At a certain point in "Funny Pages," a calculatedly abrasive portrait of the comic book artist as a young man, I lost count of exactly how many of its characters I'd envisioned falling off a cliff.
I don't mean that in a bad way, entirely. Blandly likable characters are such a given in so many movies, especially American movies, that it can be a tonic to encounter a few flat-out repellent ones. And really, a fatal fall would hardly be the nastiest punchline in a movie that continually falls back on Wile E. Coyote levels of slapstick violence.
In the opening scene, an after-school art lesson goes comically awry, sending the student, Robert (Daniel Zolghadri), fleeing into the night while his doting teacher (Stephen Adly Guirgis) meets an untimely end.
