![\"Sophia](\"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/artschoolconfidential.jpg\" "\\"artschoolconfidential\\"")
Sophia Myles is the girl of Max Minghella's dreams in "Art School Confidential"<\/p><\/div>\n
Speaking Truth to Poseurs<\/span><\/em><\/h1>\n[xrr rating=3.5\/5]<\/p>\n
Art School Confidential<\/em>. Starring Max Minghella, Sophia Myles, John Malkovich, Matt Keeslar, Jim Broadbent, Joel David Moore, and Anjelica Huston. Screenplay by Daniel Clowes.\u00a0Directed by Terry Zwigoff. (United Artists\/Sony Pictures Classics, 2006, Color, 102 min. MPAA Rating: R).<\/strong><\/p>\nWhat does a true artist live for, deep in his soul?<\/p>\n
Jerome Platz, artist in training, desperately wants to know. Jimmy, his mentor and drinking buddy, has the answer: \u201cHe lives only for that moment of narcotic bliss that only comes every decade, or once in a lifetime\u2026perhaps, never at all.\u201d<\/p>\n
But the aging Jimmy\u2014in a dour, virtuoso performance by British character actor Jim Broadbent\u2014has extinguished his divine spark long ago, in a paper coffee cup of Slivovitz liquor. He is but one of many casualties strewn along the path of the cruel and unscrupulous world of postmodern art.<\/p>\n
In this follow-up to their excellent 2001 sleeper\u00a0Ghost World<\/em>,\u00a0director Terry Zwigoff and screenwriter Daniel Clowes (whose script for\u00a0Art School Confidential\u00a0<\/em>is based on a feature from his comic book series, \u201cEightball\u201d) follow Jerome\u2019s ambitions and letdowns as a freshman art student.\u00a0<\/em>It\u2019s a\u00a0riotously dead-on satire that paints a contemptuous portrait of modern art pretensions.<\/p>\nPlayed with quiet determination by Max Minghella, Jerome is a shy, but very passionate boy who worships Picasso and aspires to become \u201cthe greatest artist of the twenty-first century.\u201d Arriving at the venerable Strathmore Art Institute (modeled after Clowes\u2019s\u00a0alma mater<\/em>, Brooklyn\u2019s Pratt Institute), Jerome na\u00efvely believes that all he must do to attain his dream is to hone his native talents, find his individual aesthetic style, and\u2014voila!\u2014his work will capture an eager audience among the tastemakers and trendsetters of the New York gallery scene.<\/p>\nBut, he soon finds out\u2014in a series of soul-crushing blows\u2014that talent and vision don\u2019t count nearly as much as creating insipidly empty pieces and latching onto the latest trite \u201cgimmick.\u201d Here, the movie hits its comedic stride, lampooning every bad art clich\u00e9. Jerome\u2019s classes are peopled with a host of \u201crebel\u201d caricatures: the manic-depressive beatnik chick; the \u201cVegan Holy Man\u201d white Rastafarian; the shock \u201cperformance artist\u201d; the sycophantic chameleon; and the blowhard who brags, in circular poststructuralese, that his inept art projects \u201chave nothing to do with form or texture or color; they\u2019re a conscious rejection of spatial dimensions\u2026They\u2019re more about the intimacy of the artistic\u00a0process.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\nHis professors fare hardly better. Most are burnouts, and his drawing instructor, Professor Sandiford (played with a patronizing smirk by John Malkovich), is more concerned with his own exhibition career than in guiding students. When Jerome goes to him for help in seeking a vision, Sandiford tells him he\u2019s too young to be so rigid as to have a style: he should experiment with\u00a0all<\/em>\u00a0genres and media. So when Jerome follows the advice, working wildly divergent styles into his final project, he gets back the saboteur prof\u2019s written critique: \u201cToo experimental. Hollow and derivative. You need to be yourself.\u201d<\/p>\nJerome finds kinship only in a fellow student who keeps dropping in and out of classes (Joel David Moore), and in an art history teacher sympathetic to his predicament (Anjelica Huston). But the nascent artist discovers his true inspiration in Audrey (Sophia Myles), whose ethereal beauty and demure calm enthrall him.<\/p>\n
The scene that intimately acquaints the viewer with Audrey, as she disrobes to model before Jerome\u2019s drawing class, is the most sensuously evocative and graceful grand entrance I\u2019ve seen since Kim Novak\u2019s in Alfred Hitchcock\u2019s\u00a0Vertigo\u00a0<\/em>(1958). Jerome is captivated as she slowly reveals her nude body: Set to the string introduction from the\u00a0adagio<\/em>\u00a0movement of Beethoven\u2019s \u201cEmperor\u201d Concerto, the music evinces Jerome\u2019s inner emotions for Audrey\u2014not only sexually, but as the fulfillment of his quest for an ideal muse. Desirous of her, but also in love with her classical beauty, Jerome sees the otherworldly Audrey as she\u00a0could<\/em>\u00a0be\u2014a real-life\u00a0Venus de Milo\u00a0<\/em>(which, if you\u2019ve seen Sophia Myles, is not that far a stretch).<\/p>\nSadly, Audrey resists Jerome\u2019s awkward advances. Dejected by unrequited love, he realizes that he must be content to love only the\u00a0idea<\/em>\u00a0of her.<\/p>\nAt this point, a subplot about a serial strangler terrorizing the Strathmore campus takes over. Almost every review I\u2019ve seen pans the subplot as gratuitous, or as running out of steam. I think they miss the method in Clowes\u2019s and Zwigoff\u2019s madness. As a plot device, it works perfectly in driving home the film\u2019s message: The \u201cfine arts\u201d wasteland is so corrupt that the only way for Jerome to get his big break is to take the rap for the murders. Thus, through exploiting the biggest gimmick of all, Jerome finally is free to paint his ideal projects\u2026in the Kafkaesque world of a prison, where he is locked up for crimes he didn\u2019t commit.<\/p>\n
What is\u00a0intended as\u00a0an essentially happy ending demonstrates a fundamentally bleak worldview. Audrey, having seen the error in her fickleness, finally commits to Jerome. In an understated closing shot, the two lovers at last engage in a passionate kiss\u2014their lips partitioned by the wire-reinforced glass of a booth in the prison\u2019s visiting area, to the strains of the Emperor\u2019s\u00a0Adagio.<\/em>\u00a0To Jerome, their passion still remains not fully realized, his Audrey still not fully within reach. The message is that artistic success and love are indeed attainable, but only by alienating oneself from the larger world.<\/p>\nThis fatalism aside, however, the film is a spot-on satire in its scathing indictment of the backbiting, pettiness, haughty elitism, and sham that is today\u2019s art.\u00a0Art School Confidential<\/em>\u00a0is\u00a0The Fountainhead<\/em>\u00a0meets\u00a0Catcher in the Rye<\/em>, realized by Mel Brooks. Bitingly it drives home its theme that, in today\u2019s public arena of the absurd\u2014where \u201ccontroversial\u201d artists vie to out-shock each other\u2014beauty<\/em>\u00a0is truly the most controversial message of all.<\/p>\nRobert L. Jones is a photojournalist living and working in Minnesota. His work has appeared in\u00a0<\/span>Black & White Magazine<\/span><\/span>,\u00a0<\/span>Entrepreneur<\/span><\/span>,\u00a0<\/span>Hoy! New York<\/span><\/span>, the New York\u00a0<\/span>Post<\/span><\/span>,\u00a0<\/span><\/em>RCA Victor\u00a0<\/span>(Japan)<\/span><\/em>,\u00a0<\/span>Scene in San Antonio<\/span><\/span>,\u00a0<\/span>Spirit Magazine<\/span><\/span>\u00a0(Canada),\u00a0<\/span>Top Producer<\/span><\/span>,\u00a0 and the Trenton\u00a0<\/span>Times<\/span><\/span>. Mr. Jones is a past entertainment editor of\u00a0<\/span>The New Individualist<\/span><\/span>.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u00a0 Speaking Truth to Poseurs [xrr rating=3.5\/5] Art School Confidential. Starring Max Minghella, Sophia Myles, John Malkovich, Matt Keeslar, Jim Broadbent, Joel David Moore, and Anjelica Huston. Screenplay by Daniel Clowes.\u00a0Directed by Terry Zwigoff. (United Artists\/Sony Pictures Classics, 2006, Color, 102 min. MPAA Rating: R). What does a true artist live for, deep in his […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39,38,52,37,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-371","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-black-comedies","category-comedies","category-graphic-novel-adaptations","category-independent-films","category-mreview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/371","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=371"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/371\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":525,"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/371\/revisions\/525"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=371"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=371"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=371"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
What does a true artist live for, deep in his soul?<\/p>\n
Jerome Platz, artist in training, desperately wants to know. Jimmy, his mentor and drinking buddy, has the answer: \u201cHe lives only for that moment of narcotic bliss that only comes every decade, or once in a lifetime\u2026perhaps, never at all.\u201d<\/p>\n
But the aging Jimmy\u2014in a dour, virtuoso performance by British character actor Jim Broadbent\u2014has extinguished his divine spark long ago, in a paper coffee cup of Slivovitz liquor. He is but one of many casualties strewn along the path of the cruel and unscrupulous world of postmodern art.<\/p>\n
In this follow-up to their excellent 2001 sleeper\u00a0Ghost World<\/em>,\u00a0director Terry Zwigoff and screenwriter Daniel Clowes (whose script for\u00a0Art School Confidential\u00a0<\/em>is based on a feature from his comic book series, \u201cEightball\u201d) follow Jerome\u2019s ambitions and letdowns as a freshman art student.\u00a0<\/em>It\u2019s a\u00a0riotously dead-on satire that paints a contemptuous portrait of modern art pretensions.<\/p>\n Played with quiet determination by Max Minghella, Jerome is a shy, but very passionate boy who worships Picasso and aspires to become \u201cthe greatest artist of the twenty-first century.\u201d Arriving at the venerable Strathmore Art Institute (modeled after Clowes\u2019s\u00a0alma mater<\/em>, Brooklyn\u2019s Pratt Institute), Jerome na\u00efvely believes that all he must do to attain his dream is to hone his native talents, find his individual aesthetic style, and\u2014voila!\u2014his work will capture an eager audience among the tastemakers and trendsetters of the New York gallery scene.<\/p>\n But, he soon finds out\u2014in a series of soul-crushing blows\u2014that talent and vision don\u2019t count nearly as much as creating insipidly empty pieces and latching onto the latest trite \u201cgimmick.\u201d Here, the movie hits its comedic stride, lampooning every bad art clich\u00e9. Jerome\u2019s classes are peopled with a host of \u201crebel\u201d caricatures: the manic-depressive beatnik chick; the \u201cVegan Holy Man\u201d white Rastafarian; the shock \u201cperformance artist\u201d; the sycophantic chameleon; and the blowhard who brags, in circular poststructuralese, that his inept art projects \u201chave nothing to do with form or texture or color; they\u2019re a conscious rejection of spatial dimensions\u2026They\u2019re more about the intimacy of the artistic\u00a0process.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n His professors fare hardly better. Most are burnouts, and his drawing instructor, Professor Sandiford (played with a patronizing smirk by John Malkovich), is more concerned with his own exhibition career than in guiding students. When Jerome goes to him for help in seeking a vision, Sandiford tells him he\u2019s too young to be so rigid as to have a style: he should experiment with\u00a0all<\/em>\u00a0genres and media. So when Jerome follows the advice, working wildly divergent styles into his final project, he gets back the saboteur prof\u2019s written critique: \u201cToo experimental. Hollow and derivative. You need to be yourself.\u201d<\/p>\n Jerome finds kinship only in a fellow student who keeps dropping in and out of classes (Joel David Moore), and in an art history teacher sympathetic to his predicament (Anjelica Huston). But the nascent artist discovers his true inspiration in Audrey (Sophia Myles), whose ethereal beauty and demure calm enthrall him.<\/p>\n The scene that intimately acquaints the viewer with Audrey, as she disrobes to model before Jerome\u2019s drawing class, is the most sensuously evocative and graceful grand entrance I\u2019ve seen since Kim Novak\u2019s in Alfred Hitchcock\u2019s\u00a0Vertigo\u00a0<\/em>(1958). Jerome is captivated as she slowly reveals her nude body: Set to the string introduction from the\u00a0adagio<\/em>\u00a0movement of Beethoven\u2019s \u201cEmperor\u201d Concerto, the music evinces Jerome\u2019s inner emotions for Audrey\u2014not only sexually, but as the fulfillment of his quest for an ideal muse. Desirous of her, but also in love with her classical beauty, Jerome sees the otherworldly Audrey as she\u00a0could<\/em>\u00a0be\u2014a real-life\u00a0Venus de Milo\u00a0<\/em>(which, if you\u2019ve seen Sophia Myles, is not that far a stretch).<\/p>\n Sadly, Audrey resists Jerome\u2019s awkward advances. Dejected by unrequited love, he realizes that he must be content to love only the\u00a0idea<\/em>\u00a0of her.<\/p>\n At this point, a subplot about a serial strangler terrorizing the Strathmore campus takes over. Almost every review I\u2019ve seen pans the subplot as gratuitous, or as running out of steam. I think they miss the method in Clowes\u2019s and Zwigoff\u2019s madness. As a plot device, it works perfectly in driving home the film\u2019s message: The \u201cfine arts\u201d wasteland is so corrupt that the only way for Jerome to get his big break is to take the rap for the murders. Thus, through exploiting the biggest gimmick of all, Jerome finally is free to paint his ideal projects\u2026in the Kafkaesque world of a prison, where he is locked up for crimes he didn\u2019t commit.<\/p>\n What is\u00a0intended as\u00a0an essentially happy ending demonstrates a fundamentally bleak worldview. Audrey, having seen the error in her fickleness, finally commits to Jerome. In an understated closing shot, the two lovers at last engage in a passionate kiss\u2014their lips partitioned by the wire-reinforced glass of a booth in the prison\u2019s visiting area, to the strains of the Emperor\u2019s\u00a0Adagio.<\/em>\u00a0To Jerome, their passion still remains not fully realized, his Audrey still not fully within reach. The message is that artistic success and love are indeed attainable, but only by alienating oneself from the larger world.<\/p>\n This fatalism aside, however, the film is a spot-on satire in its scathing indictment of the backbiting, pettiness, haughty elitism, and sham that is today\u2019s art.\u00a0Art School Confidential<\/em>\u00a0is\u00a0The Fountainhead<\/em>\u00a0meets\u00a0Catcher in the Rye<\/em>, realized by Mel Brooks. Bitingly it drives home its theme that, in today\u2019s public arena of the absurd\u2014where \u201ccontroversial\u201d artists vie to out-shock each other\u2014beauty<\/em>\u00a0is truly the most controversial message of all.<\/p>\n Robert L. Jones is a photojournalist living and working in Minnesota. His work has appeared in\u00a0<\/span>Black & White Magazine<\/span><\/span>,\u00a0<\/span>Entrepreneur<\/span><\/span>,\u00a0<\/span>Hoy! New York<\/span><\/span>, the New York\u00a0<\/span>Post<\/span><\/span>,\u00a0<\/span><\/em>RCA Victor\u00a0<\/span>(Japan)<\/span><\/em>,\u00a0<\/span>Scene in San Antonio<\/span><\/span>,\u00a0<\/span>Spirit Magazine<\/span><\/span>\u00a0(Canada),\u00a0<\/span>Top Producer<\/span><\/span>,\u00a0 and the Trenton\u00a0<\/span>Times<\/span><\/span>. Mr. Jones is a past entertainment editor of\u00a0<\/span>The New Individualist<\/span><\/span>.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u00a0 Speaking Truth to Poseurs [xrr rating=3.5\/5] Art School Confidential. Starring Max Minghella, Sophia Myles, John Malkovich, Matt Keeslar, Jim Broadbent, Joel David Moore, and Anjelica Huston. Screenplay by Daniel Clowes.\u00a0Directed by Terry Zwigoff. (United Artists\/Sony Pictures Classics, 2006, Color, 102 min. MPAA Rating: R). What does a true artist live for, deep in his […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39,38,52,37,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-371","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-black-comedies","category-comedies","category-graphic-novel-adaptations","category-independent-films","category-mreview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/371","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=371"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/371\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":525,"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/371\/revisions\/525"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=371"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=371"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=371"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}