This movie, well, it just knocks it out of the park. I don’t remember too much from “American Beauty” and haven’t seen Thora Birch’s other recent work, but I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt and say that, based on this performance, she is the greatest actress of her generation. Just look at the way she walks, the way her arms dangle uncomfortably when she is at rest. I foolishly looked up some recent photos of Birch on the Web and learned, sadly, that she lost weight; she doesn’t look like Enid anymore, she looks like a regular person, one of the “99% of humanity” she and Seymour can’t relate to. This movie gets an “A” because I love it so much but, like Enid, it is flawed. The coda is a disaster — that much is almost universally agreed on. Also, I feel like some of the wacky side characters (the Satanists, the kung-fu redneck) are kinda crammed in during the first ten minutes, then dropped. My educated guess is that this is due to wanting to keep some of the gems from the comic book. My quick research tells me that the relationship with Seymour, the emotional heart and soul, was created for the movie, and not in the original comic book. If this is true, it finalizes a theory I’ve held since I was about 9 years old – I don’t like comic books. So far, “Ghost World” is the only comic book movie I like, and I think what I respond to is all the non-comic book parts.