Friday, February 24
American Splendor
dir. Shari Springer Berman, Robert Pulcini; USA 2003

It takes a special sort of grumpiness to address your wife and adopted infant daughter as "man", generally in the course of some shrill and ill-tempered complaint. That's the sort of guy you're dealing with in this movie: a neurotic, jazz-loving, existentially anxious serial divorcee, now involved with a nerdy, nervy woman with big hair and glasses: a sort of defiantly uncool Woody Allen. This sweetly sad and deeply enjoyable movie is a drama-documentary collage based on the true life story of Harvey Pekar. He's a fat, balding everyman with poor hygiene who worked a grindingly dull job all his life as a file clerk at the local hospital, but who achieved cult fame through his self-published autobiographical comic-book American Splendor, which relentlessly documents the ghastly realities of Pekar's day-to-day life. - Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian