Excellent but underrated film

Absolutely Brilliant!

Very interesting film. Was caught on the premise when seeing the trailer but unsure as to what the outcome would be for the showing. As it turns out, it was a very good film.

Yo, there's no way for me to review this film without saying, take your *insert ethnicity + "ass" here* to see this film,like now. You have to see it in order to know what you're really messing with.

I had never heard of Harvey Pekar or his work before "American Splendor" got released. Now that I've seen the movie, I'm impressed. The movie makes clear that Pekar (Paul Giamatti) didn't want to condescend to his audience. He just wanted to show life as it was. No sugar-coating, just the truth. As is often the cast with great artists, misery made for some fine work. An unusual trick that the movie uses is to intersperse footage of the real Pekar talking about why he created the cartoons that he did. He had some good things to say.Basically, this is what movies should be. It should go without saying that Giamatti does a perfect job as Pekar. Equal credit should go to Hope Davis as a fan whom he marries, as well as some other cast members (you gotta love what Pekar's friend says about "Revenge of the Nerds"). I'd also like to see the other movies directed by Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini. Definitely see it.Watch for a young Josh Hutcherson as the boy dressed as Robin.

I had wanted to read a couple of autobiographical graphic novels like Perseipolis , Fun Home and the like. So I decided to check out American Splendor. Through the novel I found the movie and I read many reviews praising it so I decided to check it out . The main difference between the series and movie is that while the series is pretty funny the movie is poignant and a bit sad.Maybe it is the music or maybe it's the people or both. Harvey Pekar lives a sad life. He works at a dead job because his comics do not make money. He lived quite a part of his life in gut wrenching loneliness and there is nothing good happening to him.Harvey Pekar died this year in early July. I actually felt very sad without having known him . Maybe because this was a real human being. He wasn't pretending to be anyone else. He was trying to reach out to people like him who are struggling in life. And that is what the movie does. Harvey Pekar narrates and Paul Giammati plays the role. One thing has always come to my mind when I see Paul act. He is not that great looking but incredibly talented. This helps him get unconventional roles like this one or American Splendor. In that way he is actually luckier than Tom Cruise who will never get unconventional roles because of his looks.These are fractured souls. They can barely make sense of the society or the environment they live in yet they struggle and soldier on. In that sense it might be actually called a feel good movie.American Splendour is a great movie. Maybe when I am older a lot of things in the movie will seem clearer and more relatable but even now it seems like a great movie that I might have to see a couple of times.

Within American comic books there are two types of comic books, the mainstream which includes famous superheroes like Batman, Spider-man, Superman, etc… which aim to appeal the wider audience possible, and then there are underground comics like Ghostworld and American Splendor, which are aimed at a smaller adult audience and tackle more grounded issues. This can also be seen in American cinema, with Hollywood films which too also aim for a wide audience, whilst indie cinema is more adventurous. With American Splendor, underground comics and American Indie cinema are combined.American Splendor is based on the comic book series by Harvey Peker which is a an autobiographical account of Harvey Peker's (Paul Giamatti/Harvey Peker) regular life. Harvey is a regular man living in Cleveland which most American would descript as an industrial hole. Harvey is a middle aged man who has two failed marriages under his belt and works a dead-end job as a file clerk in a hospital. He is a bright man with a typical American left-wing attitude against big business and mainstream culture. He decides to become a comic book writer, writing about his own personal life. He quickly becomes a hit writer and gain critical recognition: but he continues to work his clerk job. His life takes a turn when one of his fans, Joyce Brabner (Hope Davies) sends him fan-mail and the two meet his home city. They quickly fall for each other and marry each other. But their marriage is fall of struggle whilst Harvey's fame rises, and Joyce goes through a rut. The two also have to go through one of the worst experiences imaginable, when Harvey discovers he has cancer and Harvey and Joyce write a graphic novel to overcome the experience.This is a fine example of indie cinema at it quirkiest. This is a comic bio-pic, made by people who obviously who are fans of the series. The directors Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini do not want to tell a conventional film: telling the story of one man's adult live, about original live, and the creative process. For the most part they keep a fun energy going throughout the film, and their experience as documentary film-makers show, particularly when their interview Harvey Peker. They are moments of style like when the cartoon versions of Harvey are shown, keeps a quirky, feel to the film. The character of Cleveland and it's industrial scene is present throughout the film, and it influence the hero.A mate of my joked that Paul Giamatti on the DVD cover looked like an older version of another friend. Character wise they weren't much different. Giamatti and Davies are convicting in the main roles, are two intelligence, ordinary people who become writers. But Peker at times can be a bit annoying with his pessimistic outlook and his counter-culture viewpoint to the extreme.However this is a funny film, a good example of American Indie cinema.

Comic book writer Harvey Pekar would probably be the first to tell you that he only agreed to a movie about himself for the money. He denounces all things glamorous or idealistic and a moving biopic about his life would contradict him entirely. That's why Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini's choice to do an off-center biopic on Pekar in a quasi-documentary style is such a phenomenal direction for their film."American Splendor" features both Pekar himself doing a few on-the-set interviews and voice over narration as well as Paul Giamatti playing out key scenes in his life from befriending fellow artist Robert Crumb to meeting his wife Joyce (Hope Davis) to his odd string of appearances on David Letterman. It's not totally committed to one style over another which is its greatest strength and a bit of a weakness. Although it's so interesting to be able to compare the acting to the real people, at times it's distracting and breaks the illusion. For example, the real Pekar and his semi-autistic pal Toby chat on the movie's set while both actors playing them (Giamatti and Judah Friedlander) take five in the background.Rarely -- and certainly not this extensively -- does a film open itself up to scrutiny like "American Splendor" by allowing the audience to see both reality and its own fiction. Giamatti's performance becomes critically vulnerable with the real Pekar getting almost as much time on screen as he has, though he does do a good job juggling Pekar's many quirks from his dying voice to his tendency to add "man" to the end of every statement."American Splendor" also offers a few other unique directorial choices and sequences such as comic frames in the beginning to replicate comic books and including animated Harveys and thought bubbles into live action. These are generally effective, but they lack continuity. Each scene where traditional cinema is broken get its own treatment; the shift from biopic to documentary is the only constant.Consequently, we've never gotten acquainted with the focal character of another biographical film like we get to know Harvey Pekar. I think anyone who watches the film and happens to meet Harvey afterward would feel like they'd known him for years. Part of it is his natural, quirky predictability, but the other is Berman and Pulcini's decision to give us a healthy dose of the man himself.Much like his American Splendor comics, the story of Harvey Pekar isn't extraordinary or fascinating but down to earth. Pekar didn't want to be anything but ordinary and he just happened to really like the underground comic scene. The film honors that wish by being the same way, so taking the title of the comics and using it for the movie is more than fitting. It had to be a challenge to adapt someone's autobiographical comic and make a biographical documentary about the person who wrote said comic about himself, but Berman and Pulcini make it work and in a highly original and inspiring way. ~Steven CVisit my site at http://moviemusereviews.blogspot.com