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Art School Confidential Our rating: Your rating: 1 2 3 4 Your Comments: see all MPAA rating: R (for language including sexual references, nudity and a scene of violence) Genre: Drama Theater release: May 05, 2006 by Sony Pictures Classics Limited release: May 05, 2006 Directed by: Terry Zwigoff Runtime: 1 hour 42 minutes Cast: Max Minghella (Jerome Platz), Sophia Myles (Audrey), Matt Keeslar (Jonah), John Malkovich (Professor Sandiford), Jim Broadbent (Jimmy), Joel Moore (Bardo), Anjelica Huston (Sophie), Jeremy Guskin (Eno) Related: Talk About It/Family Corner

Five years ago, director Terry Zwigoff and writer Daniel Clowes mocked the pretensions and politics of art school in Ghost World, a modest independent hit that helped launch the grown-up, art-house phase of Scarlett Johansson's career. Now, Zwigoff and Clowes return to the subject with a vengeance in Art School Confidential, a strange hybrid of a movie that is part coming-of-age black comedy and part noir-ish murder mystery. The resulting pastiche is a little like the odd sketches, paintings, and other items that the students tack up on the classroom wall for their teacher and classmates to evaluate—and one hesitates to review the film, lest one end up sounding as clueless as the characters it mocks.

Max Minghella as Jerome and Joel David Moore as Bardo

Nevertheless, review it we shall. The story concerns Jerome Platz, a suburban kid who has a way with a pencil and a paintbrush, and who is first seen being beaten up by a bully on an elementary-school playground. Jerome dreams of escaping this world, primarily through art; the only revenge he can take against the bullies is to draw pictures of them covered in excrement. But Jerome believes there are more positive, less reactionary benefits to being an artist, too; for a special show-and-tell in which students come to class dressed up as their personal heroes, Jerome says he looks up to Picasso, because Picasso was a famous artist—and, oh yeah, Picasso also got to have sex with lots and lots of women.

Hormones, rather than any noble ideas about art, are also the reason why Jerome goes to the fictitious Strathmore Institute several years later. Jerome (now played by Max Minghella, son of English Patient director Anthony) sees a picture of a beautiful blonde model posing for one of their classes in a brochure, and it isn't until after he has enrolled in the school and moved into his dorm room—which he shares with a boorish would-be filmmaker and a seemingly-gay fashion student who talks a little too conspicuously about his "girlfriend"—that he learns what a grim and shallow place the school really is.

John Malkovich as Professor Sandiford

Jerome is disappointed to discover that the nude model in his first class is actually a man, not a woman, but he makes a new friend in the student sitting next to him, Bardo (Joel Moore), who happily points out how nearly all the other students fit into one art-school stereotype or another: the Angry Lesbian, the Vegan Holy Man, the Mom, and so on. One reductionistic classmate, Eno (Jeremy Guskin), says all art is motivated by a "Darwinian imperative," and he deliberately turns in sub-par work because he's "questioning aesthetic experience"—to which the professor (John Malkovich) can only reply, non-judgmentally, "I'll buy that." And when an arrogant but successful alumnus named Marvin (Adam Scott) comes back and visits the school for a question-and-answer session and treats everyone, faculty and students alike, like dirt, all but a few people accept this because, well, Marvin is a successful artist.

And then, one day, Jerome's dream comes true. A female model, Audrey (Tristan & Isolde's Sophia Myles), comes to the class—and she is the very woman he saw in the brochure. Jerome's attraction to her is unabashedly romantic; his portrait of her focuses mainly on her face, prompting Bardo to complain that he's missing the "good parts," and the music that plays on the soundtrack as Jerome paints is classical, orchestral and free of irony. What's more, Audrey seems to take a shine to Jerome. But before they can actually become a "couple" in any meaningful way, a rival steps in—a neat, handsome, and anything-but-artsy new student named Jonah (Matt Keeslar), whom Bardo quickly dismisses as a "weirdo."

Zwigoff's cynicism is all over this movie, perhaps nowhere more so than in the scenes where Jerome meets Jimmy (Jim Broadbent), a Strathmore alumnus who comes across like an even more hopeless version of the title character in Zwigoff's previous film, Bad Santa—and that's saying something. Jimmy stays home all the time, drinks all day, admits to spending his time masturbating in front of the TV (we hear The Facts of Life's theme song in the background at one point), and, when a guest vomits on his carpet, he apathetically throws a newspaper over the offending mess. He's an exaggerated cautionary tale.

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