American Splendor.... uh, I don't know... I'll just get on with my job which I hate and maybe tell you about it later. Jazz is good.

American Splendor

Shari Springer Berman
Robert Pulcini

2003

HBO doesn't do bad things, and I'm a comic nerd. Go figure I'm drawn quickly then, to American Splendor, this cool looking, new (ha, I'm so behind the curve) movie.

The introduction is brilliantly put together: Super heroes, comic script, little boxes and gutters of the comic itself. Original, recorded straight off the vinyl Amazing Stories sort of music... I shifted my butt around in excitement. Doesn't get better than witty, self-deprecating, comic-oriented stuff with good music! Glad I wore the comfy pants. All that jazz.

They say, or have said, or have been known to say, that if you like a movie in the first 10 minutes, you'll like it forever, and vice versa. If this were true, American Splendor was shooting right into the top 20 at least of Erika's Bestest.

Cut immediately to a stylized soundroom where the only color is an glass of orange soda. The real life Harvey Pekar is doing, and receiving direction on the intro voice over we just heard. The Meta Meter shoots through the roof. Cool. I'm a Post Post Modern sort of girl, I can dig it.

The rest of the plot and film, though, pings back and forth between this painfully realistic style, like we got in The Savages and Dreiser novels (which, awesome enough, Pekar as Guy Playing the Real Guy (something only Paul Giamatti can do) derides later in the film) with the Guy Playing the Real Guy and this uber clean Gattaca colored Real Guy set.

The uber reality of it all does everything it can to be awkward too. Giamatti must have studied a bit of Chaplin and mime to get papers to cram that awkwardly and phones to not sit in cradles that on cue. It's where the humor is. But, like with writing that is bad, the more awkward you force characters to interact, the more the humor dims.

By an hour in, the audience has been let down to the depression that Pekar and his character, Pekar, feels about the routineness of everything. Every once in awhile there's a glimmer of the splendor in living such a typically humdrum American life, but the continued meta narrative (see Giamatti walk to the set of Letterman, watch Pekar on Letterman, see Giamatti come off the set of Letterman) bogs itself into a pander to Pekar himself, and kind of an ass kissing of him in a way that made me wonder why, if he let into Letterman so hardcore in the eighties, then why is he letting this happen?

Long story short, there's barely any plot other than shooting the comic with actors, and continuously proving it so with shows of the page, and framing the actors with the original gutter.

Though, with a comic so stagnant and depressing that Alan Moore had to make a caricature of it in his own comic Promethea, what else could I have expected.

It's good; well put together, beautiful editing, acting, all that. . . it's just as bleh as the subject matter.