Dir. Terry Zwigoff

Starring Max Minghella, Sophia Myles, John Malkovich etc.

Harassed teen boy Jerome (Minghella) finally gets out of high school hell and gets to follow his dream of becoming the world’s greatest artist.

However, all is not well at the Strathmore Institute where Jerome enrolls. Many teachers have stopped caring, and many students are knee-deep in pretentious bullshit. And there’s also the little detail of a serial killer on the loose. As a result the school atmosphere isn’t as chill as he’d have hoped, and he has to find new ways to be creative and compete.

Art School Confidential is written by Daniel Clowes, who wrote Ghost World and the comic book it was based on. Terry Zwigoff was the director then too, and it seems they enjoyed the work and the result, since they’re pairing up to dance again. The result is not as good this time, if a direct comparison is to be made, but the movies are not really in the same genre. While you could say Ghost World went for “melancholic comedy about cross-generational friendship”, Art School Confidential is less easily defined. It’s a satire, and it’s at times good at it. It’s a murder mystery, but it’s not very mysterious. Most of all it’s about expectations and dreams, and how realizing them can be harder if you need to stay in control, instead of letting things happen. Well, it tries to be.

If you only watch it for the funny, it’s probably gonna satisfy you. The trailer is hilarious, and the movie resembles that remark.

This is His review, you can read Her review here.

Keywords: Art, Satire, Quirky

Dir. Clint Eastwood

Starring John Cusack, Kevin Spacey, Jude Law, Alison Eastwood

Going in, I had this movie pegged as a dirty south noir thriller, exposing some sort of old truth about people. An antithesis to Gone With the Wind if you will. Gritty, templated, and.. well.. probably boring.

Boy was I wrong.

It’s kind of fun seeing a movie with absolutely nothing to go on but the movie poster, isn’t it? Anyways, this is more in the vein of a Coen brothers comedy, where the subtle and traditional get brushed off and displayed alongside the bizarre and spectacular, without any preferential treatment.

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil tells the tale of freelance reporter John Kelso, who gets a gig in Savannah, Georgia to cover an exclusive christmas party for the magazine Town & Country. The scoop quickly derails when the host of the party, eccentric millionaire Lex Luthor, shoots and kills Alfie (none too soon).

Kelso sticks around though, and turns private investigator as he interviews the people around the area, finding just as much oddities as clues. The whole movie feels very laid back and comfortable, perhaps a southern touch. And all of it is entertaining, if not outright hilarious. Now, IMDb doesn’t list it as a comedy, and you may have to be of a certain disposition to find it funny, but that could be said of an Adam Sandler movie as well. The laughs are there if you manage to connect to the warm, pulsating core of it. The suspense is mostly missing, the crime mystery is secondary to the rest of the story, even though everything is centered around it. It adds a bit of realism to this half-true story, since in real life things aren’t resolved in the third act.

This is His review, you can read Her review here

Keywords: Surreal, Quirky

Dir. Clint Eastwood

Starring John Cusack, Kevin Spacey, Jude Law, Alison Eastwood

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil is based on a true story about nouveau-riche collector , Jim Williams (Kevin Spacey) accused of having murdered his gigolo boyfriend, Billy Hanson (Jude Law). The story is set in the very southern, gothic town of Savannah, Georgia where the Victorian homes are surrounded by manicured lawns and bushes and enclosed in wonderfully ornate black iron fences. John Kelso (John Cusack) a reporter that is there, for a day only, to cover the Williams Xmas party, decides, instead, to stay and interview the town’s people and write a book about the murder.

Although this is supposedly a crime mystery, to me it seems more a depiction of the look and mood of a small southern city where many rich and eccentric people live.

Minor Spoilers ahead

There is the man who walks an invisible dog, an old voodoo woman who wears dark sunglasses even at midnight and a sour alcolholic inventor with huge horse flies on strings attached to his clothing, who walks around with a small bottle of poison that he threatens everyone he’ll dispense into the water system one day and kill them all.

As quirky as these people may seem, what is truly interesting and very droll, is the nonchalant and very accepting reaction of the people that live there. Nobody lifts an eyebrow and it’s just all part of everyday life in Savannah.

One of the more entertaining players in the movie, is Lady Chablis (played by him/herself ) a transsexual who does a club act about her sexuality yet at the same time keeps her rolled up weiner snitzchel a secret from her boyfriend cause she wants to tell him “when the time is right”.

Although IMDB listed this movie as a crime drama, I find it difficult to place it into this category as the character and mood of the people and place completely override the murder mystery here… yeah, it is there, but to me it almost feels like the subplot. It felt as if the murder mystery was an excuse to show how people of that town reacted to it and other crimes, mostly sweeping it (and any other delicate matters) under the rug, for the sake of appearance. It’s all about southern hospitality and deceptive politeness. It seems as if nobody really cares if he is punished or not, even Williams, himself, who seems more interested in knowing if he will be the main player in the book that John Kelso will write about him. Seeing how he paid “Town and Country” magazine to make sure he would be the writer to cover his Xmas party, it almost seems like the murder was already on his agenda, he just needed the proper person around to make sure that it became not only a newspaper article, but a huge affair, because everything here is bigger and better.

Clint Eastwood’s daughter’s (Alison Eastwood) role in this movie, Mandy Nichols, probably could have been left on the cutting floor. She is pretty and free-spirited but her relationship with Kelso is boring and we never get at all attached to her at all, they have no love story, it is all incidental and just seemed as an extra distraction.

As a crime mystery, I would say forget it… it isn’t thrilling or very mysterious and you won’t be biting your nails trying to figure out what happened. As a humorous look on a society that is slow paced, (just like their southern drawl), very flamboyant, exotic and over the top… it’s hilarious.

This is Her review, you can read His review here

Keywords: Surreal, Quirky