The SmarK DVD Rant for High Fidelity
“Is that Peter Fucking Frampton?”
– So I’m getting ready to go to bed on Sunday night, and some DINGUS goes and sends me an e-mail with a reference to High Fidelity in it, and like a Pavlovian dog I immediately am forced to run to my DVD collection and throw it in for the millionth time, which is doubly ironic because this is a movie about people who obsessively collect and worship music and movies. And I f*cking love this movie, man. This movie knocked me on my ass the first time I saw it and it’s still just as funny and true after all those times, and I have no idea why the unwashed masses didn’t go flocking to it instead of whatever crap with Julia Roberts was playing at the time. Which is kinda the point of the movie — it’s about elitist f*cks like myself who categorize the world and treat everyone else as dirt under our feet to be wiped on the welcome mat of life.
Hmm, let’s start again.
Quick, what’s your top five albums you’d take on a desert island? Top five songs to play on a Monday morning? Top five songs you’d want playing at your funeral? Ever stop to think about those? Well, this is a movie about people who do, all the time.
The Film:
I must stress that, before we begin, although this movie makes owning a little record store with no customers look REALLY COOL, it’s probably not. But I’d sure like to try after seeing this movie.
“DJ” Rob Gordon (played by the brilliant John Cusack, one of my favorite actors dating all the way back to Better Off Dead) runs a small record store, assisted by two nutcases and has what seems to be a fairly good relationship with his live-in girlfriend, Laura, who one day decides to move out without giving an explanation. This leads Rob into a nearly-total breakdown, culminating in a fantasy beatdown of the repulsive Ian, the ponytail-wearing world-music-listening high culture idiot who stole his girl.
But it’s more complicated than that.
First of all, we’re generally only getting one side of the story here, from Rob, who spends the movie talking to the camera in internal monologues, as he divides his life into top 5 lists. Specifically, the movie centers around his exploration of the Top Five All-Time Breakups. These range from his first girlfriend in junior high up to a recent girlfriend who was an amicable split and had no effect on his life, but was only slotted in to spite Laura. After Rob spends the first half-hour or so of the movie feeling sorry for himself and trying to figure out why he keeps getting rejected, we suddenly discover from a more objective source WHY Laura decided to dump him, and the sympathy pretty dramatically swings to the other side of things. In real life, nice people do f*cked up things, and Rob is no exception. Even worse, as his obsession with getting Laura back deepens, he focuses on whether or not she’s had sex with new boyfriend Ian yet (“If I told you that I haven’t seen Evil Dead II yet what would that mean to you?”) and then goes out and sleeps with another woman himself, before confronting her again.
Perhaps the plot is misrepresenting the movie, because this is actually a comedy, and a very funny one at that. Consider the people he works with — Todd Louisa as passive-aggressive Dick and Jack Black at his most extroverted as Barry. Rob notes that he can’t fire them — he only hired them for 3 days a week a few years earlier, and they just started showing up every day. Barry takes delight in scaring off middle-aged businessmen looking for Stevie Wonder records (“Oh, I’m sorry I didn’t realize she was in a coma.”) while Dick is just constantly befuddled by life and left arguing with Barry about whether it was Jan or Dean who died in a crash after releasing “Dead Man’s Curve”. They operate as a kind of elite threesome in the musical underground, making money by selling copies of the Beta Band’s EPs to unsuspecting people who get sucked in by the melodies, while refusing to sell rare vinyl to other people, just out of spite.
The main action of the movie revolves around the increasingly neurotic Rob (his phone call with Mom after the breakup is hilariously true to life), as he decides to hunt down the 5 women on his Top Five All-Time Breakup List and find out exactly why they dumped him. The end goal is of course to absolve himself of all the blame. This sets up the funniest moment in the movie (among many), as he tracks down the girl who wouldn’t put out for him at 16, thus ending their relationship. She goes off on him for being a f*cking asshole who drove her into the arms of another guy who took advantage of her mental state and left her a mess who couldn’t even be around men until college, and his reaction is delightfully self-centered. That’s one of the great things about this movie — it’s not afraid to make the main character look like a shit for the sake of a laugh.
The other great thing is the unconventional structure and pacing — things move leisurely through conversations in the record shop, flashbacks from Rob’s past, confrontations with the ex-girlfriends, phone calls with a mutual friend (played by his real-life sister Joan in another great performance) and various trips to the local nightclub. There’s no great rush to get from point A to point B, and Rob never really has the drive to change himself along the way. His deepest thoughts are generally the top five reasons he misses Laura, or “I used to dream of being surrounded by exotic underwear, and now I know they just save the good ones for the night they’re going to sleep with someone”. His breakup with Laura is quiet, and the eventual reunion is equally quiet — she wants sex to distract herself from the death of her father, and opines that they can do the romantic stuff later. He sleeps with a singer played by Lisa Bonet while pining for Laura, and there’s no dramatic confrontation between the two women over it, or even a followup — they just go their separate ways. It’s just another thing in his life, another woman who will probably look better in hindsight than while they were involved. It’s a movie about real people who do real things and don’t end up having cliché dramatic showdowns. In fact, the movie dramatic showdown in the movie is entirely a creation of Rob’s imagination, as the three musketeers attack Ian and drop an air conditioner on his head in a hilarious moment. In real life, it turns out to be Ian quietly chastising Rob for being stalking Laura, and Rob quietly taking it.
While High Fidelity made a profit of about $7,000,000, it remains an underappreciated classic, along with it’s spiritual dark comedy cousin, Grosse Pointe Blank. It’s “Clerks” for an even smarter crowd, and it’s got a KILLER soundtrack. Highest recommendation.
The Video:
Unfortunately, Disney gave a lot of their low-level titles like this the shaft in the transfer. It’s anamorphic widescreen, but the source is a bit of mess, with pretty noticeable grain and dust on the negative, which is inexcusable for a movie from 2000! Other than that, it looks fine, if a bit soft.
The Audio:
It’s Dolby Digital 5.1, and a totally dialogue-driven movie, although the surrounds kick in a couple of times during the musical interludes, of which there are many. A regular Dolby Surround mix would have sufficed here.
The Extras:
As if the movie wasn’t good enough alone, you also get another 20 minutes of deleted scenes, ALL of which are hilarious and should have been included in the movie, running length be damned. Standouts include Rob being forced with a moral decision about whether to buy thousands of dollars worth of rare vinyl in an ugly divorce proceeding, and a hilarious continuation of the interview with the record columnist that ends the movie, as he obsesses about his all-time top 5 albums and ends up harassing the reporter at all hours of the day. All great stuff, all should have made the movie, period.
You also get 10 interview snippets, 5 each with Cusack and director Stephen Frears, about various aspects of making the movie.
That’s it, unfortunately.
The Ratings:
The Film: *****
The Video: ***
The Audio: ***
The Extras: **1/2
