the art show, and that she loses her chance at going to art college as a result, but we're obviously supposed to go along for the ride and sympathize with Enid's acceptance when everything else in the film to that point had suggested that the art teacher was such an idiot that we shouldn't really care about her phony "validation."

That's all I can remember for now. . .

And yet still, somehow, I enjoyed it. I think some of the scenes are great (like the scene when they first see Seymour and Enid makes fun of him for ordering "a big glass of milk"), and Seymour and Enid are interesting enough to keep me from missing the other characters too much-- it still just bothers me to have such superficial sketches of people. All in all, it's funny and enjoyable, likeable and rewarding to watch, but it fell far short of its potential by resorting to numerous resolution cliches and shallow characterizations.

I still think A.I. (yes, A.I.) is by far the best movie I've seen this year.

Chris