the latest "batch"

Okay, the schedule was all screwed up as I waited over an hour for a screening I didn't get to. I saw the film at the press screening at ten PM, which means I was only able to get one review finished. Here it is:

ART SCHOOL CONFIDENTIAL / U.S.A.

Directed by
Terry Zwigof

You write what you know, and Daniel Clowes, the last of the big underground cartoonists, went to art school in the late 1970s, He knows the pretentiousness of art and it’s establishment.

Jerome Platz (Max Minghella) has talent. He’s good enough to go to art school, and winds up at the prestigious Strathmore academy, which is probably a copy of the prestigious Pratt institute (being a grad it looks and feels exactly like it). Here he finds that art of bullshit to be supreme in this petty little world.

While taking Professor Sandford’s drawing class, he comes upon Audrey (Sophia Myles), the girl of his dreams, who’s working as a model. He’s totally smitten, but she’s going for Jonah (Matt Keeslar), a jock with little or no artistic talent. Soon everybody loves Jonah’s artwork, and this makes Jerome furious. He gets some solise from his pal Bardo(Joel David Moore) a cynic who introduces him to a
a failed artist named Jimmy(Jim Broadbent), who teaches him the true meaning of art and the art world. It isn’t very pretty. Where talent and hard work don’t work cheating might.

There’s also a subplot about a serial killer which isn’t particularly interesting, but this is a cartoon movie, and the problem here is that there’s not enough of anything. The film has to go to far, and for the most part it doesn’t go near much less anywhere far or even too far. .

I like Dan Clowes, but this wasn’t one of his better commix, and the film isn’t one of Zwigof’s better either. If you want to see something good in this genre see “Ghost World.