Some Notes on High Fidelity

In the spirit of High Fidelity, we've replaced your regularly scheduled film notes with mostly trivial top five lists. Enjoy.

Top five actors who always play it the same: John Wayne, Woody Allen, Clint Eastwood, Jack Nicholson after 1979, John Cusack

Top five adjectives that describe 'cusackness': affable, awkward, clueless, charming, likable

Top five quotes about John Cusack:

• "What Cusack does better than anyone else is capture the in-between moment in growing up, when the emerging adult and the kid play cat and mouse. He is a master of playing characters on the teasing edge of becoming."
• "Men identify with him. Women want to date him. Nobody doesn't like John Cusack."
• "You know how in The Grifters, my character, the con man Roy Dillon, had such it dark heart? I'd have to say I'm right smack in the middle of Lloyd [Dobler, from Say Anything] and Roy."
• "Cusack seems like an enhanced Everyguy, marked by the courage to follow his own inner compass. That wry yet watchful self-assurance is the key to his quiet magnetism."
• "As the trenchcoat-clad Dobler, Cusack vibrated with naked desire. His hair was a crested mess, his body grub pale. His was an endearment born of smarts and insecurity, self-effacement combined with clear intent, a style built on compulsive honesty and hinged on delivery--an effervescent, rapid-fire, soul-purging expulsion of thought and emotion, pointless yet compelling, like shoveling sand against the tide."

Top five things people mention about High Fidelity:

• Co-written by Cusack, Steve Pink and D.V. DeVincentis-all high school buddies
• Rabid music buffs recall rabid movie buffs
• Jack Black (who plays Barry) is the lead singer of Tenacious D.
• Realistic--these are characters you could meet on the street
• John Cusack talks to the camera a lot (They harp on this. They really do.)

Top five differences between High Fidelity the book and High Fidelity the movie:

• The book is longer more finely detailed
• The movie has John Cusack's charisma and Jack Black's venom
• Laura's character in the movie is much smaller
• The book takes place in London; the movie in Chicago
• The book is more difficult but also more rewarding

Top five quotes from High Fidelity:

• "I guess I should have forgotten about it ages ago, but forgetting isn't something I'm very good at."
• "You need as much ballast as possible to stop you from floating away; you need people around you, things going on, otherwise life is like some film where the money ran out, and there are no sets, or locations, or supporting actors, and it's just one bloke on his own staring into the camera with nothing to do and nobody to speak to, and who'd believe this character then?"
• "The unhappiest people I know, romantically speaking, are the ones who like pop music the most; and I don't know whether pop music has caused this unhappiness, but I do know that they've been listening to the sad songs longer than they've been living the unhappy lives."
• "If you really wanted to mess me up, you should have got to me earlier."
• "It was the asking that was the important thing."