Rating: 
Summary: I have 2 words: PAUL GIAMATTI
Review: I'd seen Paul Giamatti around before, mostly in stinkers like "Big Fat Liar", he never gets the roles or attention he deserves. And I'll admit was NEVER impressed with him anyways, but the reason I got this movie, mostly, was because I heard he gave such a great performance.... And well, they were right!!! This movie is about the life of Harvey Pekar, as based on his comic series "American Splendor" which was based from his life. It includes interviews with the real Harvey Pekar and other people that are portrayed in the film as well, like his wife and co-workers. I find it interesting how such an ordinary guy cannot only have not only a sucessful comic book series, but this movie as well. Which is pretty impressive for anybody :D. It was fun to watch Paul Giamatti, I mean he really had Harvey down to-a-T. He not only gets his mannerism and voice, but his emotions as well. He portrays him as a person and not just a character. :D Hope Davis was wonderful as usual, and so was everyone else in this movie. I say, anyone who think their life sucks should watch this. And, hey, anyone who likes to watch good movies with good acting too. :D The acting really elevates this film. Wonderful. God Bless & *enjoy* ~Amy
Rating: 
Summary: Stumbling and Fumbling
Review: Ouch!!! This film committs one of the worst sins a movie can make. It shows us the process of the filmmaking and takes us completely out of the moment. A HUGE mistake here. The writers and Director should be banned permanently and black listed for this atrocity. The golden rule of filmmaking is that you NEVER, EVER, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES show the art and craft of the filmmaking process!!! It's quite a shame this happened because the scenes they did play straight had a nice intimacy to them. The acting performances are felt life and believable, but unfortunately wasted.
Rating:
Summary: You have to Try the Pina Coladas!
Review: The most entertaining, and certainly of the most original films of the past year! American Splendor is about Harvey Pekar, a file clerk at a hospital in Cleveland, and how he began to document his life by means of the underground comic book scene. The actual Harvey Pekar narrates the film, and is in the film during the Letterman scenes (which are hilarious), and as the camera takes the viewer to Harvey for an occasional brief interview. Paul Giamatti plays Harvey in his younger years, and does a bang-up job, as the sarcastic, gloomy file clerk. Hope Davis does an outstanding job as well as Joyce (Pekar's wife- who also appears in the film briefly).
This is a must see for all who are tired of little old ladies in the checkout lines, Hollywood films like "revenge of the Nerds which, according to Pekar, don't accuratly portray what real nerds have to go through, and stupid people.
Rating: 
Summary: Narrative of marginality
Review: American culture proceeds by widening a circle of inclusion as opposed to demarcation; this has a material basis in the search for new content. Thus, the normed American family of the early American "situation comedy" was white and middle class but pure market forces exhausted this theme just in time for the civil rights movement to simultaneously confront American government with an overdue bill and American media with a new market and new themes. However, in a manner parallel to the way in which enormous and ugly-when-new factories became sarcophagi in places like Harvey Pekar's Cleveland, Harvey Pekar's American Splendor comics showed how people's lives in the Rust Belt also became sarcophagi on boulevards of broken dreams. In fact, precisely because Pekar focused on marginality, and narrates and centers his own marginalization, we'd do well to "read" American Center on its own margin. This means paying less attention to his attractive and engaging wife Joyce (who in the DVD comes across well as played) and more to the least attractive figure in the DVD, a "nerd" who lives with his grandmother and has a variety of tics. When the "nerd" supposes he sees himself reflected in the 1980s film Revenge of the Nerds, Harvey produces a brilliant deconstruction of the film. It is reminiscent of the way in which Saul Bellow's hero in Bellow's short story "How Was Your Day?" is obscurely angry at his girlfriend when she likes M.A.S.H., a Seventies film. Bellow's hero is angry because as an Adorno clone, he feels that M.A.S.H. painted over "suffering", which is also Harvey's focus and which goes against an American grain. Pekar is angry at Toby because, as Pekar correctly points out, Toby isn't even a "nerd". Toby, as Pekar points out, lives with his grandparents, probably because the destruction of the physical environment of the Rust Belt was responsible for physical and mental dysfunction strong enough to destroy families. Toby, as Pekar points out, bought his computer with coupons and $149.00 (much as I bought a Sinclair mail order from the UK in 1980 and nearly set our house on fire because the "American" adapter started a fire). As Joyce points out in the DVD, what Adorno called damage is the norm and it goes "up" (or, perhaps in a real moral order, down) to David Letterman. The problem is that the media is the message. For genuine and practical reasons, Pekar struggled for years as a writer and critic to break out of the marginal ghetto that is represented by comics and into a more renumerative line of work such as movies; but for the simple reason that movies are a social art they reflect, more so than comics, the wider society. Unfortunately, the laissez-faire narrative of the wider society, the American dream as it were, is that American culture has the Manifest Destiny to expand into a vacuum. The "nerd" thereby gets his revenge only by co-optation and by being made a celebrant. Precisely when Harvey got serious on Letterman, Letterman of course turned on him, and as shown in the movie, invited him, absurdly, to buy his own television network to air his pro-union views. The "system" cannot be changed from within and what this means is that only when it encounters an external check, up to and tragically including September 11, will it change. In the run up to the assault on Iraq, Cheney said "the American lifestyle is not negotiable". American Splendor as a comic and now as a movie shows that for at least twenty years and at least since Reagan's election, it has been quite negotiable for most Americans, including the preponderance of working people with no health insurance and many other working people who live like Toby with relatives or in motels. Furthermore, it isn't even American anymore. We need to realize that George F. Kennan's essay of 1948, in which Kennan said that our policy goal needs to be preservation of our lifestyle, was obscene as was the marginalization of George Marshall after Marshall showed that the only way to preserve it is to extend it and, in some measure, give it away. Thus in China, the "American" lifestyle is not "American", just a decent future which the leadership starting with Deng Xiao Peng realized people wanted and which the leadership to its credit tried to foster by managing market forces...in a way that is impossible under laissez faire, and in a Long March towards laissez-faire, which replaces the false reality with the goal. But Back in the USA, Americans have been invited to believe that they already live in Paradise and, if they are in any way discontent, to self-marginalize. In the central narrative they are invited to find the reason for their marginalization in psychological disorder renarrated as defects of character, since it's convenient to ignore a physical basis, especially if this would implicate corporate polluters. However, the DVD ends, not by any fault of Pekar's, as an inclusive, American celebration. "The revolution will not be televised". Bob Crumb, the great cartoonist, has tried to exit the all-inclusive situation comedy repeatedly and now lives in France. Pekar, in a more tragic tradition, that of Judaism and the narrative of emigration, looks forward only to a well-deserved and reasonably comfortable retirement. But those of us with children need an American narrative in which the best of those children is not marginalized and in which their worst, Letterman-like characteristics don't form the ground of "success". In other words, there must be some way out of this place.
Rating:
Summary: BRILLIANT with a capital B!
Review: This movie had all the things I look for in movies: Intellegence, humor, dark humor, drama, good actin. Paul Giamati is a brilliant actor and deserves to have some respect from the acedemy and win best actor. Well I have to go...Sorry no more rants for today. Enjoy my other fine reviews for now!
Rating:
Summary: A life unexamined....
Review: I forget who said "a life unexamined is not worth living". I think it was Socrates. Oh well. Harvey Pekar's American Splendor series of autobiographical comic books is made into a film. Yes...I know...I know...the books are better. Aren't they always? On it's own this film is a classic. It is honest and real. The film fades between Harvey's short commentraries and the longer scenes. Paul Giamatti plays Harvey and Hope Davis plays Joyce Brabner, Harvey's wife. They communicate each others characters very well. The acting is so well done, and not labored in the least, that the tensions and love in the relationship are evident in each scene. Often this is communicated through one or two words, or even a look. Hope can give "the look" that simply shuts Harvey down. I wonder if this is Joyce's look or did Hope originate this? The daily grind many of us experience is portrayed accurately. Harvey locks himself out of his apartment, Joyce wants him to unload some of his records to make space for her stuff, a long grovery line that goes nowhere and Harvey can't keep his mouth shut about the shortcomings of a film his friend thinks is insprational. This is real life. I grew up around Cleveland ethnics, my famliy came from Germany, and until you have experienced it you haven't lived. The film captures all this. If you are looking for escapism this ain't it...if you think this film offers escapism then you're a blue blood.
Rating: 
Summary: If you don't already know who Harvey Pekar is, skip this one
Review: Those who are fans of Harvey Pekar's comics will surely enjoy this film. As for me, I had no idea who Pekar was when I saw it. My friends and I rented it based on the heaps of praise it's received - both from critics and from other friends - and our consensus, to put it bluntly, was that it sucked. This film was valuable in the sense that it gave me one more example of someplace I absolutely do not want to end up in my life. Harvey Pekar (or Harvey Pekar as he's portrayed in this movie, at least) is simply not a character who I can manage to feel any sympathy for. His drab existence is a self-fulfilling prophecy - it's not hard to remain trapped in gloom if you're going to act like forgetting your keys inside your apartment is the most terrible, depressing thing that's happened to you in ages. Everything's a tragedy for this guy, but in the big picture, he doesn't have it so bad at all. If you're feeling angsty about your station in life, but don't really have the motivation to do anything about it, you'll probably feel a bond with the Harvmeister. Otherwise, I suspect he'll just irritate you for 100 minutes. In short, this film has an interesting concept and very good acting... but when the protagonist is a depressing bore who makes no effort to improve his situation, I just can't bring myself to give a damn. It may be "real," but so is the trashcan under my sink, and the trashcan speaks to me on an emotional level just about as much as this movie does (i.e. not at all). If you want a far superior film inspired by underground comics, check out Ghost World.
Rating:
Summary: brutal, just brutal
Review: Holy God, did this movie make me want to absolutely smash my own face in. I have never been more disappointed in a movie in my entire life. All I heard from people was how good this film was. But everyone is wrong. I'm sorry, but I'm no dummy when it comes to what a good movie is. I like all the cool, weird, wacky movies that every film major thinks are too important to be wasted on the masses. But watching this movie, this slow, boring, loooooong, slow, boring movie, was too much for me to bear. And don't give me that nonsense about how it was so deep, and emotional, and tragically beautfiful, because it wasn't. The characters were ugly, both physically and otherwise. The landscape was disgusting, and the story went absolutely nowhere and back. I never thought I'd be rooting for a character to die of cancer, but I was. If you're thinking about renting, buying or even stealing this movie, don't. Just save yourself 3 hours and spend it slamming your head in a car door. Trust me, it's way less painful.
Rating:
Summary: Great movie
Review: I loved this true life story of an ordinary life. Just about everyone will be able to identify in some part with Harvey Pekar and his pathetic life. The truth in the comics, and in the movie, enable everyone to stand back and laugh at themselves. It is good medicine for the ego.
Rating:
Summary: A Nice Film
Review: I didn't know what to expect from 'American Splendor'. The previews made it look so mundane, pehaps a little boring. But it made it onto countless top ten lists, and I never heard anything bad about it, so I watched it. It was good. It's actually a nice little story about a man & the people he surounds himself with. It had a lot less to do with the world of comics, & a lot more to do with the day to day of life. It was sweet. I loved how the filmmaker's/editors interspersed the real Harvey with the actor Harvey; it was all quite clever without falling into any pretension. Recommended.
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