#Ethiopian funny pages series

Also, it contains one of the most blood-curdling screams I've ever heard in cinema and it's not even a horror film. japan network city good photographer hippie i. His is a world of Tijuana Bibles and nauseating caricatures, and this includes the people he encounters in real life (who are among the most beautifully grotesque figures in the A24 pantheon).

(My grandmother also used to cut out the funnies of our local newspaper, which included the likes of Beetle Bailey and Zits, and staple them together into little books for me and my cousins to read.) Of course, Robert is more into the R. I do relate to growing up on the funnies: while others flipped through Spider-Man comics, I read Dilbert, Get Fuzzy, Pearls Before Swine, Bloom County, The Far Side, and whatever else appeared in the Gary Larson magazines my father used to collect. 6, the film is presented through a grainy image that makes it feel remarkably '90s'. It doesn't take place in some past golden age of Sunday funnies, yet it feels like it much like Spencer and Compartment No. It stars Daniel Zolghadri (Tales from the Loop) as Robert, a young man who aspires to be an artist - specifically, a comic strip artist. I spent an awful lot of this film gasping for air and giggling hysterically, often at the same time.įunny Pages screened at the Cannes film festival and is released on 16 September in cinemas and on Curzon Home Cinema.The grungy 'idiosyncratic indie movement' (as one critic called the movement of 'new Harmony Korines' that explore the most pitiful lifeforms of America's underbelly), which includes the likes of Sean Baker and the Safdie brothers, now has a new member in the form of Owen Kline and his impressive debut Funny Pages. Funny Pages is about that kind of Crumb vision in comics, which confronts or exorcises, or is simply a cry for help. To watch this film is to be reminded of Paul Giamatti’s performance as the gloomy cartoonist Harvey Pekar in American Splendor (2003) or the real Robert Crumb, the dark master of offensive sexual transgression in Terry Zwigoff’s classic documentary Crumb (1994), along with his unforgettably unhappy and marginalised brothers Charles and Max.

There are some great cameos, including a hilarious one from the legendary Louise Lasser as a mean lady in a pharmacist. But the entirely awful and very mad Wallace, by his own admission, had no creative input in these comics, and can do nothing but drag Robert into an awful chaos: the unfunny pages of real life. Robert makes it his muddled mission to somehow befriend or redeem Wallace, an act of homage he considers appropriate for a young master like himself. He even intends to move away from the comfortable family home in Princeton, New Jersey, and going to the tough neighbouring town of Trenton he rents a nightmarish room from the ineffably creepy landlord Barry (Michael Townsend Wright).īut it is in the DA’s office that Robert is electrified by a discovery: among the gallery of losers and creeps is Wallace (Matthew Maher), who Robert realises was once the “colour assistant” on some of the comics he loves. He imperiously tells his uptight parents (played by Josh Pais and Maria Dizzia) that he has no intention of going to college, preferring instead to follow his artistic vocation – sanctified, of course by this noble teacher. The rest of the time he hangs out obsessively at the local comics store, cultivating his fanatical connoisseurship.

#Ethiopian funny pages series

The subsequent shocking series of events ends with Robert getting a humble filing job in the district attorney’s office, covertly sketching the various lowlifes and no-hopers he sees there on both sides of the law. Poor Robert sketches him as best he can and while walking home later, Katano draws up alongside in his car and insists on offering Robert a lift – pulling into the oncoming traffic lane as he does so. We begin as this inspirational teacher, Katano (Stephen Adly Guirgis) is challenging Robert to wake up creatively, to get out of his comfort zone, and perhaps draw him naked, maybe? Polite, biddable Robert says yes and Katano strips off – his great, obese, middle-aged body fully revealed when his vast white underpants are discarded.