In the list of people who were cheated out of an Oscar - well, forget the Oscar, how about not even a nomination - Paul Giamatti should be near the top of the list for "Sideways." Here, playing "American Splendor" comic writer Harvey Pekar, he gives earlier evidence for his gift of characterization.

The film is done in an interesting way - it's interspersed with the real Pekar and his real wife Joyce, and where it normally would be intrusive, it isn't in this case. Pekar is a file clerk who started writing comics about his miserable life. His stories caught on with the public, and he found himself invited on "Letterman" several times. A lonely man, he also found a wife when Joyce wrote to him to get a copy of the latest comic book. On meeting her for the first time, he said, "I need to tell you now. I've had a vasectomy." Yet during a bout with cancer, he and Joyce wound up with Danielle, a friend's daughter. A man with nothing who wanted to leave a footprint ends up with fame, a family, and a cancer cure, all of which he has chronicled in his comics.

The performances are right-on, very real, and very much like the characters the actors play. As Joyce, Hope Davis is excellent and manages to keep a poker face. In the almost scary scene of Joyce and Harvey's first date, she throws up her dinner and has to face Harvey's trashed, overcrowded apartment. She then says, "Harvey, I think we should skip the courtship and just get married." She's a quiet riot. Judah Friedlander is great as Pekar's work friend Toby, a nerd among nerds who gets a bit of fame himself through Harvey when he has a gig on M-TV.

And Giamatti is an amazing Pekar - shleppy and miserable. Definitely one of the best actors we have today.

Excellently made film.

Successfully innovative, American Splendor combines fiction and reality in a spellbinding and amusing way, winning awards at Cannes and Sundance, and proving its maxim that life is pretty complex (and endlessly fascinating) stuff . . .

The story features Harvey Pekar, as himself, as the played by actor Paul Giamatti and as the comic book persona that he has created based on himself. Pekar is downbeat, depressed, in a dead end filing job, rather bitter. His best friend is a self-confessed nerd. Yet when the events of his life are epitomized in comic book snapshots they are intensely poignant, they seem to reach the disenfranchised, the dysfunctional within each of us. We follow him into a marriage that is as weird as he is. The originality of the material is reflected in its postmodern style of presentation, self-awareness of audience-manipulation blending seamlessly with entertainment and artistic delivery. Scenes are introduced and blended with comic book taglines, storyboarding, and even transitions from interloping set discussions with the real Pekar to the actor playing the scene under discussion. If it sounds pretentious, it's not – simply because it works so well and in an unpretentious way. Lovingly created and very moving. Probably the first real classic of 2003 and not to be missed, and for lovers of jazz/blues a soundtrack collectors item.

(Seeing it at the Edinburgh International Film Festival I also had the privilege of seeing the real life Pekar, his wife and adopted daughter together with Paul Giamatti, truly topping off a multi-media experience haha!)

I guess I am sucker for biographies of weird people. This certainly qualifies for that.

What makes this film different from others is the combination of fictional and real people playing the two main characters: Harvey and Joyce Pekar. For most of the film, Paul Giamatti portrays Pekar - the main focus of the film, and Hope Davis plays his wife, Joyce. However, interspersed in the film are comments from the real Harvey and Joyce. Strange!!!

The only thing stranger that the film structure is the story of these actual people. You wouldn't think that two dull introverts like this could be made to look so interesting, but they are. What a testimony to the job the filmmakers did here....and the actors. Giamatti was amazing.

After seeing this movie, I was inspired to go out and obtain several of Harvey Pekar's comic books. Whew! I should have stuck with just the movie. The comics stink!! Don't waste your money.