High Fidelity (2000)
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High Fidelity Movie Review
High Fidelity is a 2000 romantic comedy film directed by Stephen Frears and starring John Cusack. It’s a very overrated, annoying movie.
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“If you really wanted to screw me up,
you should’ve gotten to me earlier“
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Rob is a thirty-year-old record store owner who is trying to understand why he is always unlucky in relationships. He attempts to reconcile his relationship with Laura, who recently dumped him. My main gripe with this movie is that it is rather dated in its breaking the fourth wall, self-deprecating and cynical approach at storytelling. I certainly respected this particular quirk to the movie, but I personally do not like this style of filmmaking all that much to be honest.
John Cusack is great in the main role. His performance is quite good and competent and he steals the show from everybody else. However, I strongly disliked Rob Gordon as a character. In fact, I found all of the movie’s characters utterly annoying. None of them appealed to me at any capacity and the conversations that they had, especially in the music store, were rather irritating.
And that’s a thing about High Fidelity. If you know people like this, you are bound to love the movie. If you like music and the music industry, you are bound to enjoy it tremendously as the movie is filled with a lot of references to music, especially rock music. But I am not a rock music fan and I do not like people like these guys, so my enjoyment of the movie was significantly reduced as a result of that.
The female characters are well developed, but even the romance did not work for me. I liked the protagonist’s references to his past failures in relationships and heartbreaks, that was very well done – self-deprecating and memorably dark, but overall the film rushed its central relationship in favor of more scenes with the main character and the other guys.
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High Fidelity has some very good lines of dialogue that are again quite memorable in their dark streak. The humor can be solid, but also quite annoying at times depending on the scene. The acting is fine as is the cinematography, but the movie left me in the cold emotionally.
