Word: berman
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...series of autobiographic comic books in the ’70s and ’80s captured the innate complexities of a simple existence and ultimately revolutionized the comic book industry. These books had a number of different illustrators, and the varying styles are translated by directors Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini into various visual presentations of Pekar. For the majority of the film, he is portrayed by Paul Giamatti, who pulls no punches in presenting the artist in all his ill-tempered glory. At other times, the actual Pekar appears in the form of footage from David Letterman...
...biopic about a guy named Harvey Pekar. Who, you ask, is Harvey Pekar? And why should he rate a biopic when I don't? (That second question qualifies you as a perfect audience for this movie.) But as written and directed by the wife-husband team of Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, the film is concerned mainly with the first question, the shortish answer to which is that Pekar was, until his retirement in 2001, a file clerk in a Veterans Affairs hospital, a housekeeping-challenged resident of the grimmer reaches of Cleveland, Ohio, and a man whose soon...
...Berman and Pulcini have devised a perky-quirky style to tell Pekar's story, blending documentary material, comic panels and some editing tricks to create a kind of bipolar movie, not exactly haha funny but true to life--at least, to life on that unlevel playing field where Pekar (and millions like him) does his level best to keep going. --By Richard Schickel
...movie adaptation starring Paul Giamatti and Hope Davis opens next week and may be the most ambitious film adaptation of a comic ever attempted. Co-directors and script-writers Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini combine re-enactments with animation and documentary footage of the real people being played in the movie - including Pekar and his wife Joyce Brabner - sometimes putting the actors and their real-life counterparts in the same frame. Giamatti gives a hilariously simian characterization of Pekar as he struggles to find meaning in his life. Essentially a story about the redemptive power of art, Pekar...
...central Africa and last week declined to underwrite a Liberian operation. It says it spends $165 million a year on keeping troops in Burundi alone. And most West African armies are small and ill equipped. "The resources are just so minute compared to other regions," says Eric G. Berman, an expert in African peacekeeping at Brown University in Rhode Island. "It's easy [for the U.S.] to point the finger and say, 'Well, we trained you and what are you doing?' But that's mistaking a lack of resources for a lack of seriousness." Then there is the conduct...