by SARAH ROWLAND and MARK SLUTSKY

Art School Confidential

Starting out as a very funny four-page story in issue #7 of Daniel Clowes’ brilliant comic book Eightball, Art School Confidential is an elaborated-on adaptation of its forebearer. The original was a glimpse of the absurdity of Clowes’ experience in art school, and the miasma of ambition, pretentiousness and abject failure he witnessed there. It was a series of comic vignettes, and for the movie version, Clowes (who wrote the screenplay) has filled it out with a coming-of-age story and, strangely enough, a murder mystery.

The film’s directed by Terry Zwigoff, whose Ghost World I always felt did a disservice to the Clowes comic it was based on, but whose more recent Bad Santa was a comic masterpiece of sorts (and let’s not forget his great documentary, Crumb). Max Minghella stars as young art student Jerome, who idolizes Picasso and wants to make it big as an artist, primarily to impress girls like Audrey (Sophia Myles), and mentors like the washed-up professor played by John Malkovich. Meanwhile, as the young man tries to figure out love and life as an artist, a mysterious strangler stalks the campus.

There’s simply too much going on at once in this movie—is it an art world parody, a portrait of the artist as a young man, a mystery or just a straight comedy? The character of Jerome is unlikeable and, fatally, not entertaining to watch. But above all, at 102 minutes, the movie has far fewer laughs than the comic, which you can breeze through in five minutes. (MS)

Don’t Come Knocking

If director Wim Wenders and his co-writer Sam Shepard were trying to recapture the brilliance of their 1984 classic Paris, Texas, they’ve failed miserably.

Here, Shepard plays Howard Spence, an ageing movie star—big stretch, guys! Once famous for his Eastwood-ian Westerns, Howard is now infamous for his DUIs, drug busts and paternity suits. But after nearly three decades of debauchery, he wants to find some meaning in his life. This leads him to Butte, Montana in search of the 30-year-old illegit he’s never met.

Once there, he has a series of run-ins with the mother of his child (Jessica Lange). He also has a few explosive meetings with his son Earl (Gabriel Mann) and his girlfriend Amber (Fairuza Balk), who are presumably meant to be the Sid and Nancy of Butte, or maybe the Sailor and Lulu. Either way, there are a few too many contrived Wild at Heart moments with these two, especially when Amber is dancing on a vintage couch in the middle of the road as Earl plays some steely guitar.

The film’s one saving grace is the fact that Lange and Shepard have carnal knowledge of each other in real life and consequently their chemistry gives the otherwise inert script some much needed substance, but it’s still not enough to make Don’t Come Knocking worth the price of admission. (SR)

Délivrez-moi

What’s a woman to do when she’s just been released from prison and wants to regain custody of her estranged daughter? She does a strip-tease for her coke-snorting, carpet munching parole officer—obviously. It’s at this moment that Denis Chouinard’s Délivrez-moi turns into some sort of unrecognizably bad film. Mind you, it’s a bad film from the outset, but in a more traditional, overwrought family drama kind of way.

Annie (Céline Bonnier) is a stereotypically white trash mother with a heart of gold. After serving a 10-year sentence for shooting her abusive husband, she’s on a mission to make up for lost time with her kid Sophie.

Meanwhile, Annie’s pious mother-in-law (Geneviève Bujold) has been doing her best to brainwash Sophie into thinking that Annie killed the wife-beater in cold blood. Knowing her chances of winning back Sophie are slim, Annie lets it be known to her parole officer that she’d do “anything” for a character reference—thus the bizarre and unwarranted private dance.

Bonnier gives a strong performance, but her mullet and hooker garb are too distracting—last I checked, not every victim of domestic violence is of the trailer park variety, so why keep pushing this hackneyed characterization on us? (SR)

All films open Friday, May 12

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