High Fidelity
Even after eight years I still love the Steve Frears directed ‘High Fidelity’ (2000) movie. I watched it again recently and I have to say, Cusack (like that most favourite of mine, Mark Harmon) is just so easy on the eye, watching is like eating home baked Madeira cake, too delicious for words!
“The plot of High Fidelity evolves around Rob Gordon (John Cusack), a self-confessed audiophile whose flair for understanding women is less than par for the course. After getting dumped by his current girlfriend, Laura (Iben Hjejle) he decides to look up some of his old flames in an attempt to figure out what he keeps doing wrong in his relationships.
Top 5 Breakups
During the time that he and his girlfriend broke up, he decides to make a list of his top 5 breakups, then after thinking them, he decides to contact every woman on his top 5 list to find out what went wrong. He spends his days at his record store, Championship Vinyl, where he holds court over the customers that drift through.
Helping Rob in his task of musical elitism are Dick (Todd Louiso) and Barry (Jack Black), the “musical moron twins,” as he refers to them. Armed with an encyclopedic knowledge of all things musical, they compile “top five” lists for every conceivable occasion, openly mock the ignorance of their customers, and every so often actually sell a few records. Also there are a some teenagers who skate near his store.
One day at the store, the teenagers try to steal some records and he chases them down, making his dislike for them bigger, until one day, he listens to a recording that they did and offers them a record deal, starting his own label called “Top 5 Records”. During his off hours, he pines for the lost girlfriend Laura and does his best to win her back. He does in the end.
Reorganising the Record Collection
There are lots of memorable scenes but the one I love the most is a deleted scene, ‘Record Collection for sale’, sort of First Wives Club meets music industry material albeit with a musical knife edge twist. This is closely followed by the scene of Cusack’s character reorganising the record collection autobiographically. It reminded me of Harbour City FM days sans the tragic context!
John Cusack is, like most of his characters, an unconventional hero. Wary of fame and repelled by formulaic Hollywood fare, the Chicago-born actor has built a successful career playing underdogs and odd men out, all the while avoiding the media spotlight. He became a member of Chicago’s Piven Theatre Workshop while he was still in elementary school. By age 12, he already had several stage productions, commercial voice overs and industrial films under his belt. He made his feature film debut at 17, in the romantic comedy Class (1983).
His next role, as a member of Anthony Michael Hall’s geek brigade in Sixteen Candles (1984), put him on track to becoming a teen-flick fixture. Cusack remained on the periphery of the Brat Pack, side stepping the meteoric rise and fall of most of his contemporaries, but he stayed busy with leads in films like The Sure Thing (1985) and Better Off Dead (1985).
The young Cusack is probably best remembered for what could be considered his last adolescent role: the stereo-blaring romantic Lloyd Dobler in Say Anything (1989). A year later, he hit theatres as a grown-up, playing a bush-league con man caught between his manipulative mother and headstrong girlfriend in The Grifters (1990).
The next few years were relatively quiet for the actor, but he filled in the gaps with off-screen projects. He directed and produced several shows for the Chicago-based theatre group The New Criminals which he founded in 1988 (modeling it after Tim Robbins’ Actors’ Gang in Los Angeles) to promote political and avant-garde stage work.
Four years later, Cusack’s high school friends Steve Pink and D.V. DeVincentis joined him in starting a sister company for film, New Crime Productions. New Crime’s first feature was the sharply written comedy Grosse Pointe Blank (1997), which touched off a career renaissance for Cusack. In addition to co-scripting, he starred as a world-weary hit man who goes home for his ten-year high school reunion and tries to rekindle a romance with the girl he stood up on prom night (Minnie Driver).
Life Imitating Art
In an instance of life imitating art, Cusack actually did go home for his ten-year reunion (to honour a bet about the film’s financing) and ended up in a real-life romance with Driver. Cusack’s next appearance was as a Federal Agent (or, as he described it, “the first post-Heston, non-biblical action star in sandals”) in Con Air (1997), a movie he chose because he felt it was time to make smart business decisions. He followed that with Clint Eastwood’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1997).
Cusack has always favoured offbeat material, so it was no surprise when he turned up in the fiercely original Being John Malkovich (1999). Long-haired, bearded and bespectacled, he was almost unrecognisable in the role of a frustrated puppeteer who stumbles across a portal into the brain of actor John Malkovich. The convincing performance won him a Best Actor nomination at the Independent Spirit Awards.
In 2000, Cusack was back to his clean-shaven self in High Fidelity (2000), another New Crime production. He worked with Steve Pink and D.V. DeVincentis to adapt Nick Hornby’s popular novel (relocating the story to their native Chicago), then starred as the sarcastic record store owner who revisits his “Top 5” breakups to find out why he’s so unlucky in love. He seems pleased with the spate of projects on his horizon, but admits that he still hasn’t reached his ultimate goal: to be involved in a “great piece of art”.
Top 5 Things
In the film’s most quotable of quotes, “What came first, the music or the misery? People worry about kids playing with guns, or watching violent videos, that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands, literally thousands of songs about heartbreak, rejection, pain, misery and loss. Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?” So which was it do you think?
For now I’m just content to name my Top 5 things of 2008 (In No Particular Order): health, family, friends, working senses and an ability to be creative. What are yours?
The Video
