An excited and anxious crowd filled the Eccles theater Monday night for the world premiere of Terry Zwigoff's newest cinematic oddity, "Art School Confidential," a dark comedy about life in a New York art school.

    Perhaps it was the one time a character actor like John Malkovich was treated like a rock star.

    Dozens of people walked up to the co-star of "Art School Confidential" inside the theater with bulbs flashing and fingers pointed. At Sundance, the premiere event for independent film, a quiet (but brilliant) actor like Malkovich can have a throng of groupies.

    Then the lights dimmed and the movie started. What unspooled is hard to explain. What began much like a warped version of a campus comedy slowly spiraled into a dark and sometimes maniacally funny take on our perceptions of art and commerce and how the two tragically intertwine.

    I'm not sure what to think of the movie as a whole - it has to sink in for a day or two for me to make up my mind. Two things are certain: It's often funny in the way you expect a Terry Zwigoff movie would be (he directed "Crumb," "Ghost World" and "Bad Santa," so that should tell you something), and the lead, Max Minghella, who plays the young art school freshman and protagonist, is not as obsessive and full of angst as he should be for the role.

    When the lights came up, the audience reaction was more subdued than I expected. The applause was there, it just lacked the kind of wild enthusiasm that says, "This is a Sundance hit."

    It's one quirky movie that's going to be a tough sell to a wider audience.
- Vince Horiuchi