‘Funny Pages’ Review: A Grungy (and Sketchy)-As-It-Gets Comedy Set on the Bottom Rung of the Comic-Book Ladder
variety.comOwen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic“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.
The movie, set in a humdrum New Jersey suburbia, unfolds on the moldy bottom rung of the comic-book ladder. 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.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.
These two eat, breathe, and sleep comic books. But they’re not into superheroes. To them the comic-book world is all about bringing reality to the page.
They’re fixated on artists who work in the tradition of R. Crumb, like Daniel Clowes and Harvey Pekar and Peter Bagge. The everyday situations those artists create on the page are intensely relatable, making their comic books the opposite of fantasy.
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