It’s fairly clear what Terry Zwigoff is getting at with Art School Confidential. He’s taking the typical teen comedy and turning it on its head. He’s critiquing that robust if repetitious ’70s -’80s genre just as much as he is lovingly parodying or honoring it. In other words, if the “annoying and undermining best friend” really is annoying, for example, here he is supposed to be, because that figure always unintentionally is in the teen genre and Zwigoff is exposing that facet of the genre for what it is.

Composed with his collaborator on Ghost World, cartoonist (or graphic novelist) Daniel Clowes, it’s a look into a set of contemporary types which at least have the virtue of being for the most part relatively new. Perhaps Clowes encountered them in art school, and in fact the film is based on a four page plotless piece that appeared in Eightball No. 7 in 1991, but Zwigoff didn’t, and in fact the characters don’t feel “observed,” but rather conjured out of the imagination and consequently thin and one-note. I find certain kinds of satires worrisome because when they fail they call into question the ethics and utility of satire and caricature (and stereotypes) in general. In fact, perhaps the problem is that bad satire turns caricatures into mere stereotypes and thus risk near-racist reductivism.

Art School Confidential also bears some of the other earmarks of autobiographical films. The central character is the reposity of the filmmakers’ sympathy if not identification, but he hasn’t earned it. His name is Jerome Platz (Max Minghella) and though he is inexperienced, naive, and also a rather bad artist, he aspires explicitly to be Picasso. To that end he finds himself in a Manhattan art school surrounded by confident and withering types who despite their varied attire are fundamentally conformists who enjoy group think. Platz yearns to get together with Audrey Baumgarten (Sophia Myles), an art model (and daughter of an artist) who appeared on the cover of the school’s brochure. But she is in love with Jonah (Matt Keeslar). Jonah, though, is an undercover cop, on the hunt for a serial killer who has been assaulting female students. Though a complicated (but not complex) succession of events, Platz plagiarizes art for his thesis show which happen to have been done by the real serial killer (being partially collage art, they contain evidence from the murders). Consequently, Platz is imprisoned, and, of course, in an irony of Flaubertian proportions, at least in aspiration, he finds himself behind bars, but a famous painter.

I wish this had been a better movie. Strangely, modern equivalents of the ’80s teen sex comedy (such as American Pie) are funnier, are better observed, and explore new cultural types better. There is something both strained and hollow about the film’s thesis and its characters. Curiously, it reads better than it plays, at least for those who have come upon the published script (Fantagraphics, 190 pages, $14.95 ISBN 1 56097 678 0). Supplements on this version of the disc (assuming that there are future editions) include a pro forma making-of, footage form the premiere night at Sundance, and no less than 12 deleted scenes, plus outtakes.

Released on the same day but from another distributor, Dimension (i.e., Miramax, i.e., Buena Vista, i.e. Disney) is Bad Santa, Zwigoff’s previous movie but one. Even at the time the film seemed more like a Coen Brothers movie than a Zwigoff film, especially since the duo co-produced it and reportedly co-wrote the script, and this version is the director’s cut, which turns out to be shorter (down from 91 minutes to 88 minutes), and with a slightly different ending. That’s really all that is important about this release, it’s minor differences from the previous two iterations of the DVD, and in fact it seems more like the theatrical release than anything else, with only the addition of a few new extras. The supplements are essentially the same, with different trailers and the addition of a laid back commentary track by Zwigoff and editor Robert Hoffman. A nice transfer and fair sound accompany the supplements from earlier editions: four deleted or alternate scenes, a 10-minute making of, and four minutes of outtakes.

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