Lives Loves Lists & Lusts (High Fidelity (DVD))

Name: sandrabarber

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Product:	High Fidelity (DVD)
Date:	13/01/02 (43 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Amusing, Entertaining, Very well acted

Disadvantages: None

Rob Gordon makes lists. He has a top 5 of everything, including people. Superficial? Yes, and he knows it. It helps him get through life if he can catalogue its events and heartaches and file them away in neat little piles. Or so he thinks.

When his girlfriend Laura leaves him, he copes by categorising the break-up of their relationship and analysing it against his all-time top 5 break-ups. Well, he thinks he copes. As he begins to rehash his old heartbreaks, he becomes aware that his way of dealing with the world has left him with many unresolved conflicts which now won't go away, and which he realises have affected the relationship he has just lost. The film sees him coming to terms with his past , going through the stages of a broken heart and deciding to win Laura back.

Doesn't sound like a comedy? Believe me, it is. Rob is hugely likeable, totally recognisable as a modern male, very witty and gets himself into all sorts of hilarious, horrendous situations. And his whole life-appraisal is performed to the songs of the time (accompanied by some wicked hairstyles and dress codes in the flashback scenes).

Rob is played by John Cusack, and played perfectly. The movie opens with Cusack doing a monologue to camera, and he does this often throughout. where this is often irritating in film, it works great in this one, drawing the audience into Rob's life and inner world to the point where you think he really is your friend and you're dying to shout advice back at the screen.

Rob owns a record store - Championship Vinyl - in which works two other great characters who each have their frustrations and social ineptitudes to bear. The trio make a brilliant ensemble as they spend their days cataloguing, analysing, arguing and acting downright daft.

The acting in this film is superb. Cusack IS Rob, he inhabits the character completely and is utterly convincing. You laugh with him, share his frustration, understa
nd his restlessness, feel for his pain and really want him to find a happy ending. I don't know a lot of Cusack's work, so this film was like a discovery for me and I can't wait to see more of him. In this film he shows probably the best comic timing I've seen since the old Hollywood slick comedies of the 30s and 40s.

Jack Black as Rob's fellow worker and frustrated singer is stunning and hogs the limelight in all of his scenes. He is ably matched by his shy, stuttering, self-effacing co-worker played by an actor whose name I'm ashamed to say I forget. And Iben Hjele as Laura is intelligent, gifted and a real 'one to watch'.

There are fine cameos by Catherine Zeta Jones as a pretentious ex, Lisa Bonet as a free-spirited local singer, and Joan Cusack is Rob's current ex's best friend.

Tim Robbins gives a terrific, touchy-feely performance as the ageing new-ager who Laura subsequently shacks up with, and Bruce Springsteen pops up as himself and does it very well.

The soundtrack is a delight, spanning the last 3 decades and taking the viewer back to episodes in his/her own life at the same time. It also shows the power of music to get people together, unite them, cause them friction and drive them apart.

I won't give away the ending, except to say that it ties up all the loose ends in a very satisfactory way, not just for Rob but for the other main characters too.

I haven't read Nick Hornby's book, so I can only review this film as a stand-alone, and stand alone it certainly does as a great way to spend a couple of hours of your life. It's warm, it's funny, it's utterly engaging and in an age of lowbrow simplicity it emerges as a real showpiece of character-driven intelligent film-making of the highest order.

Summary: