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Movie Review: 'High Fidelity'
Aside from the change of location (from London to Chicago) High Fidelity is a surprisingly faithful cinematic rendering of Hornby's terrific novel about the twisted love lives of a hapless band of obsessive music geeks who run a record store that specializing in vinyl copies of hard-to-find albums. The move is as funny, savvy and biting as the book.
In the Mp3 era, High Fidelity is almost something of a l950's period piece, when rock-and-roll inspired music crazies spent hours sorting through bins of records, polishing and carefully storing their vinyl and blowing the dust off. John Cusack is great as Rob, the owner of Championship Vinyl, who is as obsessed with women who have dumped him as he is with spouting lists of songs for every conceivable occasion. In fact, Rob sees life as a series of top five lists -- especially the five most painful relationships in which he has been dumped by women.
Moving the movie from London to a gritty Chicago neighborhood was risky, since London was a vivid backdrop to the original story, but it works. Rock was, after all, born in the U.S.A. The book and the movie are penetrating looks at the sometimes bewildering life of the urban single. One of the movie's interesting devices is that Cusack addresses the camera directly throughout the film, explaining his story directly to us. The bare-outlines plot focuses on his efforts to win back Laura (Iben Hjejle), who, to his mortification, takes up with his upstairs neighbor Ian (played by Tim Robbins), a pompous expert in conflict resolution who sports a pony-tail and a lot of New Age chatter.
Although Rob sees himself as a perpetual victim of diffident women, the movie makes clear, even to him, that relationships are more complicated than that.
As good as Cusack he (he also co-wrote High Fidelity's screenplay, which lifts whole chunks verbatim from the novel), he is nearly upstaged by Jack Black (Barry) and Todd Louiso (Dick), two hilariously odd music freaks who work for him (he hired them years ago to work three days a week, he confides, but they never left). Barry in particular brilliantly embodies the 50's/60's music crazy -- addicted, intemperate, astonishingly knowledgeable, arrogantly defensive and superior about music. In one scene, he practically tosses a clueless middle-aged father out of the story for wanting to buy a lousy album for his daughter's birthday. The type will be instantly familiar to everyone reading this.
There's also a surprise guest appearance by a major rock star, whose identity won't be given away here.
High Fidelity is a terrific movie, a must-see -- well-paced, funny, beautifully written and well acted. Perhaps without meaning to, it's also a bit of a nostalgic film, a peek inside a culture that mostly lives online, and has been Wal-Marted out of the real world.
There are still geeks out there who spend hours obsessing about their records every day and spend all their time cleaning them and caring for them...
We are called DJs =)
Just because most of the music I have is in MP3 format doesnt mean I dont buy music, I just only buy it on vinyl.
They don't compete with Walmart. Walmart will never carry Stiff Little Fingers vinyl and Beefheart first editions. They may be competing with Ebay, but I know of very few music geeks who would buy vinyl sight-unseen. If they are under any threat, it's much more like to be a matter of the pandemic rent hikes that major cities are experiencing now. But I still see a lot of indie record stores. In the Bay Area (Berkeley and San Francisco) we have Amoeba Music, the greatest music store in the world, and my favorite small store, Aquarius Records. We've got places like Streetlight. When I travel to San Diego, Seattle, Portland, and Chicago, I never fail to find cool little stores.
I just saw the movie. It was excellent - not Oscar material, but a good, funny, honest movie about relationships. I also do know some people for whom pop music is so deeply enmeshed in the fabric of their day to day lives, that it is part of their emotional and interpersonal language, a sort of kaliedoscopic reflection of their inner lives.
The movie was kinda low tech, but I was struck by the similarity in attitude between the workers at the store toward the customers, and in the attitude of some techies I've known toward users. "Top 5 songs about death" could morph into "Top 5 favourite features of OO programing in C++."
Over all a very good movie. Man John Cusack does a good job.
BTW, does anyone know how to pronounce Hjejle??? I think it's probably something like "Hi-yay-lee" with a very short "hi."
IMHO, as per
J:)
Oh well, no point in steering now.
I don't know what its like to be dumped, and i mean that in a bad sense :)
Mike Roberto (roberto@soul.apk.net) - AOL IM: MicroBerto
Berto
Nick Hornby. No 's' in there. Also the author of Fever Pitch, an excellent (and quick) read about the life of an English football supporter. In his case, he supports Arsenal, but it's enjoyable even if you're a supporter of a different club.
Barry in particular brilliantly embodies the 50's/60's music crazy -- addicted, intemperate, astonishingly knowledgeable, arrogantly defensive and superior about music.
This type never went away. In fact, I'd argue that they got worse as time's gone on because the language of criticism has been appropriated by just about every schmuck with an opinion. Including me, by the way.
People used to aspire to an appearance of sophistication by subscribing to the right book clubs and doing paint-by-numbers of old masterpieces. Now they just hang out and talk like post-structuralists. I'd prefer the older forms of middle class insecurity, because people eventually try to dump their paint-by-numbers of sad clowns and moody watermills, or string art, or mass-edition copies of the book du jour, for a nickel apiece. If we keep up this practice of blabbering like academics without creating a demand in the market for the trappings of our sophistication, people like me are going to have nothing to pick up at Salvation Army in twenty years.
I think, by the way, I'd like to cast my vote (with whoever's keeping track) to declare use of the word "geek" oversaturated, or at least badly in need of reevaluation. I overheard a 30-something referring to herself as a "Friends" geek. You know... an unconventional outsider who sits in front of a tv for half an hour per week at the same time as millions of others, feeling the bitter sting of persecution because of her love for a television show some corporation has identified as suitably safe to serve as filler between the commercials.
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Michael Hall
mphall@cstone.nospam.net
Michael Hall
mph.puddingbowl.org
Jon Katz is a geek martian!
Hornby actually discusses the limits of geography on story in the interview.
It should be noted that while Rob is a bit self-pitying, it isn't really accurate to describe him as simply "lonely." He's not just a frustrated geek who can't get a date - rather, he's under the impression that he is getting rejected, yet is initially blind to the ways in which he sabotaged the relationships he was in.
I really don't know why Katz is even bothering. This movie had nothing to do with the 50s and 60s. The strongest nostalgia I saw was for the late 70s through mid 80s, and the film was definitely set in the present day (or at least sometime after Stereolab's Aluminum Tunes and the Beta Band's EPs were released), both in millieu and in attitude. The only character who fit Katz's demographic was Tim Robbin's reprehensible Ian - every other character there was in their 30's or younger. I don't like to get personal when I respond to someone's writing, but Katz really is looking through the narcissistic rose-colored glasses of baby-boomer self-importance.
I haven't seen the film, but if it really is just like the book, then it must be *awful*. Unless you like self-indulgent pre middle age poor-me-won't-be-young-for-ever crises.
Possibly I'm just too young, and you need to have been the age of the hero to appreciate the book, but it did strike me that him and Bridget Jones would make an excellent couple - they deserve each other.
andy.
I haven't seen the movie, yet. I read the book when it came out, and, frankly, I don't remember much about it, except that I read it really quickly (not "thinky" enough for my taste). That said....
:).
:)
There's something about us record geeks that, if Katz had known it, would have made a better "angle" for this review than that tacked-on mp3/WalMart schtick he always does. Our records are our lives. And I don't mean that we're merely obsessed with them. They're us--we live there in our piles of pressed plastic. I don't know how to explain this to a typical "record user" without a boring personal anecdote, so here goes:
A couple weeks ago, this fabulous babe I know and I finally managed to hook up after years of futilely flashing the fuck-eye at each other while being overinvolved with annoying losers. On the way home after our tremendously cool and fun first date, I had Shudder to Think's *50,000 BC* on in the car. So that's where my memory lives--all the coolness and fun and that awesome-first-date feeling--it's in those songs. I don't have it without them. Conversely, things have since gotten kind of shitty and tense between us, for reasons neither of us is airing. I've been listening to the new Love-Cars and the last Sunny Day Real Estate album a lot--sad, confused, frustrated records. And they're where my sadness, confusion, and frustration live now. This week is what those songs will always be about; they're me, this week, and they're how I'll always remember it. I'll never get it back without hearing them, and I'll never hear them without getting it back.
The Cusack character in the movie has the same problem. His emotional life is mediated by popular culture (in that you have to buy records before you can get unhealthily attached to them) to a harmful degree, and it's his getting past that that the book's (partly) about (hence the record *store* setting). And the more thoughtful among us (like Cusack himself (met him once--awesome guy), and all of us who've read Adorno) know that this is a huge-ass emotional problem we record geeks have. We've become one with The Spectacle
Geeks I know, of every sort, have a similiar, allegedly abnormal transferrence-of-emotion thing going on. I'm about nine kinds of geek myself, though I'm not enough of a computer geek to know where they store their feelings. An HFS+ partition, maybe? I suspect it'd be hard to make a movie about it.
Did I make my point yet? Screw it; this is too long.
PS: I was planning to see the movie tonight, but the Love-Cars are playing, so...
Your mouth is like Columbus Day.
=(
Free music from Jack Merlot.
Vinyl is still an affordable medium for independent bands to put out music on. If you take a look at any of the larger independent labels in existence (like Dischord, Alternative Tentacles, Victory or Matador) you can see that they still produce a tremendous number of vinyl records.
This is done for a few reasons:
It's a less substantial investment than CDs (if the band just doesn't sell, it's less money lost by the label than if they gone ahead and released a full-length CD with them).
Consumers are more willing to spend $3 on a seven inch record of a band they've never heard of than $12 for a full-length CD.
A seven inch with four songs by a band just starting out will most likely have four of their better songs, whereas they might have to struggle to produce an entire CD of music, and write a lot of crappy songs.
and of course:
Damn it, they just sound better.
SteveAnd the music was pretty cool, even though I'm no music freak.
Ceterum censeo Microsoftam esse delendam.
BTW, at the HR site you can listen to clips from the songs, the list of which I duly post here:
1.13th FLOOR ELEVATORS "You're Gonna Miss Me"
2.THE KINKS "Everybody's Gonna Be Happy"
3.JOHN WESLEY HARDING "I'm Wrong About Everything" [FULL SONG]
4.VELVET UNDERGROUND "Oh Sweet Nuthin'"
5.LOVE "Always See Your Face"
6.BOB DYLAN "Most Of The Time"
7.SHEILA NICHOLLS "Fallen For You" [FULL SONG]
8.BETA BAND "Dry The Rain"
9.ELVIS COSTELLO "Ship Building"
10.SMOG "Cold Blooded Old Times"
11.JACK BLACK "Let's Get It On"
12.STEREOLAB "Lo Boob Oscillator"
13.ROYAL TRUX "Inside Game"
14.VELVET UNDERGROUND "Who Loves The Sun"
15.STEVIE WONDER "I Believe (When I Fall In Love)"
I think that's the entire soundtrack -- it felt like more, though, when I saw the credits. I believe these are in chronological order -- in terms of when they are played in the movie. And, in fact, if you click "buy the soundtrack," you get directed here -- not Amazon, but "Express". $12.98? Perhaps a bargain.
Ceterum censeo Microsoftam esse delendam.
http://salon .com/ent/movies/review/2000/03/31/high_fidelity/in dex.html
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Am I the only one who thinks Microsoft is a misnomer? Perhaps Macrosoft would be a better fit?
Stephen Fear's High Fidelity is as good a movie as the l995 Nick Hornsby novel on which it is based.
I didn't think the novel was a very good movie.
You're missing the point totally. It may well "translate well to an American city" but why do they have to bother doing that? Its become fairly common for Hollywood to either take quality European literature and "Americanise" it and to take quality European films and remake them, magically suddenly set in America.
....
I would like to think that the American public is not so dim that they can't accept a film set in another country. So why do it?
I haven't seen "High Fidelity" - and living in Sweden I'll probably get to see it next year or so - but I hope to God it's not as bad as "The Beach". That film was "The Beach" in name and the fact that some people find a beach, the rest was something completely different.
Books are set in certain places for a reason. If Nick Hornby thought that the book should have been set in Chicago then he would have set it there. If Alex Garland thought Richard should be an American and have a relationship with Francoise, then he would have written it. They are both good writers with imagination - they don't have to write about what they see about themselves, they can dream and write about that.
And of course they have both said that they agree with the changes made in the film. What do you expect them to do? Publically criticise the film, thus meaning (a) it does worse at the box office and they lose book sales and (b) they have less chance of selling the movie rights to another of their books?
I mean, come on. Wake up
I know this is off-topic in slashdot and all but did you say BEEFHEART FIRST EDITIONS ? And where can I get these things? Specifically where can I get Lick My Decals Off Baby , that I've been looking for for about five years now? I really would appreciate a pointer.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
> German is very guteral and so even saying
> "I love you" sounds like you're declaring war!
Well, Christ, when you say "I love you" you are declaring war.
Yours WD "purple heart" K - WKiernan@concentric.net
The sure sign of a recovering typewriter user.
Unless, of course, you set it in and around Green Bay, Wisconsin.
Come to think of it, New England Revolution fans -- that's the soccer team outside of Boston -- are an odd bunch as well.
Hmmm. I kinda agree. I saw High Fidelity this afternoon and almost walked out. Am I gay? No, Im happily married.
Lets take a little musical diversion, it seems appropriate. My favorite band used to be Dinosaur Jr. J Mascis provided my soundtrack for my high school days. Anyone familiar with their work can back me on this: It sounds a whole lot better when youre lonely. They lyrics make sense and the distortion blurs the pain. Meeting my wife five years ago reduced my dinophilicity. The music hadnt changed, but I had. Lyrics that seemed to describe my here and now became distant and intangible. I enjoyed it less because I was in a different place.
I had the same feelings about High Fidelity. The main character was too distant from my experience for him to be the whole story. The people who will like this film are the ones who can relate to the main story. Otherwise youre left looking for something else to focus on. There were some bright spots outside the relationship saga, but they were pretty spread out. Your enjoyment of this film is all about what you bring to the party.
-BW