Movie Review: 'High Fidelity'

Stephen Fear's High Fidelity is as good a movie as the l995 Nick Hornsby novel on which it is based. The movie brilliantly evokes the overheated life of the urban single, and gives us a nostalgic period piece for the long-ago-and-far-away age of vinyl records, along with the obsessive music geeks who loved and collected them. (Read More)

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.

Comments

I don't know where Katz lives...

[Lemmy Caution]

but the little independent corner record store is alive and well in 90% of the cities that I travel to (and I travel to a lot of cities.) As an institution, I don't see it in any danger of disappearing.

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.

Geeks, crazies, etc.

[MichaelH]

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

Music Geek Here

[CdotZinger]

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... :)