He’s good enough at what he does, and proud enough of himself for moving out, to become a little bit of a shit as a consequence, unsubtly fashioning himself superior to his friend Miles (Miles Emanuel), a fellow comics nerd, and leaning into this unglamorous taste of adulthood like a guy who’ll have a story to tell. He picks up a job working for a legal aid (who thinks he’s an absolute delight) and earns a pittance, altogether trying to turn his back on the safety net of his upbringing. Robert moves out of his parents’ house in Princeton to live in a sketchy basement in Trenton with a pair of older, sweaty nerds. So Kline makes sure the journey is memorable.
#Wierd funny pages movie
This is a movie about junior independence, after all, about a slightly full-of-himself young talent who’s journeying out on his own for the first time. Owen Kline’s script is boisterous, funny, and very much committed to the bit. He’s flying as close to the sun as you would if you’d yet to learn that it burns. Robert needs guidance, but his instincts keep leading him in silly directions, and his chosen mentors are, well, not so well-chosen. But Funny Pages at its best is a bit more off the rails than that, a bit more beholden to minor crises, excruciatingly awkward mishaps, and unexpected violence. The movie starts out feeling like your usual quirky coming-of-age indie, rife with the kind of character-building turns of fortune that whittle its young hero into his adult form. You’re watching the kid that Robert is while looking ahead to what kind of man he’ll become. This suits him just fine - it almost makes him seem more mature, and you’d better believe that he knows as much.įunny Pages, an itchy, smart, unpredictable portrait of a young artist, practically makes you see Robert with double vision. Given his subjects - graphic cartoon sex in which men’s hairy buttholes are more visible than women’s faces, for example - he seems to be destined for a more off-the-radar notoriety than the mainstream can stand, an underground, independent greatness. But Robert is still very much a teenager: excitable and immature, high on his own potential, blind to failure, willing to do whatever it takes only because he’s still ignorant of the humiliations of “doing whatever it takes.” He’s a talented artist. This kid who drinks orange juice out of the carton and looks like he’s never washed a dish in his life says he’d rather bus tables for little pay than ship straight off to college, and when his parents pooh-pooh the idea, he makes them feel like snobs. Robert, a suburban rebel, fashions himself too independent to do what his parents want. If he doesn’t go to college, it might in part be because his parents, Jennifer and Lewis (Maria Dizzia and Josh Pais, respectively), are only too persuaded that he should. Robert, played by Daniel Zolghadri, is an 18-year-old wannabe comic artist, a promising young man who’s been given the leeway to dive into his own obsessions at the expense of most anything else, his fat imagination nourished by his job at a comic-book store, his subversive (read: dirty) mini comix cheered on from the sidelines by a beloved, inappropriate art teacher, his “future” basically boiled down to a choice between art school or no school at all. Owen Kline’s Funny Pages is not a cartoon, but its young hero, Robert, nevertheless comes off like a coyote on the run from the anvils threatening to fall on his head.
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