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Considering the sheer firepower involved, it's shocking that Terry Zwigoff and Daniel Clowes' Art School Confidential is so dreadful. The two did stupendous things together on Ghost World, adapted from Clowes' graphic novel, but the same combination somehow just doesn't congeal in Art School.

Max Minghella stars as Jerome, a lonely and sensitive art school student at an urban New York art college. He's got a buddy (Joel Moore) who revels in pointing out the art school stereotyped characters surrounding them, but it's just a copout to point out stereotypes, and then structure the film around the selfsame characters. The film has some great actors -- John Malkovich, Anjelica Huston, Jim Broadbent -- and Sophia Myles is touching as Jerome's love interest, but the whole thing is lost in a dire plot line. Acting is fine, diolog writing is good ... but gah, the plot turns could be forecast fifteen minutes ahead of time, and watching good actors enact those routines just got painful after awhile.

Omar Khayyam was a Persian astronomer, mathematician, and poet in the 11th Century, famous today for Edward Fitzgerald's 1859 translations of his works into English. The Keeper is a well-meaning and handsome (if a bit stolid, and poorly edited at times) attempt to render his life meaningful today, written by Iranian-American lawyer/filmmaker Kayvan Mashayekh.

To keep things relevant, Mashayekh presents through the eyes of a young Iranian-American boy in Houston (Adam Echahly) who is a descendant of the family who takes it upon himself to "keep" and transmit the story. The title character (Bruno Lastra) is presented in an admirable if a bit sycophantic light, as is his love story with Darya (Marie Espinosa), to whom he composed most of his most famous love poems. The scenes (set in Uzbekistan, with period jaunts elsewhere) are ably filmed and mostly elegant, although the level of the actors' engagement doesn't rise above a slow simmer most of the times. The principal conflict is between Khayyam and lifelong friend Hassan (Christopher Simpson), which Mashayekh hopes to make emblematic of a host of larger conflicts - between science and religion, between universalism and sectarianism, between worldliness and Islamic separatism. It succeeds only in pieces. The editing is also a bit spotty, and at certain points I felt that too much of the story had been cut.

The film is one of those that serves a valuable public function; informing the movie-going world about Khayyam's legacy and the larger history of Islamic science and mathematics is a meaningful one, and I saw a host of Iranian-American families at the screening taking part in their cultural heritage. It doesn't win on purely cinematic terms, but it's an engaging and wholly good-hearted exercise regardless.