Film School Confidential

Starring:Various
Studio: Tapeworm
Product Type: DVD

Average customer rating:

Speaking Truth to Poseurs
The cast carries you through....
THE HUMOR OF PLAGIARISM
Interesting Dark Comedy With A Few Surprises
Just Like Anything Pablo Picasso Ever Painted

Art School Confidential
Starring: Max Minghella , Sophia Myles , John Malkovich , Jim Broadbent , and Matt Keeslar
Director: Terry Zwigoff
Manufacturer: Sony Pictures
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

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ASIN: B000H6SXSI
Release Date: 2006-10-10

Amazon.com

Bitter, misanthropic, yet sometimes blisteringly funny, Art School Confidential is not a movie for everyone. Jerome (Max Minghella, Bee Season) goes to art school in the hopes of having his genuine ability recognized and cherished--but instead, finds his teachers to be self-obsessed has-beens, his peers jaded and floundering, and himself being investigated for a series of gruesome stranglings. He becomes obsessed with a lovely student named Audrey (Sophia Myles, Tristan and Isolde), but she's more interested in hunky Jonah (Matt Keeslar, Splendor), whose crude yet acclaimed paintings of cars and tanks make Jerome want to tear his own eyes out. The crime-thriller plot of Art School Confidential, however, is merely a contrivance to string together a series of caustic digs at the shallow, narcissistic, talentless hacks who go to art school in the vain hope of achieving fame, wealth, and sexual abundance with little or no effort. For most viewers, who want to think that people are largely well-intentioned and decent, this will seem snide and cruel; but for some viewers, who believe people are foolish and blinkered, Art School Confidential will seem like an oasis in the arid desert of lies and propaganda about the good side of human nature. If this is your movie, you know who you are, and I encourage you to seek it out as soon as possible. Directed by Terry Zwigoff (Bad Santa) and based on the work of cartoonist Dan Clowes; their previous collaboration was the much warmer Ghost World. Also featuring sharp turns from John Malkovich (Being John Malkovich), Anjelica Huston (Prizzi's Honor), and Jim Broadbent (Moulin Rouge!). --Bret Fetzer

Sony

"Art School Confidential" follows 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. Neither his harsh judgments of his classmates' efforts nor 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 attention 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.

Customer Reviews:

Speaking Truth to Poseurs.......2007-05-21

What does a true artist live for, deep in his soul?

Jerome Platz, artist in training, desperately wants to know. Jimmy, his mentor and drinking buddy, has the answer: "He lives only for that moment of narcotic bliss that only comes every decade, or once in a lifetime...perhaps, never at all."
But the aging Jimmy--in a dour, virtuoso performance by British character actor Jim Broadbent--has 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.

In this follow-up to their excellent 2001 sleeper Ghost World, director Terry Zwigoff and screenwriter Daniel Clowes (whose script for Art School Confidential is based on a feature from his comic book series, "Eightball") follow Jerome's ambitions and letdowns as a freshman art student. It's a riotously dead-on satire that paints a contemptuous portrait of modern art pretensions.

Played with quiet determination by Max Minghella, Jerome is a shy, but very passionate boy who worships Picasso and aspires to become "the greatest artist of the twenty-first century." Arriving at the venerable Strathmore Art Institute (modeled after Clowes's alma mater, Brooklyn's Pratt Institute), Jerome naïvely believes that all he must do to attain his dream is to hone his native talents, find his individual aesthetic style, and--voila!--his work will capture an eager audience among the tastemakers and trendsetters of the New York gallery scene.

But, he soon finds out--in a series of soul-crushing blows--that talent and vision don't count nearly as much as creating insipidly empty pieces and latching onto the latest trite "gimmick." Here, the movie hits its comedic stride, lampooning every bad art cliché. Jerome's classes are peopled with a host of "rebel" caricatures: the manic-depressive beatnik chick; the "Vegan Holy Man" white Rastafarian; the shock "performance artist"; the sycophantic chameleon; and the blowhard who brags, in circular poststructuralese, that his inept art projects "have nothing to do with form or texture or color; they're a conscious rejection of spatial dimensions...They're more about the intimacy of the artistic process."

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's too young to be so rigid as to have a style: he should experiment with all genres and media. So when Jerome follows the advice, working wildly divergent styles into his final project, he gets back the saboteur prof's written critique: "Too experimental. Hollow and derivative. You need to be yourself."

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.

The scene that intimately acquaints the viewer with Audrey, as she disrobes to model before Jerome's drawing class, is the most sensuously evocative and graceful grand entrance I've seen since Kim Novak's in Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958). Jerome is captivated as she slowly reveals her nude body: Set to the string introduction from the adagio movement of Beethoven's "Emperor" Concerto, the music evinces Jerome's inner emotions for Audrey--not 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 could be--a real-life Venus de Milo (which, if you've seen Sophia Myles, is not that far a stretch).

Sadly, Audrey resists Jerome's awkward advances. Dejected by unrequited love, he realizes that he must be content to love only the idea of her.

At this point, a subplot about a serial strangler terrorizing the Strathmore campus takes over. Almost every review I've seen pans the subplot as gratuitous, or as running out of steam. I think they miss the method in Clowes's and Zwigoff's madness. As a plot device, it works perfectly in driving home the film's message: The "fine arts" 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...in the Kafkaesque world of a prison, where he is locked up for crimes he didn't commit.

What is intended as an 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--their lips partitioned by the wire-reinforced glass of a booth in the prison's visiting area, to the strains of the Emperor's Adagio. To 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.

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's art. Art School Confidential is The Fountainhead meets Catcher in the Rye, realized by Mel Brooks. Bitingly it drives home its theme that, in today's public arena of the absurd--where "controversial" artists vie to out-shock each other--beauty is truly the most controversial message of all.

The cast carries you through...........2007-05-17

An overall mediocre movie, I purchased it originally because I'm a John Malkovich sucker... and he mostly delivers. Worth watching.

THE HUMOR OF PLAGIARISM.......2007-04-27

"Art School Confidential" is an engaging film that provides some unintended humor. The movie identifies 13 musical items from sources other than "Composer" David Kitay. Yet, throughout the movie, the second movement of Beethoven's Fifth Piano Concerto appears repeatedly and effecvtively. Despite this, no acknowledgment of the music's source in Beethoven appears at all. In fact, in the accompanying "Sundance Featurette" so-called "composer" David Kitay speaks to the audience with Beethoven's music in the background. Again no acknowledgment of the source of the "composition" appears. The music is so close to Beethoven's original as to be virtually indistinguishable from its source. What is involved here is, first of all, a case of musical [...], and, secondly, an assumption of colossal ignorance on the part of the audience. Mr. Kitay needs the honesty to acknowledge his sources or at least the basic savvy not to "borrow" from something as familiar as this. A highschool kid would have covered his tracks much more cleverly. By the way, don't expect any acknowledgment of this from the Sundance Festival if you bring it to their attention.

Interesting Dark Comedy With A Few Surprises.......2007-03-18

It tooke me a while, but I finally got around to seeing this movie, and it is pretty good. Funny with a lot of satire and an odd sub theme that ends up playing it's way out in the end. Jerome is a suburban kid who has always been different and picked on. He grew over the years to love art, and became good. He finds a brocure for an art college, and gets the chance to go and be amongst people who may actually finally appreciate him. Well, that's what he thought, but the more he tries, the more things come apart. Rent this movie, the acting is pretty good, the story is original, and the ending, well you have to see. Worth purchasing if you have to.

Just Like Anything Pablo Picasso Ever Painted.......2007-01-30

The first thing that came to my so called mind after the completion of this film was, "What was Terry Zwigoff thinking?" He is responsible for the documentary of Robert Crumb entitled `Crumb', which was one of the better films made in the last two decades. `Bad Santa' was a very big surprise as well, so I am caught scratching my head as to why he decided this particular script and/or subject matter was worth making a feature presentation over.

For starters, people who are serious artists and who over-emphasize the importance of their craft are the most annoying people on the planet. I can say that because I went through a department with this type of person. They are self indulged and think so highly of what they're trying to say that it irritates me just thinking about it. The fact is...they have nothing to say and what they are doing has very little significance to people who actually have talent (ie, those of us who don't need to "say" anything).

If Zwigoff focused on this and made a mockery of the entire `art-scene', that might be enough to make a entertaining film, but there isn't enough in here, really.

`Art School Confidential' gets too boggled down in a courtship where the main kid seemingly finds his first infatuation in a figure model at school. The two of them are so uninteresting that it made me yearn for some art school-critique talk from some of the hippies in the film.

It tried too hard to go over the top with some of it's jokes (male models walking up to female students where her eye level is at his pelvis level, the obnoxious roommate who offers nothing but `can I smell your finger' quirks).

It would have been nice if the story actually followed this student, who knew he was better than everyone else (and he was), ridicule the rest of the students who had absolutely nothing to offer the world (which is, essentially, about 98% of all "artists").

Instead it turns into your standard, boy tries to impress girl by stealing someone else's artwork who just happens to be a serial killer story. Wrong direction. There are/were too many opportunities to make fun of these types passed up for something that's been overdone way too many times. Terry should have known better!

There is a very entertaining Thanksgiving Dinner scene, which was worth two stars from me. The overbearing female who takes her artwork way too seriously even though it's complete trash was also amusing, so that earns two stars.

Just not enough irritating art-scene comedy in here to recommend it at all.

Average customer rating:

More of a Juvenile Delinquent film than a Rock and Roll Film
A Wonderful Movie
"You're draggin' your rear axle in waltz time"
Some things never change . . .
The movie with the best opening credits and the birth of rap

High School Confidential
Starring: Russ Tamblyn , Jan Sterling , John Drew Barrymore , Mamie Van Doren , and Diane Jergens
Director: Jack Arnold
Manufacturer: Republic Pictures
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

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ASIN: B0002235LM
Release Date: 2004-06-15

Amazon.com

Is it a serious look at drug addiction and the "narcotics problem," or is it pure exploitation? Well, High School Confidential opens up with Jerry Lee Lewis rolling into town on a flatbed truck, pummeling an upright piano as he bellows one of his hits, so that should tell you something right off. Eminently slappable punk Russ Tamblyn enrolls at the local high school and immediately starts to hit on the teacher (Jan Sterling). Soon he proves that he's even cooler than jive-talking king daddy-o John Drew Barrymore (Drew's dad), and is getting acquainted with the local dope peddler (Jackie Coogan). Never mind that Barrymore should be able to pick him up over his head and throw him; Tamblyn has a switchblade at the ready should trouble break out. At home, he's constantly fending off the amorous advances of his "aunt," Mamie Van Doren. Of course, Russ's character is a narc, sent undercover to infiltrate the school dope ring. High School Confidential's cast includes Lyle Talbot, Michael Landon and famous offspring William Wellman Jr., and Charlie Chaplin Jr. Fifties teen movies (and drug-hysteria movies) just don't come any better than this; simultaneously absurd, exciting, and hilarious. --Jerry Renshaw

Product Description

Tony Baker (Russ Tamblyn) is the tough-talking king of the hot-rodders at Santo Bello High School. The queen of his heart is beautiful Joan Staples (Diane Jergens), a well meaning but naive girl. She gives him the attention he never had at home, where he lives with his flamboyant "aunt". But when the local crime syndicate muscles its way into the scene, these two hot young lovers find themselves on a star-crossed path that only a caring school teacher can change.

System Requirements:

Running Time 85 Min

Format: DVD MOVIE

Customer Reviews:

More of a Juvenile Delinquent film than a Rock and Roll Film.......2007-01-07

High School Confidential has misleading advertisements. When I saw the film, I thought it was going to be a semi-rock and roll film co-starring Jerry Lee Lewis (his name is actually in the credits). However, he only comes out during the opening credits singing one song.

The story is actually more in line with the 1950s juvenile delinquent films than the rock and roll films. I'm not saying that this is a bad thing because the film actually has a better plot than most rock and roll films. It just appears to be advertised as a rock and roll film.

That said, the film has a great storyline, but is overshadowed by beatnik talk and mentality (are beatniks really tough while reciting poetry?). It's great nonetheless.

A Wonderful Movie.......2006-05-31

This is a very good movie. In fact, it is extremely well done all around. The acting was very effective and convincing. Russ Tamblyn is excellent. I particularly liked the cinematography. Also, the script worked on many levels making it appealing to a wide audience. I found this film to be both entertaining and thought provoking.

"You're draggin' your rear axle in waltz time".......2006-03-09

I LOVE High School Confidential. I find it to be campy, yet very well made. I think the acting is good, the action scenes are exciting and I was genuinely surprised by the plot twist. And the dialog, dripping with 1950's hep-talk, is the most daddio!

Unfortunately this dvd is very bare bones, without even the theatrical trailer which was included on the laserdisc edition. But on the plus side it's in widescreen (as a previous reviewer noted, the box incorrectly indicates that it's full screen.)

When I think of Russ Tamblyn, I don't think of West Side Story, I think of High School Confidential. (I also think of Dracula vs. Frankenstein, but that's another story.)

Some things never change . . ........2005-07-16

I teach the history of pop music at the college level and I'm always looking for source material. It's hard to beat the mid to late 50s movies featuring teen angst and early rock and roll. It's interesting to me that we still have similar issues with drugs, home life, teenage behavior, etc. When I talk about the 50s in my class, I often show clips from these types of movies. This movie is not so much about the music (like "Don't Knock the Rock," or "Rock Around the Clock") but more of a period piece similar to "Blackboard Jungle." I gave it a 5 because it takes me back to that time better than most movies made in the 50s.

The movie with the best opening credits and the birth of rap.......2005-05-25

Believe or not but in this movie I just love to see over and over again the opening credits. And I am sure that everybody that sees this movie, will agree with me. Another outstanding thing is that if you think that rap music was invented and started in the 90's, you must check out this lady from the 50's. Now, the rest of the movie is a very serious drama. A drama that made me laugh throughout the movie like if it was a comedy. Is this a funny drama?, I don't know but if you give it a chance you'll know what I mean. And about the dvd, I was dissapointed to read that it was in "full screen", but when I saw it I couldn't be more happy to see that it was a mistake and it was in widescreen as it should (too bad it was mono). And too bad that in those days the credits at the end were so short. It would've been great to see Jerry do the whole "high school confidential" again, or maybe "great balls of fire". I gave it a 5 for the credits, 4 for the rap song and 0 for the rest, my total is 3.

Average customer rating:

Student Confidential
Starring: Ronee Blakely , Sarina Grant , Marlon Jackson , Kip King , and John Milford
Director: Richard Horian
Manufacturer: TROMA ENTERTAINMENT INC.
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

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