High Fidelity

High Fidelity (2000) is about a man who runs a record shop and sorts his entire life into lists. Rob's girlfriend Laura leaves him. He turns directly to the camera, starts talking to the audience, and lists the five worst break ups of his life. Then he decides to find all five and ask why it ended. That direct address is the method. Rob keeps explaining himself to us, justifying himself, and occasionally it emerges that he is lying. The two people who work in the shop, Barry and Dick, have turned musical taste into a moral question. They throw customers out, make lists, and treat knowing an obscure record as a form of superiority. The real point is that Rob sorts people the way he sorts records and has never learned to sustain a relationship. The film tells him so at the end. It is adapted from Nick Hornby's novel. The book is set in London; the film moved it to Chicago and Hornby said he liked the change. John Cusack stars and is one of the writers; Jack Black became known through Barry. Bruce Springsteen appears briefly as himself. The soundtrack is the film's device for defining character; every track carries information about a person. A series was made from the same story twenty years later. It runs 113 minutes. Good for: music culture, relationship comedy, and the early two thousands. Less good for: the lead is deliberately unlikeable and the women are thinly written.