Our hero, Jerome, is a wimpy kid from the suburbs who gets bullied because he\u2019s artistic. This poor loser doesn\u2019t know how to capitalize on his only asset. What he does know is that artists get a lot of sex, so he wants to be one. Can you see where we\u2019re going here? I thought you could.<\/div>\n

The story isn\u2019t very long, but it benefits from abbreviation. Jerome goes to an art school called Strathmore Institute and falls in love with the life class model, whose father happens to be a famous artist. She becomes his entr\u00e9e into the professional art world, which as you might expect is populated by pompous, arrogant, venal manipulators. That also describes Jerome\u2019s fellow\u00a0 students–all except one, who turns out to be an undercover cop.<\/p>\n

What the heck is he doing at Strathmore? He\u2019s investigating a series of stranglings on the Strathmore campus, an improbable ivied enclave modeled on Brooklyn\u2019s Pratt Institute but transplanted to SoHo. If this feels phony, that\u2019s because it is–the film was shot in and around Los Angeles, and looks like something cobbled together on the back lot.\u00a0 In class, the students trot out every known theoretical platitude, defensive put-down and jealous innuendo, while their professor–played with his trademark predatory cynicism by John Malkovich–struggles to salvage the wreckage of his own failed artistic ambitions.<\/p>\n

The tedium is briefly relieved by Jerome\u2019s visit to an even more pathetic failure, a former Strathmore student who is such a disgustingly abject role model that you wonder why Jerome doesn\u2019t immediately drop out and join the Army. By a marvelous coincidence, this fellow just happens to be the strangler, and of course he paints pictures of his victims. Jerome steals the paintings and passes them off as his own, thereby becoming the chief suspect in the murders. And wouldn\u2019t you know it, his subsequent notoriety makes him a hot property in the art market. Go directly to jail, and you get a waiting list of buyers. Well I\u2019ll be darned–so that\u2019s how you do it.<\/p>\n

I think \u201cArt School Confidential\u201d is supposed to be a satire, but the screen writer, Daniel Cowles, is no Voltaire. The humor, what there is of it, is as broad and forced as vaudeville, and just as dated. Max Minghella does a workmanlike job of depicting Jerome as an ambitious but essentially spineless nebbish who never does get the sex he craves. Nor can he paint like the artist whose work he stole. So what will happen to him when he has to produce his own paintings? Well, as Andy Warhol might say, his fifteen minutes will be up.<\/p>\n

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For \u201cIn the Morning,\u201d I\u2019m Helen Harrison.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n