One thing that bothers me about High Fidelity (the movie)

My friend Ken, who runs the record store here, says he doesn't believe Rob (who's a hell of a lot like Ken on a bad day) would fall for a hippy chick singing "Baby I Love Your Way". She does seem like she should be setting bullshit detectors on high. But I blame Lisa Bonet's performance.

So you really blame Edith Frost, then?

I haven't heard enough Edith Frost to really getthe joke, hstencil. But I think I know what yer getting at.

and I was referring more to Bonet's performance as an actress with Cusack. Not her singing voice.

I'll hand it to Jody, at least ONE of three would think she sucks ass.

One out of three music nerds always do.

Eek! I found a fault in one my favorite movies! Time to run through a windowpane.

If we're picking among Chicago-based female solo singer-songwriters I think a closer mark would be Rebecca Gates (sorry, Rebecca).

I think sifting in slow-mo through the DVD to pick out acquantances is going to become a sizable Chicago pastime.

Rebecca Gates is a good call. I heard her recent EP for Badman and thought it sounded like something Lisa Bonet might do.

I'm also with Nabisco on the original complaint. There's a reason he reminded me of my record store manager friend "on a bad day." Though I don't think the other two need to necessarily outgrow their interests, as long as it doesn't tear them up with self-loathing.

Surely the Neil Hamburger cameo must have done them some good.

Uh, didn't think there was one, but perhaps the few people who know Al Johnson thought his Beefheart-obsessed fan was funny. Drag City did work pretty extensively with the filmmakers on various things (hello, product placement!).

And of course there's a part where Ian Williams is walking through one scene in the store, but no lines.

Rebecca Gates = truly horrid

Track 34: The Coctails
"Yeah, those are puppets of us above the bar there."
"I'm the good-looking one."
"Shut up, Archer."
"No you shut up, Barry."

I mean, the thing starts with his cozy record-geek existence getting dealt a big blow (girlfriend leaving): his biggest mistreatments of both employees and customers seem to come basically as a result of finding the whole field of music geekdom just pointless and annoying once real life has started making big scary noises in the background.

i can only think of:

ian williams
al johnson
liam hayes

(i only saw the movie once).

A friend of mine who worked at D.C. at the time claims that he was written for a scene with Sara Gibson (who was in the movie for all of like, what, two seconds?), but that it was dropped because she was so short, the D.P. couldn't frame them. Keep in mind this guy is quite a bit shorter than me, and I'm 6'.

(yep Zac, it got lots worse, a nice respiratory infection - I'm finally on the mend now I think)

But the blurb and the book are two different things. I thought more that the character of Rob had issues more than the writer. But I may have missed the boat a bit. A lot of guys DO think women are aliens, so I assumed Hornby was showing this rather than espousing it.

"It's not what you're like, it's what you like."

Ten pages into the book I realized I was going to be spending 300 some more pages with a person who I would avoid in real life.

keith

Oddly, the women I know who've read the book have enjoyed it quite a bit, and actually found the Rob character more likable in the book because at least there was some explanation as to what was going through his head.

Details, I know, but stillll....

I guess I don't count as a woman Sean knows. Add me to your database pls.

haven't read the book.

I dunno, a real Beefheart-Obsessed Fan might have noted that today is the good Captain's birthday. He turns 62.

Nick Hornby ate scarabs and turned into a giant serpent? I think that would have made him more likeable rather than less.

I thought both book and movie were meh: I went into the movie hoping Cusack would make up for the more unlikeable bits of the book, but it never quite worked.

Might have noted that the record shown in the film was NOT a rare French pressing of Safe As Milk?

Nicole has reached the point of no return. Sad, really. ;-) *flees*

This thread actually inspired me to borrow it from a friend and watch it a second time, and I found it pretty much the same: generally enjoyable, and a decent enough treatment of mundane laundry-list sorts of angst. And reasonably funny. The music is terrible, but I doubt most audiences cared too much about that.

I was also thinking about the Hornby issue from the US to the UK and basically yes: the tastes of Hornby and the tastes of Hornby's Rob are both sort of old-mannish -- you get the sense that both would have basically given up somewhere around 1987. I'm not sure why he gets more of a free pass on this in the US: I get the sense that music-obsessiveness is a much smaller phenomenon in this country, possibly, and so Hornby, with this particular book, gets let off lightly as a godfather of sorts. (I.e., some sense of different era / same concerns.) It's very jarring seeing the tastes of Hornby's Rob slotted into the context of the film, where a guy who spins dance music wanders around an apartment decorated with indie-rock show posters talking about ... old soul records.

Confidential to hstencil: the performance scene sounded a lot like Lisa Bonet to me -- if that really was a Frost overdub Frost might be better off not admitting it to anyone.

Not about testicular cancer? Well, cancer does enter the book fairly late on as a McGuffin/excuse for not committing to a relationship. "I don't want to have to come home from work in 20 years' time to be faced with a pale, frightened woman saying that she'd been shitting blood." He asks us to believe that he doesn't commit because he's scared that his partner will die. Smarter writers like Richard Yates or Banana Yoshimoto could have written a perfectly fine book just from that theme, but here it feels gratuitous and I have to say, As One Who's Been There, it is spurious bullshit.

Thing I loved about the film: the Lene Lovich poster for 'Stateless' up in the shop. Inspired!

Ha I am a nerd.

Yeah but if you're from or have lived there, you have to ignore how completely disjointed it seems (he's on the Blue Line! Now he's on the Red Line! Whoa!).

I once went to a party in the apartment that was used as Tim Robbins's character's apartment in the movie. It's next to the Division Street Baths. And there's no payphone out front where you can get soaked in the rain.

I agree with whomever upthread said that there was no real motivation for the girlfriend to get back with him. If girls got back together with dudes because of mixtapes, well... That's my main problem with the movie: there's no motivation for the characters to do anything. Which ultimately makes it seem pretty false. Dunno about the book, never read it, but seeing the movie makes me not want to.

I dont know, but who says that the reason they got back together was because of something he did? (I havent read the book). I mean, the real reason could simply have been - she wanted to- she still wanted to be with him. No other grand reason necessary. The mix tape was simply a pretext.

I find the idea that someone would fall in love with me to be a laughably absurd idea.

What's actually more interesting to me is that there's lots of room to think that Laura is actually going through a parallel process of conversion: I don't remember the nuance of it in the book, which I read a long time ago, but in the movie her decision to go back to him is sort of a ... well, you can frame it in two ways, one mean and one nice. The mean way would be to say that it's giving up, it's a decision that she's just not up to the stress and hassle of changing her life -- but the nice way would be to say that in a moment of actual need she realizes that it's Rob she feels comfortable with, Rob she wants to be around, Rob who feels like "home" (the word "home" is much used in the screenplay) ... and it's possible to claim her own character-shift is going on in realizing that this is somehow more important than the aspirations she has that Rob doesn't share. (Explication of his good qualities is off-page and out-of-frame, so we only learn that she's decided he's worth it. And if he's working as our proxy that's exactly what're supposed to want to hear -- despite your ridiculous flaws you're worth it.)

Em@il: That's not actually incompatible with feeling like you deserve it anyway.

1. No, Hornby was always an utter tosser, at least from his first big-hit book on. (That book is [even?] worse than this one.)

2. 'People hold it to Russian-lit standards': yes, and 'people' = 'American people' - that was my point, and is perhaps sth only visible from here.

3. You are correct, I think, about the careless genre-mix-ups, etc.

Others:

4. I prefer the film to the book: partly because it has less... Nick Hornby in it. Whoever said Hugh Grant would have made it worse: yes, indeed.

5. Justyn D: no, I don't think Americans are boring. If I did, I'd say so. I think they're... exciting.

I'll revive this thread when i see it again.

Kill me now, please.

better than i remember this movie. way better.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2006/12/08/arts/Chase600.jpg

http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-images/Arts/Arts_/Pictures/2006/12/14/highfidelity460.jpg

http://youtube.com/watch?v=avgAgcL-pag

http://youtube.com/watch?v=B_SZEacyD6I

http://youtube.com/watch?v=t93hWw8iH74

http://youtube.com/watch?v=beo_UYb-jfc

oh no this actually happened

a musical? what the..

By BEN BRANTLEY
Published: December 8, 2006 NY Times

excerpt:
Surely geeks grow in Brooklyn too. Yet in the musical version of “High Fidelity,” directed by Walter Bobbie, these overgrown lads have shed both their sting and their pain. The characters have the same names and say many of the same things. In addition to Rob — who takes inventory of his romantic past while mourning the departure of his live-in girlfriend, Laura (Jenn Colella) — there are his customer-scaring employees and best friends, the meek Dick (Christian Anderson) and the brash Barry (Jay Klaitz, in the Jack Black role).

If you’ve been a die-hard patron of Broadway over the last decade, you have probably noticed that something weird happens to figures from books and movies when they enter the land of musicals. The rough edges and prickly quirks that made them distinctive soften into a uniform blandness. ...

...Still, “High Fidelity” definitely deserves a place in my own catalog of Top 5 lists. That would be on the roster of All-Time Most Forgettable Musicals. Now if only I could remember the names of the others.

Oh hells no!

Ok fine, a musical version of High Fidelity. But then shouldn't the music sound like Belle & Sebastian? Or Stevie Wonder? Or anything besides Tin Pan Alley one hundred times removed? Is the music of The 13th Floor Elevators or Smog forever incompatible with Broadway?

P. S. Hedwig was TPA in glam drag.

It seems like Broadway basically has one musical, and when they adapt something they just change the names of the characters.

Why did I think this already opened, bombed and closed?

wow, that just looks horrible

Yeah, what Hurting said. I remember reading about this a while back.

Oh aye, that article's dated December last year. As you were.

Saw this tonight for the first time since 2000. The record store in an incel den! But loved seeing all the locations and posters and such on a big screen.

Posted when Zoe Kravitz was in high school and two decades before the reboot:

Who would be the real world equivalent of the Lisa Bonet character?
― maria b (maria b), Wednesday, January 15, 2003 7:21 PM (twenty-one years ago) bookmarkflaglink

Lenny Kravitz?
― dave225 (Dave225), Wednesday, January 15, 2003 7:25 PM (twenty-one years ago) bookmarkflaglink

Showed it to my 17 year old earlier this year and he loved it. Didn't we all know some of these people IRL? I certainly did. One of them pulled off the "I'll sell 5 copies of this album right now" when he played Sinead O'Conner's debut in the store.