In this, his debut as a filmmaker, he writes some acidly funny exchanges, and his affection for freaks and losers - and for the twisted purity of comic-book bohemians - is palpable. Owen Kline, the writer and director of “Funny Pages,” has been an actor (he played Jesse Eisenberg’s little brother in “The Squid and the Whale”) he is also the son of Kevin Kline and Phoebe Cates. Now we’re off and running into whatever-happens-happens-ville. Katano races after Robert to apologize - and gets killed in a car accident. This seems an extreme enough note to kick off a movie on, but to top it off, Mr. Katano (Stephen Adly Guigis), who insists on posing naked for him in order to illustrate a lesson about life drawing. The movie opens with Robert hanging out with his high-school art teacher, Mr. Almost nothing that happens in “Funny Pages” is particularly believable. What is doesn’t have, oddly, is any sort of bone-deep reality factor. “Funny Pages” was produced by Josh and Benny Safdie, who as filmmakers (“Uncut Gems”) have made a certain gutter grunge quality their calling card, and the movie has an uncut Safdie flavor. The film’s lighting is plain and glarey, and the settings are skeevy - like the basement apartment where Robert’s cohorts masturbate to Tijuana bibles (those pre-underground pornographic knockoffs of famous comic strips that show, for instance, Betty boffing Jughead), or the comic-book store that, in a few promising early scenes, looks like the setting for a “High Fidelity” of vérité comics. 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. “ 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.
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