And you’d think “Funny Pages,” in peering into the lives of these kinds of devotees, would itself be rooted in a certain scuzzball reality principle. Trying to capture life raw, as opposed to drawing some rainy sci-fi dystopia featuring horned demigods, is what a certain comic-book impulse is all about, an impulse that’s more connected to Charles Bukowski (or even Dostoevsky) than to the further adventures of men in capes. You look at comics like Harvey Pekar’s and think, “Maybe I could actually do something like that.” (It’s the same struck-by-lightning feeling that Martin Scorsese got when he saw John Cassavetes’ “Shadows” - the revelation that he, too, could just go out into the New York streets and shoot a movie.) But hooked into that appeal is a certain DIY factor. That’s appealing on its own terms (it’s part of what makes Crumb the greatest artist ever to have worked in the comic-book medium). The everyday situations those artists create on the page are intensely relatable, making their comic books the opposite of fantasy. Crumb, like Daniel Clowes and Harvey Pekar and Peter Bagge. They’re fixated on artists who work in the tradition of R. To them the comic-book world is all about bringing reality to the page. These two eat, breathe, and sleep comic books. Robert (Daniel Zolghadri), at 17, has left the posh home of his parents in Princeton and set up residence in downscale Trenton, where he hangs out at the local comic-book store along with his friend, the sweetly passive, long-haired, acne-ridden Miles (Miles Emanuel), who has a secret crush on him. It centers on two friends who are obsessed with drawing their own comics, and it’s about the insular world of geeks and creeps and pervs and weirdos that this brings them into contact with. The movie, set in a humdrum New Jersey suburbia, unfolds on the moldy bottom rung of the comic-book ladder. (In the movie’s most crushing scene, Robert unwraps a comic-related box set his mother has carefully chosen for him as a Christmas gift and remarks that it’s useless to him because he has all the originals the look on her face tells you both how much she loves this kid and how much it hurts her that he’s turned into such a pain in the ass.) The one adult who seems to understand him is Cheryl (played by the wonderful character actor Marcia DeBonis), a public defender who takes on his case when he gets into a minor scrape with the law, despite the fact his parents have hired a fancy lawyer.“ Funny Pages,” a scruffy, grungy, likably tossed-together sketchbook of a low-budget indie comedy, typifies a paradox that now runs through a great deal of independent cinema. Robert has nothing but contempt for his parents (Josh Pais and Maria Dizzia), seeing them as bourgeois and controlling even though it’s clear they’ve given him everything. Katano (Stephen Adly Guirgis), dies very early in the movie, shuffling off this mortal coil in a classic black-comedy setup. The one adult he respects, his art teacher Mr. His best friend, Miles (Miles Emanuel), a lanky, shy, acne-ridden kid who radiates gentle sweetness, shares Robert’s enthusiasms, and may also be a little bit in love with him.īut Robert seems to be outgrowing everything around him, including Miles’ friendship. Bright and ambitious, he radiates deep disdain for art that he thinks is beneath him: he has zero interest in superhero comics, instead deriving inspiration and joy from 1970s-era underground comics, the outrageously crude yet brilliant Tijuana bibles of the 1930s, and even the stuff of 20th-century childhoods, like Dick Tracy and Scrooge McDuck. At least Robert isn’t your run-of-the-mill disaffected kid.
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