Rather than a dark comedy, Owen Kline’s directorial debut Funny Pages is perhaps more akin to slowly unfolding tragedy with a number of gut-busting gags. The story follows Robert (Daniel Zolghadri), a 17-year-old aspiring cartoonist from an upper-middle-class background who drops out of high school to make his dream a reality. Moving into a damp New Jersey basement that’s basically a dungeon and crossing paths with Image Comics color-separator-turned-petty-criminal Wallace (Matthew Maher), Robert’s misguided journey may be painfully relatable for anyone who’s alienated loved ones through an intense dedication to niche interests.
With a very selective filmography after his breakout role in The Squid and the Whale as a 13-year-old, appearing only for friends the Safdie brothers (who returned the favor producing Funny Pages) and Michael Bilandic, Kline emerges an exciting new voice in cinema. Ahead of his film’s release, we were lucky enough to...
With a very selective filmography after his breakout role in The Squid and the Whale as a 13-year-old, appearing only for friends the Safdie brothers (who returned the favor producing Funny Pages) and Michael Bilandic, Kline emerges an exciting new voice in cinema. Ahead of his film’s release, we were lucky enough to...
- 8/25/2022
- by Ethan Vestby
- The Film Stage
The deranged lunatics populating Owen Kline’s absurdist, bleakly hilarious Funny Pages are all somewhat anachronistic; loners who gravitate around old things and old places, one foot always firmly rooted in the past. Even teenage Robert (Daniel Zolghadri) nurses what feels like an age-inappropriate nostalgia. A high school senior stranded in an anonymous suburban stretch of Princeton, NJ, he works at the local comic store while daydreaming of becoming a cartoonist himself. But the comics he loves and devours with pantagruelian appetite are much, much older than him—the kind of niche, underground relics no one seems to recognize, much less appreciate. Funny Pages tracks Robert’s coming of age, but Kline (here in his directorial feature debut) dexterously avoids the genre’s trappings. His isn’t just a portrait of a most complicated chapter in a young man’s life, but an homage, in turns affectionate and savage, to...
- 5/25/2022
- by Leonardo Goi
- The Film Stage
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