High Fidelity

Based on the book by English novelist Nick Hornby, High Fidelity may be the most enjoyable date movie you ever see. That might not be saying a hell of a lot, but John Cusack has excellent delivery as ever and Jack Black is as outrageous as ever. A small role portrayed by Lisa Bonet also helps keep things moving.

The movie is centered around the life of one Rob Gordon (Cusack) who is quite early in the movie dumped by his long-term girlfriend Laura (Iben Hjejle). Rob owns an elitist but well-stocked pop music record store, also staffed by the mousy Dick (Todd Louiso) and the scruffy and out-of-control Barry (Black) that does enough business to stay afloat, but little more. Rounding out the core cast is Rob and Laura's friend Liz (Joan Cusack) and an array of ex-girlfriends played by Catherine Zeta-Jones, Lili Taylor, and several others who are consulted as to why Rob is "destined" to live a life of desperation and solitude.

These women in fact make an all-time top five breakups in Rob's life, and this is a continual theme throughout the story; in classical music-industry style, life at the record store consists largely of a string of top-n lists, like the top five albums you need by yourself on an island and so forth. The musical involvement in Rob's life extends to his record collection, which after his breakup he begins reorganizing along autobiographical lines - in order to remember where a record is in his collection, he has to remember where it came from. This sort of musical mania is well-displayed in other characters, especially Jack Black, to whom the majority of the hilarity is left.

All in all, a lot of the dialogue feels fairly forced, especially when John is addressing the fourth wall and discussing his thought processes with the audience. While my statement will date me, I feel compelled to mention that this worked in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, but it just doesn't work here. It really comes off as just self-aggrandizement, making the speeches seem more important than they really are. Oh, they're important to the story, and some of them are kind of fun, but mostly it's not all that interesting. What was probably a clever literary device in the book simply fails to make the translation to screen, at least in this particular case.

This movie is of course not a total loss. Again, Jack Black provides the glimmer of interest in a movie that otherwise would be interesting only to women, and only sensitive ones at that. There are moments of humor throughout that can continue to entertain you if you are, well, easily amused. But this is certainly not a movie I'm going to watch "again and again". In fact, I watched it this last time only under protest.