Then there's High Fidelity, the new John Cusack film. Cusack plays Rob, the thirtyish owner of a collectible record store, whose girlfriend (Iben Hjejle) is in the process of leaving him. The movie is basically Cusack soliloquizing to the camera, rehashing past loves lost, trying to figure out what his trouble is with women.
As the favorite pastime of Rob and his music-geek employees (Todd Louiso and Tenacious D's Jack Black, who are both terrific) is making up top 5 "desert island" lists, Rob explores his problem by listing his top 5 worst breakups, and deconstructing them. At first this seems fruitless, but between the rehashing and the way Rob handles a new relationship and the dissolution of his old one, the theme pulls together.
The record store, and the concomitant fetishism of its patrons, flesh out the theme of the movie, and make all of Cusack's camera narrations worthwhile. Rob is such a solipsistic control freak, he's unwilling to give his passion to something that might not utilize it the way he wants it to. So he saves it all for his records and his lists and his compilation tapes.
That theme, and its ultimate resolution, may be cliché, but Cusack is eminently likeable, as always. All the performances are very good, and the material never feels old or contrived.
I finally just got around to seeing Being John Malkovich a couple of weeks ago (and loved it), so I'm kind of seeing these two films almost side-by-side. There's an interesting juxtaposition in how relationships are handled. Where BJM's theme is manipulation of other people, HF's theme of solipsism is almost the inverse of that. Instead of the struggle being to get other people to be what one wants them to be, it is the struggle of getting oneself to be emotionally equipped to handle other people.
A hair long, and not perfect, but pretty damned good. Four planets out of five.
BTW, Catherine Zeta-Jones has a pretty good cameo in High Fidelity, and I understand that she was supposedly born in 1969. Now, she's hot and all, but there's no fuckin' way she's two years younger than me.
