Lavishly praising Robert - and dividing his cartoons as either Michael Jordan or Kobe Bryant great - Katano urges him to submit his work straight to Mad Magazine. Katano (an indelible Stephen Adly Guirgis). ![]() Our Robert hopes to attend art school, an ambition that doesn’t sit well with his mentor and teacher, the shambolic Mr. In classic striver mode, Robert yearns to become what he isn’t yet, in this case a great cartoonist in the vein of Robert Crumb and his underground comix brethren. The economic if event-filled story fits the coming-of-age template in its broadest, less romantic outlines. Or at least his bad attitude: Robert talks big (and mean), but is desperate for validation, one problem being that he seems to despise almost everyone. There’s nothing obviously nice about Robert - a fantastic Daniel Zolghadri - a churlish 17-year-old whose talent is engaged in an escalating war of dominance with his narcissism. ![]() It’s startling how good the film is, partly because independent American cinema is clogged with bland coming-of-age fictions about nice kids. No one is spared in this portrait of a young artist as a pain in the butt. ![]() Scabrous, painful and true, it tracks a high school senior who, in his ambitions to be a comic-book artist of the highest, purest order, steamrollers over nearly everyone in his life. The young director Owen Kline packs worlds of cringe into “Funny Pages” - shame, disgust, embarrassment, sweaty sexual panic, acres of pustules - it’s all here in this terrific, tonally flawless feature debut.
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