Curiously, this relentlessly cynical tone turns out sounding refreshingly original compared to the usual pieties in the genre.
Art School Confidential (2006)
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:32
Fresh:14
Rotten:18
Average Rating:5.5/10
Consensus: Art School's misanthropy is too sour, its targets too flat and cliched, and Clowes and Zwigoff stumble when trying to build a story around the premise.
Rated: R [See Full Rating] for language including sexual references, nudity and a scene of violence.
Runtime: 1 hr 42 mins
Genre: Comedies
Theatrical Release:May 5, 2006 Limited
Box Office: $3,174,973
Synopsis: "Art School Confidential" follows a talented young artist Jerome Platz (Max Minghella) as he escapes from high school to a tiny East Coast art school. Here the boyish freshman's ambition is to... "Art School Confidential" follows a talented young artist Jerome Platz (Max Minghella) as he escapes from high school to a tiny East Coast art school. Here the boyish freshman's ambition is to become the world's greatest artist, like his hero Picasso. Unfortunately, the beauty and craft of Jerome's portraiture are not appreciated in an anything-goes art class that he finds bewildering and bogus. Neither his harsh judgments of his classmates' efforts or his later attempts to create pseudo-art of his own win him any admirers. But Jerome does attract the attentions of his dream girl — the stunning and sophisticated Audrey (Sophia Myles) — an artist's model and daughter of a celebrated artist. Rejecting the affectations of the local art scene, Audrey is drawn to Jerome's sincerity. When Audrey shifts her attentions to Jonah (Matt Keeslar), a hunky painter who becomes the school's latest art star, Jerome is heartbroken. Desperate, he concocts a risky plan to make a name for himself and win her back. Filling out Jerome's world are a host of offbeat characters, including: a quirky art teacher (John Malkovich) who takes an extra-curricular interest in Jerome; a failed artist (Jim Broadbent), drowning in alcohol and self-pity; a regal art history professor (Anjelica Huston) Jerome tries to influence; a coffee shop owner-cum-art impresario (Steve Buscemi) swelling with self-importance; a worldly classmate (Joel David Moore), who introduces Jerome in the intricate mores of campus life; and Jerome's filmmaker roommate (Ethan Suplee), exploding with energy to create a cinematic masterpiece. United Artists and Sony Pictures Classics present Terry Zwigoff's "Art School Confidential," starring Max Minghella, Sophia Myles, John Malkovich, Jim Broadbent, Matt Keeslar, Steve Buscemi and Anjelica Huston. The film is produced by Lianne Halfon, John Malkovich and Russell Smith, partners in the production company Mr. Mudd, which also produced "Ghost World." Based on Daniel Clowes' short comic story of the same name, "Art School Confidential" is directed by Zwigoff from a screenplay by Clowes. --© Sony Pictures Classics [More]
Starring: Max Minghella, John Malkovich, Jim Broadbent, Ezra Buzzington
Starring: Max Minghella, John Malkovich, Jim Broadbent, Ezra Buzzington, Sophia Myles, Matt Keeslar, Anjelica Huston, Steve Buscemi, Adam Scott, Nick Swardson, Paul Collins, Roxanne Hart
Director: Terry Zwigoff
Director: Terry Zwigoff
Screenwriter: Daniel Clowes
Producer: Russell Smith, Daniel Clowes
Studio: Sony Pictures Classics
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Reviews for Art School Confidential
The film loses its way with multiple subplots, becoming a hodgepodge that isn't particularly hard to follow, but, far worse, provides no compelling reason to bother.
Zwigoff's angry exposé of this intense, tiny subculture isn't fair to anyone in the art world, but if you can stomach the overstatement, it's often scathingly funny. And it's sometimes scathingly smart.
What keeps the film from being altogether snide and smug are the well-intentioned performances.
By the end, it feels as if Zwigoff and Clowes skimmed through a sketchbook without figuring out how to make a fully realized painting, a task that might have mattered less had the movie been either thematically more ambitious or more consistently funny.
There's not a single person to like in Art School Confidential, a crucial mistake in a movie filled with mean, shallow and self-absorbed characters.
Simply runs out of things to do once it establishes its ground rules of defining stereotypes and mocking pretension.
There is something in the Zwigoffian universe that values such characters [as Jimmy]; having abandoned all illusions, they offer the possibility of truth. I also much enjoyed Broadway Bob.
Even if one disagrees with some of its points, as I do, it offers plenty to mull over.
It becomes the sort of thing Zwigoff usually holds in contempt, and how depressing is that?
Enjoyable and reprises the same dyspeptic attitude that infused Ghost World, but ultimately it lacks its predecessor's originality and humanity.
It's pleasant enough, features fine acting in smaller parts, rises occasionally to laughs or plot, but its ambitions and its accomplishments are modest.
Against this atmospheric background the characters have the depth of stick figures.
Proposes to paint a black comedy, but instead has the outsize ears and lopsided, leering grin of bad caricature.
It's a ruckus, veering from one picaresque episode to the next in its eagerness to debunk Hollywood clichés and art world stereotypes, but I prefer untidy novelty to paint-by-numbers storytelling any day.
Risks more highs and lows than the plaintive, even-toned Ghost World. But both, improbably, have made themselves more or less at home on screen.
It's often as naive as it is knowing and can feel as unfocused and sketchy as a film one of Strathmore's students might make.
In handing such a major role to such an untested actor (he's the son of film director Anthony Minghella), Zwigoff takes a risk that ultimately doesn't pay off.
Every teacher is a burn-out, every student is a fraud and experimental artists are the worst burn-outs and frauds of all.
Jerome eventually learns that talent has nothing to do with the success he craves - and, sadly, talented filmmakers and actors don't add up to much in Art School Confidential.
Latest News for Art School Confidential
September 14, 2007:
Zwigoff, Clowes to Assemble $40,000 Man
The creative duo responsible for Ghost World and Art School Confidential has found its next project. More...
August 27, 2007:
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