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High Fidelity Customer Reviews (28 - 30 of 81 Reviews)

The Universality of Male Angst
I read this novel by Nick Hornby years before the movie's release and it captured with great truth the sad, sorry experiences that men go through in their quest for women and what they imagine is love. But dating disasters, as funny or tragic as they might be, are nothing to do with real love: they are the hormonally controlled antics of men who are either immature, groping the best they can in the dark and making progress towards the real thing, or men who are total losers and doomed never to make any worthwhile connection with a real woman at all. The delight of this book is to see what appears to be a consummate loser, the record shop owner, actually make progress by the end of the story, to truly change himself for the better, which is the essential ingredient of all satisfying personal drama.

Being a Londoner (near enough) like Nick Hornby, you can imagine my horror when I found out the film was to be produced, but transported to Chicago! I was slightly more hopeful when I found out that John Cusack, who makes every film he is in better (rather like the way Gene Hackman or Sean Connery always do), was going to star in the main role, but I could not imagine the quintessentially English atmosphere of the book holding up to the standard Hollywood treatment. How wrong I was - I had forgotten the principle that most human experience is universal, and male angst is no different. When you watch the film, you realize that the voice over commentary by John Cusack actually contains vast chunks of Nick Hornby's original prose lifted straight from the book, and yet it works perfectly, none of the book's truths about our desperate and at times pathetic love lives has been lost, none of the script seems out of place or time, and the movie is as hilarious and satisfying as the novel.

So buy the DVD, play it again for yourself and your closest male friends - the ones who actually understand what an idiot you were when you were breaking up with your last girlfriend - and then play it once more for your new girlfriend (only once you've been together past the All Men Are A.holes phase), pointing out to her all the terrible things that John Cusack is saying and, even worse, thinking, and reminding her that even though you've met guys like that, you're totally, completely different......

I Play It All The Time
It's hard to know what I like best: the book, the movie, or the soundtrack. ALL of them are wonderful in their own way. The language of Nick Hornby. The crazy antics of Jack Black. But even though I love the first two, I think the soundtrack is the best of all. It has something for all moods. It has classics. It has foreign music. I love to play it over and over again in my car. I highly recommend it to anyone who loved the movie.

I really don't have much to say about this movie...
...other than that I didn't like it much. Supposed to be a movie for the boys, about a frustrated music-lover that "any guy can relate or identify himself to!" -well, I didn't. The acting (John Cusack), he certainly is not the problem -he delievers with style what he has got to work with, but the story is a shallow mess! This guy whose girlfriend has broke up with him, and suddenly he starts to ask the main question in life -who is he? And as an idea to find out where he goes wrong time after time he asks all his past-girlfriends out on dates. This may sound hysterical-funny, but it's simply (in my opinion) so "unbeliavable" and too much! I couldn't relate to this "losers'" way of thinking or anything else in "High Fidelity". "About a boy" starring Hugh Grant (ever so different, but...) is a far better way of describe the "modern" man. This movie, I've seen it twice to see if it would change my opinion, is SO overrated!

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