While I had hoped for more from this film, Art School Confidential did what I had hoped - both remind me and parody my early years in college. It made me laugh! Though I did not go to art school per se, the first few years of the design cirriculum overlapped the art program. My first few studio classes - life drawing, art theory, etc., reminded me of this cast of self-righteous students and windy professors.
There were parts of this movie that were too slow, too humorless beneath the surface. More biting parody would've been more interesting to me. The movie got wrapped up in its own adolescent storyline, as if the filmmakers thought suddenly to inject a "serious" plot into an otherwise sketch of a film. Not that I would've preferred no plot, but I wanted it to be smarter, more original. The characters at times were too one dimensional. My memory of art school was that if anything, the people were even more serious, committed, desparite, crazy. More sex and substance abuse. Less squeaky clean. The realities of a group of 20-year-olds each with some sort of god complex.
Still, the movie depicts all the art school usual suspects perfectly, and though they're all stereotypes, I found myself thinking: I knew that guy! Suicidal girl in a black dress, boots, fingernail polish and makeup; nerdy art boy looking to score; hippe throwback dude; overintellectualized art theorist jerk - you can fill in the blanks. John Malkovich plays a crutial role as the burned out art prof, who spent 25 years figuring out that he was destined to paint triangles ("I was among the first," he proclaims).