Recently when my family was out of town I used the opportunity for a film binge and went to see Ghost World and Hedwig and the Angry Inch on the same day.
Ghost World perhaps suffered from the buildup. After reading a profile of Dan Clowes in the New Yorker I hunted everywhere for a copy of the Ghost World comic, but with astonishing bad timing it went out of print just before the movie came out. The big chain stores were pushing the movie script instead, a miserable example of bait and switch ("Sorry, we're all out of Twister -- how about a can of Comet instead?"). At last I found one copy in Forbidden Books on Deep Ellum. So after priming myself with the comic's two-color understatement, I wasn't really prepared for the technicolor treatment. It took some getting used to but I finally decided I liked the changes to plot and characters made for the sake of the movie. Thora Birch was great and Steve Buscemi was born to play the Crumb-like Seymour. (Unfortunately Scarlett Johansson as Rebecca has less to do in the movie than the comic.) P.S. The desi rock video that opens the movie deserves full-length treatment of its own.
Then Hedwig. Thanks to the teenage musical obsessions of an Oklahoma high school friend, I got enough exposure to glam for this odd little glam rock musical to have some nostalgia value. Add those perennial favorite themes krautophilia and gender confusion and you're talking cult classic. The movie has more outré style than story, but it's still a hoot. I don't know whether the music (think two parts Bowie and one part Rocky Horror) would stand on its own, but I definitely left the theater humming "I've got an angry inch!" I can't wait for it to start the midnight sing-along circuit. (Q: What do you call an obsessive Hedwig fan? A: A Hedhead, although I think Wighead would have been at least as good.)