Two Relative Disappointments

Art School Confidential

Terry Zwigoff makes comedies set in the places he'd least like to go. A bland faceless flat cityscape populated exclusively by billboards and convenience stores. A mall on Christmas Eve. Art school. Bitter and cynical though they may be, Ghost World and Bad Santa work by inviting the audience inside the perspective of a mean-spirited misanthrope who spends his time judging the bulk of humanity. Perhaps we can only laugh at our faults when they projected on to fictional characters.

Art School Confidential doesn't really change much of this formula, yet those other two films are funny and it is not. The only real difference I could see, in terms of storytelling or stlye, was the total absence of a sympathetic "above the fray" character. Ghost World had two - Thora Birch's Enid and Steve Buscemi's Seymour. That film's bittersweet conclusion comes when Seymour gives up his cranky outsiderism and agrees to conform, while Enid escapes into the unknown. Bad Santa had one - Billy Bob Thornton's boozy criminal, the only person throughout the film who truly has his priorities straight.

Everyone in Art School Confidential is a lame, self-obsessed, pathetic poseur. In order to prepare students for the hideously superficial, navel-gazing and juvenile world of professional artists, Zwigoff seems to argue, Art School itself teaches meaningless platitudes while praising that which is easy and popular. Rather than viewing the urge to conform from an outsider's perspectivge, Zwigoff and Ghost World screenwriter Daniel Clowes step right into the midst of a swirling ego vortex so dense, no matter could ever possibly escape its grasp.



Writing a comedy with next to no plot, populated exclusively by the hateful and stupid, is no easy task, and Clowes can't really keep it going on the strength of his mild, unsurprising observations about campus life. (Alexander Payne pretty much does it in Election, although Matthew Broderick's character is still sympathetic despite his awkward scumminess and misplaced anger). There just aren't enough jokes to make it worth sitting through all the bile.

Strathmore Academy invites its most celebrated recent graduate, Marvin Bushmiller (Adam Scott), to speak on campus about his success. "The only thing you have to do to be a great artist," he explains, "is to be a great artist." Making art is all about getting paid lots of money just to be yourself, apparently, which would then make enrolling a school to teach you about art a hopelessly misguided experiment in futility. If being an artist is about being yourself, then learning how to imitate other artists is inherently self-defeating.

Naive incoming freshman Jerome Platz (Max Minghella) really takes this advice to heart, abandoning his hopes of being the Greatest Artist of the 21st Century and focusing on the more narrow and achievable goal of having hot sex with the beautiful model from his drawing class (Sophia Myles).

Clowes and Zwigoff get off the predicable jabs at smug art student types, but the targets are all pretty obvious and most of the jokes come off as kind of easy and straight-forward. (It's kind of amusing to open a film with a barefoot hippie chick stepping on a broken bottle, but also a little cheap for the first actual joke in the film.) A lot of the writing is, and it pains me to say this, just kind of lazy.

Jerome tends to just sit down next to people who then pontificate for the viewer at home's benefit, "explaining" all the facets of art school that we may not be able to appreciate from the comfort of our couches. Matt Keesler's role as the hapless stoner Jonah is particularly expository. He exists in the film solely to to inform us about the various types of art school students and why they are all insane.

A few other supporting characters fare a bit better. Jim Broadbent has two great scenes as a former Strathmore student who now lives in abject drunken poverty across town. Zwigoff wastes John Malkovich in an underwritten role as a shallow instructor, who withholds priase from his students because his own work (triangles!) languishes without praise.

Several scenes indicate that he's going to make a sexual advance on Jerome, but this never actually happens and the whole character eventually fades into the background. Everything in the movie, really, is set aside in the third act to make way for a tacked-on subplot about a serial murderer stalking the students of Strathmore. It works out in a clever, if predictable, manner, but doesn't really fit in with the rest of the movie, which has been more like Porky's with easels.

Prairie Home Companion

DEAR GOD MAKE IT STOP!



Robert Altman's still such a vital, creative force in filmmaking, it's easy to forget that he's also a really, really old man. But only a guy who's knocking around that 80 year old mark would be attracted to Prairie Home Companion, a tribute to Garrison Keillor's Po-Mo hick radio show about the fictional town of Lake Wobegon and the moderately amusing weirdos therein.

This is more Garrison Keillor's show than Altman's anyway. Keillor wrote the movie, based on the long-running Public Radio show he's been taping live in Minnesota since the '70s, plus he appears in pretty much every scene. He sings a lot, which is something I didn't realize that he did, and also didn't need to see for near 2 hours straight.

A quick primer: The radio show "Prairie Home Companion" is a put-on. Keillor plays a variety of bumpkin characters, as well as himself, and narrates made-up stories about the made-up town of Lake Wobegon. He also makes up fake "silly" commercials for products like Roo-be-doop Rhubarb Pie. (Seriously.)

The movie, set on the night of the (fictitious) last PHC broadcast, casts BIG HOLLYWOOD STARS as all of Keillor's characters. Woody Harrelson and John C. Reilly portray singing cowboys Dusty and Lefty (oh Lord), who do sub-"Hee Haw" sketches and sing (I swear to God) "Git Along Little Doggies." Kevin Kline narrates as Keillor's private eye character Guy Noir, who spends the night searching the theater for a mysterious lady in white played by Virginia Madsen. Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin are the singing Johnson Sisters, who bring along Streep's suicide-obsessed poet daughter (Lindsay Lohan).

I guess it's all supposed to be nostalgic and funny, but it plays more like a lame vaudeville routine than an urbane, witty Altman film. Keillor's got a very dry sense of humor - so much so that, often, his "amusing" anecdotes just sound like tossed-off and ridiculous little stories. He does a bit about finding a nude man hanging from a kite that keeps seeming like it's about to hit a punchline but never does. The joke is just that the concept of a naked man hanging from a kite is kind of funny, and would certainly be a funny thing to mention on the radio. Also, I guess, that Keillor deadpans the story and pretends that it's true.

It might work as a short film, I guess, or a retrospective made exclusively for long-time fans of the television show. As a feature, it's like being told a long inside joke. I don't know the show, so I didn't get the references, and the bits and pieces that I could catch were just lame and folksy. Take the Lohan character (added to the film late because the studio insisted a part be found for the eager young actress). She's a disgruntled teen, she's disaffected because of having to travel around with her dumb singing mother and aunt...So of course she writes poems about committing suicide. It's just so obvious. Would it have killed Keillor to take it in another direction? Maybe she writes poems about...I don't know, ANYTHING ELSE?

I know, I know...This movie isn't designed with me in mind. It's for old people, who actually remember radio variety shows of the kind that PHC imitates. They'll hear Keillor's goofy fake commercial for biscuit powder and recall actual biscuit powder commercials and feel all misty for a second, and I guess I can't begrudge them that. Maybe when I'm an old fart, I'll find movies hazily recollecting the glory days of the Howard Stern Show appealing.

But, Altman's typically acute technical sensibilities aside, this is a movie for Keillor fans EXCLUSIVELY. I found it an altogether painful experience.