Art School Confidential

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Art School Confidential began life as a four-page black-and-white comic by Daniel Clowes for his Anthology Comic, Eightball. It became very popular first among Clowes' friends and then with other former college art students. It inspired a 2006 film of the same name.

In the movie, Jerome has idolized Picasso from a very young age and wants to be a famous artist (possibly just so he can meet girls). When he gets to Strathmore College, he very becomes very disappointed with the state of affairs, surrounded by incomprehensible art, crazy students, an even crazier alumni, and teachers who really don't care. He becomes increasingly bitter and alienates everyone around him.

Tropes used in Art School Confidential include:

• Agony of the Feet/Foot Focus: The movie scene where a barefoot hippie girl steps on a beer bottle.
• Eating Lunch Alone
• Erudite Stoner: Bardo
• Hippie Teacher
• Humans Are the Real Monsters: By Jerome during a critique when a girl's drawing is referred to as "human".
  • It really didn't help that hers looked like it had been done by a disinterested three-year-old, while a realistic self-portrait he slaved over was criticized as being a valueless piece of shit that looked like it had been made by a machine.
• Jerk Jock: Subverted. Jonah is out of place at art school, but is popular for being a cool guy, and a decent artist. Too bad he's a cop.
  • Played straighter with some of his colleagues, though - they can't seem to follow why he takes his assignments so seriously when it's just a cover. Um, maybe because he's trying to maintain said cover?
• Mad Artist: Jimmy.
• No Smoking: Don't smoke in Jimmy's apartment.
• Trailers Always Lie: The movie was billed as a comedy, but it exhausts it's entire supply of jokes (almost all of them lifted directly from the comic) within the first half hour or so (all within one scene, really) and spends the rest of the movie trying to do this really tense Mind Screw thing as Jerome continually manages to inadvertently engineer the circumstances under which he gets convicted of the murders Jimmy's been committing. The end of the movie tries to get back to comedy in the end credits, where his former classmates claim in interviews that their scoffing was just being blind to the truth, and now that he's a murderer they realize Jerome is an artistic genius.
• Transparent Closet: Matthew