Ghostworld

We began watching the live action film based off the graphic novel Ghostworld in class and certain things pushed my buttons to take a look and the book itself.  The movie was very upfront and uninviting.  The two main characters were always in a bad mood and seemed to want to cause more troubles than assisting people.  I felt like I was one of their victims in the movie.  This is very opposite from what I practice in my life and it was very hard to get into the movie, for this reason I tried to read the book to see if I could adapt more to that representation.

When I first picked up the book it didn’t look to be so bad, but after reading a few pages it was too hard to continuing reading.  All of the images are very bleak.  The book is printed with three colors: light teal, black and white.  Every image is oriented the same way and there is no variation between two images.  There is an excessive amount of close ups and mid shots that just pushes me away from reading it.  Not really sure what to be focusing my eye on if the dialogue was not there.  Most of the images are very flat and come off as posterized.  There is no variety in facial or body expressions; the characters are very stiff.  With all of this bleak and very uninviting imagery it represented the characters very well, but could not finish the book due to the dryness of the images.

The one thing that got on my nerves the most had to have been the staging of the images.  In concept class we discussed how flat staging is used for comic relief, where as dynamic staging creates drama.  Almost every image was very flat but the idea of that even being comedic contradicted the attitudes of the characters.  I was very lost and was not quite sure how to react.