Michael Medved Confidential

The Harvard Exit hosted one of those first come/first serve free screenings of the new Dan Clowes/Terry Zwigoff film Art School Confidential Monday night. The theater had a special row of seats reserved for the beleaguered hard-working employees of the local funny book factory that published both the screenplay and the original comic book series from which the film derives its material... or so the poor schlubs were led to believe. PSYCHE! Turns out all the reserved seats were somehow snagged before Fanta publisher/founder/mogul Gary Groth arrived with his posse. The Harvard Exit staff asked if everyone in the reserved row was with the Fantagraphics crew, and that's when we noticed, sitting at the end of the aisle, a certain local Christian Fundamentalist/Right Wing propagandist/movie hater... the infamous Michael Medved!

Did the moustachioed conservative steal reserved seats that didn't belong to him? Groth volunteered to go tell him to get the hell out of his seat, but in typical polite-to-a-fault Seattle style, the Harvard Exit ushers advised against this and instead brought out some additional chairs, thereby averting another battle in the Great American Culture War. Fantagraphics publicist Eric Reynolds reportedly secured photographic evidence of the crime, but he'll probably hold off on blogging about it until AFTER Medved publishes his review; a prudent move no doubt, considering the film currently enjoys a favorability score roughly equal to President Bush. If anyone's going to save Art School Confidential at the box office, its going to be the Republican subliterates who "read" Medved's "writing."

The film kicks ass by the way. There were other Eightball strips besides "Art School" that were referenced too, like "Cool Your Jets," where this asshole hypothesizes about the hideous/hilarious outcomes of trying to date certain archetypes. The Seattle audience ate it up just as much as the audiences we saw the film with at this year's Sundance. Our country's film critics are all smoking crack.

[Random nerd/trivia aside: If anybody can clue us in on the Steve Buscemi line taken from Fargo, we'll be much obliged. We were waiting for it but somehow it escaped us. Post it in the comments, champ!]