Following The Film Stage’s collective top 50 films of 2022, as part of our year-end coverage, our contributors are sharing their personal top 10 lists.
2022 was the year I had to recalibrate my relationship with cinema and television. Like Brendan Gleeson’s exasperated Colm in The Banshees of Inisherin, a man nearing the end of his life and done wasting his energy on natterers, post-pandemic life has me questioning how much time I have left on this earth to devote to art that simply doesn’t appeal to me. As a maximalist consumer by nature, I’ve spent my first 34 years watching anything and everything to stay sharp on what’s buzzing in the zeitgeist. I’m getting tired. And maybe, just maybe, the omnicrises of the early 2020s are pushing me toward shows and movies that uplift me in some way. That’s probably why I gravitated toward family films, romantic comedies,...
2022 was the year I had to recalibrate my relationship with cinema and television. Like Brendan Gleeson’s exasperated Colm in The Banshees of Inisherin, a man nearing the end of his life and done wasting his energy on natterers, post-pandemic life has me questioning how much time I have left on this earth to devote to art that simply doesn’t appeal to me. As a maximalist consumer by nature, I’ve spent my first 34 years watching anything and everything to stay sharp on what’s buzzing in the zeitgeist. I’m getting tired. And maybe, just maybe, the omnicrises of the early 2020s are pushing me toward shows and movies that uplift me in some way. That’s probably why I gravitated toward family films, romantic comedies,...
- 1/3/2023
- by The Film Stage
- The Film Stage
Stars: Daniel Zolghadri, Miles Emanuel, Maria Dizzia, Michael Townsend Wright, Marcia DeBonis | Written and Directed by Owen Kline
Cartoons have the power to change the world and seriously make an impact on someone’s life, and nobody understands that better than the character of Robert. He is an aspiring professional cartoonist, having gotten into the art form ever since his youth. Turns out, he’s also super good at it and impresses everyone with his work. But he finds out fairly quickly that, in order to make it big, you have to do a lot of hard work and put a ton of effort in. This is essentially what Owen Kline‘s Funny Pages is about. We watch Robert get into increasingly awkward situations, funny ones, emotional, and heartbreaking ones all throughout this 86-minute journey.
Although Funny Pages isn’t a great movie, it’s still an enjoyable enough film...
Cartoons have the power to change the world and seriously make an impact on someone’s life, and nobody understands that better than the character of Robert. He is an aspiring professional cartoonist, having gotten into the art form ever since his youth. Turns out, he’s also super good at it and impresses everyone with his work. But he finds out fairly quickly that, in order to make it big, you have to do a lot of hard work and put a ton of effort in. This is essentially what Owen Kline‘s Funny Pages is about. We watch Robert get into increasingly awkward situations, funny ones, emotional, and heartbreaking ones all throughout this 86-minute journey.
Although Funny Pages isn’t a great movie, it’s still an enjoyable enough film...
- 9/23/2022
- by Caillou Pettis
- Nerdly
Funny Pages Review — Funny Pages (2022) Film Review, a movie written and directed by Owen Kline and starring Daniel Zolghadri, Matthew Maher, Miles Emanuel, Maria Dizzia, Josh Pais, Stephen Adly Guirgis, Marcia DeBonis, Michael Townsend Wright, Ron Rifkin, Andy Milonakis and Constance Shulman. A24 has always been a movie studio which distributes films that [...]
Continue reading: Film Review: Funny Pages (2022): An Inspired but Sometimes Lackluster Story of a Young Cartoonist’s Escapades...
Continue reading: Film Review: Funny Pages (2022): An Inspired but Sometimes Lackluster Story of a Young Cartoonist’s Escapades...
- 9/3/2022
- by Thomas Duffy
- Film-Book
Owen Kline’s darkly hilarious directorial debut “Funny Pages” is a coming-of-age tale that finds the sublime in the grotesque, and the profound in an absurd search for meaning in the basement apartments and comic book shops of Trenton, New Jersey. Kline showcases a simultaneously provocative and poignant point-of-view and delivers an instant indie classic of lo-fi tri-state area cinema.
Kline’s “Funny Pages” is a delightfully disgusting and daring debut, featuring a breakout performance from “Eighth Grade”’s Daniel Zolghadri, as well as a host of New York’s most unique character actors. It also has notes of the Safdie Brothers’ “Uncut Gems” (the brothers serve as producers and Kline helped out on their shorts), a similar subject matter to “American Splendor” and just a soupçon of the gross-out sensibility of “The Greasy Strangler.”
Our protagonist, the young Robert (Zolghadri) is an aspiring comic artist in the tradition of R. Crumb,...
Kline’s “Funny Pages” is a delightfully disgusting and daring debut, featuring a breakout performance from “Eighth Grade”’s Daniel Zolghadri, as well as a host of New York’s most unique character actors. It also has notes of the Safdie Brothers’ “Uncut Gems” (the brothers serve as producers and Kline helped out on their shorts), a similar subject matter to “American Splendor” and just a soupçon of the gross-out sensibility of “The Greasy Strangler.”
Our protagonist, the young Robert (Zolghadri) is an aspiring comic artist in the tradition of R. Crumb,...
- 8/26/2022
- by Katie Walsh
- The Wrap
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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