lookigear.blogg.se

1. #Expression see you in the funny pages movie
2. #Expression see you in the funny pages professional
3. #Expression see you in the funny pages series

Specifically, in the video and comic book shops of the tri-state area. Yet it’s clearly just a canny caricature of a world that exists here on Earth. Meanwhile, Sean Price Williams’ grainy, grungy, Super 16mm cinematography all but gives them visible stink lines.Īt times, Funny Pages feels like a dispatch from outer space. It helps that Funny Pages‘ actors, almost to a person, look like R.

#Expression see you in the funny pages series

Funny Pages opens with a series of drawings by its protagonist Robert (played by Daniel Zolghadri) - actually the vulgar, sublime work of cartoonist Johnny Ryan - and from then on, it’s impossible not to imagine every person in Funny Pages as their own caricature. Of being, and please forgive me for putting it this way, art.įunny Pages is the directorial debut of Owen Kline, a woolly tale of a young aspiring cartoonist who, upon the loss of his mentor, moves from his comfortable upper middle class home in Princeton, New Jersey to the mean streets of Trenton in order to pursue his imagined dream of romantic squalor.

For people like me who watch a lot of movies, that feeling is invigorating one of those periodic, necessary reminders that movies are capable of being surprising. Funny Pages is one of those movies, apparent almost immediately that it depicts a different place, with different people, a different way than anything we’ve seen before.

#Expression see you in the funny pages movie

Meanwhile, Kline throws other oddballs in Robert's path, like a truly unnerving, screaming, opioid-addicted older woman who just happens to be portrayed by 1970s television star Louise Lasser.It’s rare, but there are times when a movie feels “special” from the very first frames. The other actors playing principal roles - both veterans like Maher and newcomers like Emanuel - similarly find ways to highlight their characters' weirdness without giving up their humanity. Zolghadri nails Robert's brand of nerdy confidence, while also finding the pitiable in him. He uses others as pawns in his own ambition - Wallace, yes, but also his friend Miles (Miles Emanuel), who also draws, but not at the expense of everything else in his life. Robert is often arrogant and cruel, a child of privilege who thinks he's a rebel.

Zolghadri, who has appeared in Eighth Grade and Alex Strangelove, is in the unenviable position of playing a hero that you will probably want to punch in the face at least sometime throughout Funny Pages' 90 minutes.

#Expression see you in the funny pages professional

While Wallace is initially peeved by Robert's eager questions, he eventually sees an opportunity for himself, and starts to entertain the teen's desire to be taught the ways of an actual professional comic book artist. Robert's ears perk up, however, when he realizes that Wallace used to be a color separatist at Image Comics. There, he meets Wallace (Matthew Maher), a squirrely, anxious man facing potential jail time. To support himself, Robert gets a job as a stenographer for the public defender assigned to him when he's caught breaking into his dead teacher's apartment.

After his beloved art teacher (Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis) dies in a gruesome car accident that Robert witnesses, Robert tells his frustrated parents that he's quitting school, and moves out of their upper middle class home in Princeton for an illegal residence in Trenton that he shares with two older men. He has a job at a comic book store where he and the other employees turn their nose up at superhero fare in favor of the weird and overtly sexual. Robert is a talented if maybe a little too assured high schooler who wants to make drawing perverse comics his life’s work. If you can stand it, it's a brutal coming-of-age story about a kid's own snobbery coming to bite him in the ass.

It's no surprise then that Funny Pages was produced by Uncut Gems' Josh and Benny Safdie, the kings of stressful cinema, and has the same quasi-voyeuristic, should-I-really-be-watching-this energy. Kline is probably still best known for his work on screen as the little brother of Jesse Eisenberg's character in Noah Baumbach's The Squid and the Whale, but Funny Pages establishes him as an excitingly grimy talent and a director who relishes in making his audiences and characters deeply uncomfortable.