"Some people never got over Vietnam or the night their band opened for Nirvana." (micro-review)

John Cusak has been in some interesting movies. Grosse Point Blanke and Being John Malkovich immediately come to mind. That being said, I’ve always enjoyed watching his films. I recall my wife talking about another John Cusak movie, based on a book she had read, called High Fidelity. I also remembered seeing a scene or two of this film, set in a record shop where the disgruntled shop-clerk (Jack Black) tells a customer he can’t have Stevie Wonder’s album because “there’s no way your daughter likes that music!” During a visit to Future Shop I saw a copy of High Fidelity for the bargain price of $11.95. Put all these elements together and I’m sure you can’t blame me for making yet another blind-purchase.

I’ve never read the book so I can’t comment on how accurate it is, but there are two things I’ve learned over the years; never judge a book by its movie, and never criticize a good movie simply because it doesn’t exactly follow the book. Regardless of the book, I enjoyed High Fidelity. What exactly did I enjoy? Well, allow me to give you my top five reasons to see the film:

#5. Jack Black – where he is, there is comedy. Always.

#4. Fantastic soundtrack – what else would you expect from a film centered around a character who loves music and owns his own record store?

#3. Constant camera focused monolog – ok, I think I just created that term. It means that the main character narrates a good portion of the film by speaking directly to the camera. I always like stuff like that.

#2. John Cusak – I’m going to check IMDB to see if I’ve ever seen a John Cusak film I didn’t like…ok, there’s one (The Thin Red Line) but it had nothing to do with Cusak himself.

#1. This one’s a combination of #5 and #4 – Jack Black gives a brilliant musical performance in one of those wonderful movie-moments that just makes you smile.

High Fidelity is a romantic-comedy, I guess. Or maybe it’s more of a dramatic-comedy. I’m not really sure. The point is it’s both funny and engaging. I think I’d put High Fidelity in one of those “great date-movie” categories. I’m still not sure what that means.

Rockin’ trivia for ‘High Fidelity’.