from Georgia Straight / by Ken Eisner
People assume the biggest challenge facing low-budget-film directors is the aggravation they get from studios and distributors who want to massage their visions right out of, well, uniqueness. That assumption is correct. But there are other, subtler conflicts between writers and directors, let’s say, and between filmmakers and critics.
To be blunt, Terry Zwigoff and Daniel Clowes put a lot of their Ghost World mojo into Art School Confidential, which opens here Friday (May 5), but the American press doesn’t seem to like the new movie.
“I don’t know why they hate it so much, but they really do,” says Zwigoff, on the line from his hotel room in Chicago, where he has gone to chat up the film. “Maybe they feel attacked as critics. I mean, one star is usually reserved for a bad slasher movie.”
The diminutive director, best known for the 1994 documentary Crumb, is not exactly a font of high expectations. At a posh reception after his Ghost World premiere in Seattle a few years back, I remember him pointing to his champagne flute and saying, “This glass is definitely half empty”