He’s also a tortured personality, broken by the industry and mostly prickly towards everyone. Robert is fascinated by Wallace, because Wallace used to work for Image Comics. He soon meets Wallace, played by Michael Maher, one of Hollywood’s great weird guys who deserves legitimate Oscar consideration here. Funny Pages is constantly riding the line between the banal and the absurd, always with a seasoned eye for the grotesque. Robert rents a cheap room in a sweaty basement next to a clanking water heater, populated by a handful of other oddballs, with shades of the six-and-a-half-floor from Being John Malkovich.
Which is always intoned with a mixture of awe and fear by Robert’s comic book store cohorts.
Robert, who seems determined to upset his conventional parents (who are well-meaning but intense in a way that you get at least an inkling why Robert finds them intolerable - played brilliantly by veterans Maria Dizzia and Ron Rifkin) chooses to seek his imagined life of grit and artistic danger in the exotic, far off land of Trenton, New Jersey. I grew up in California, whose residents mostly seem milk-fed and focus-grouped by comparison, and the first time I encountered the particular types produced in Northern New Jersey and Long Island when I was in my twenties I thought I was in a Dali painting. I imagine this world it will be intimate for those who know it and impossibly exotic for those who don’t. And only filmmakers as authentically from that milieu as Owen Kline and the Safdies could depict these characters in this much detail and palpable veracity. The same way Napoleon Dynamite could only have been made with and by Mormons from Idaho, Funny Pages is a collection of types only found in the arcades and comic book shops of the suburbs of the tri-state area. These characters are both odd and odd looking in a way that seems to define a place. But it’s also more than that they’re not just kooky for kooky’s sake, or deliberately gross, which has been done (see: The Greasy Strangler). Crumb drawings come to life than any cast ever has before. Yet also, maybe this cast of characters just looks more like a collection of R. It’s a brilliant and twisted trick that makes the audience complicit in Robert’s cruelty. Such that, from that point on, you begin to envision every character you encounter in Funny Pages as their own inevitable visual parody, your brain filling the gaps on its own like an acid trip. There’s some truth to that, though I suspect Kline partly achieves this effect by opening with a montage of hilarious and semi-cruel caricatures. My friend Matt, who I brought to the screening with me, said every person in Funny Pages sort of looks like a grown-up Garbage Pail kid. Funny Pages’ achievement in unconventional casting choices may never be equaled. Katano, a large lumpy slob who demands Robert caricature him in all his misshapen glory, is played by an actor named “Stephen Adly Guirgis,” a name that, like most aspects of Funny Pages, is self-evidently and almost inexplicably hilarious.Įvery actor in Funny Pages is basically the visual equivalent of the sonic qualities of “Stephen Adly Guirgis,” human sight gags, dadaist celebrations of mother nature and all the ways she can be magical and capricious and inspired.
#Funny pages pdf archive full#
They nearly steal the show, managing to be cute despite depicting full penetration and squinting little buttholes, and laugh out loud hilarious to a frame (the twisted brilliance of Johnny Ryan, who drew them). In the first scene, he’s being showered with praise by his eccentric art teacher, who urges Robert to go further, to get weirder, to subvert more expectations with his vulgar, perverse little drawings.Īh, those drawings, depicted lovingly in the otherwise grimy, grainy, fluorescent-lit scene. Crumb, determined to live out his dream of being a romantic, reclusive, dangerous cult cartoonist, in spite, or to spite his banal, upper-middle-class parents.
Owen Kline’s directorial debut, produced by the Safdie Brothers ( Uncut Gems, Good Times), is an esoteric masterpiece, a woolly comedy of the bizarre oozing with rewatch potential.ĭaniel Zolghadri plays our main character, Robert, a sort of Holden Caulfield by way of R. Even most good comedies are mostly built from familiar situations and people, but Funny Pages is that rare breed bewildering and strange before its characters even begin speaking and projecting its inherent twistedness with every aspect of its construction.
Few announce themselves as something different from the very first frames. A lot of movies are funny, but very few are funny on a cellular level.
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