It's not the best movie ever. It's not quite as good as the official movie of Shoup House. That said, it's extremely good. The whole mish-mash of an actor playing Harvey Pekar, Harvey Pekar himself, comic drawings of Harvey Pekar, file footage of Harvey Pekar, and voiceovers of the first by the second is like a film student's wet dream. And that it manages to humanize an actually fairly dislikeable character is swell as well.

Oh, and the foreshadowing! I always had a soft spot in my heart for that sort of thing. Mid-afternoon today I finally caught what the opening scene was about.

The one thing I couldn't really take about the movie was the music. The problem with it is that it sounds as though the producers wanted Kind of Blue but discovered it was cheaper to hire Eytan Mirsky to write knock-offs than to pay Sony for the rights. A bad decision. "This is supposed to be 'Blue in Green,'" I would bother Celeste by saying. "Oh, and this is supposed to be 'Freddy Freeloader.'"

But please forgive a work of cinematic genius its musical mistakes, even if the main character does write reviews of jazz. The next time you want a quiet night at home, you should get this movie.
posted by weiss @ 4:31 PM