Just watch the last 30 minutes of Hi Fidelity on Bravo. What a great movie. I first saw it in London, a really late-night showing at a movie theatre just off of Piccadilly Circus. When I got out of the theatre, it was ass-early in the am. I found a bus going back towards my hotel. After about 10 minutes the bus driver pulled the bus over, turned off the lights and got out and – I presume – went home to bed. Fortunately for me, we were just a couple of blocks from my hotel.

Anyway…

Hi Fidelity. John Cusack (has he ever made a bad movie?), Jack Black (who does a kick-ass rendition of Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get it On”), Tim Robbins (playing a prig with a long gray ponytail), from the book by Nick Hornby. It’s hard to make a really good movie from a really good book, but Cusack et al did a fabulous job with it. Ladies, if you want to get some clue about a man’s journey in life, Hi Fidelity is a good place to start.

After I got home from my trip to England, I picked up Hornby’s novel and couldn’t put it down. Because someone had squirted Super Glue all over the cover of the book. Ha ha.

No, seriously folks, the book is one of my favorites. Hornby’s a really raw, visceral, yet totally accessible writer. Reading Hi Fidelity was like a super-slo-mo punch in the gut, with tender kisses to ease the pain.

Literally within minutes of finishing that book I was in the car heading to the book store to pick up his next novel, About a Boy. This one was even better. It was so good, in fact, that I couldn’t read it. It was too painful, too close to my own recent experience for me to be detached. I’d like to spend some time with it again soon, perhaps see if I can make it through.

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Sunday, March 14th, 2004 @ 6:14 pm Movie Matters
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