Monday, June 25, 2007

The top five reasons I love High Fidelity

So after celebrating Midsummer by spending all of Friday night drinking on the roof with fellow expatriate Niko, I was in no state to accolish much of anything during the rest of the weekend except sleep and renew my man-crush on John Cusack, via underrated assassin-comedy Grosse Point Blank and seminal low-key romantic comedy High Fidelity.

Hence, the following list.

1. John Cusack. Always intensely likable even when the character he's playing isn't. Better yet, he can do smart with ease. The over-caffeinated commitment-phobic Rob is the sort of character he excels at.

2. It's about a bunch of elitist pricks ragging on their customers, and feeling superior to everyone thanks to their encyclopedic knowledge of music.

3. The moral of the story is that to find love and happiness, you have to give up. No one's perfect, even polynesian sex godessess have horrible, washed-out cotton panties amongst the lingerie. And that's ok.

4. It's content to just let the humour and story develop from the characters instead forcing all sort of superfluous plot points and artificial crisises into the movie.

5. The scene where the incredibly awkward Dick hits on a girl. Hell, just Dick in his entirety.


Not coincidentally, the "It's not who you are, it's what you like" seduction routine reminds me of Gillen & McKelvie's excellent music-as-magic comic Phonogram. It could just be because they share the same obsessions, but I suspect High Fidelity was a conscious influnce. (Go read the first issue for free, and give Warren Ellis' Fell a go while you're there as well.)

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