Latest / All The Right Movies / High Fidelity (2000) | Ep. 9 - Part 1

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High Fidelity (2000) | Ep. 9 - Part 1 · All The Right Movies

• 0:04
  All their movies. What came first?
• 0:08
  Music or the misery? People worry about kids playing
• 0:12
  with guns or watching violent videos.
• 0:14
  Some sort of culture of violence will take them over.
• 0:17
  Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands,
• 0:20
  literally thousands, of songs about heartbreak, rejection,
• 0:24
  pain, misery and loss. Did I listen to pop music
• 0:29
  because I was miserable, or was I miserable because I listened
• 0:33
  to pop music? Record store owner Rob Gordon
• 0:36
  has left broken hearted and embarks on a musical journey
• 0:39
  through his disastrous love life.
• 0:40
  He tries to understand what it all means in a bid to win back
• 0:43
  his true love. Adapted from Nick Hornby's novel
• 0:46
  Stephen Free, His High Fidelity performed respectively at the
• 0:48
  box office and has steadily built a strong following thanks
• 0:51
  to its writing, performances and one of the all time top five
• 0:54
  movie soundtracks. My name's Luke, and with me are
• 0:57
  Matt. I wasn't interested in Penny's
• 0:59
  nice qualities, just her breasts.
• 1:01
  And Westie. Hey, Rob, you fucking?
• 1:04
  Asshole, Did all the right movies watch High Fidelity
• 1:07
  because we were miserable or were we miserable because we
• 1:10
  watch High Fidelity? Hi, you're listening to All the
• 1:32
  Right Movies, the Elitist Movie Snob podcast on classic and hit
• 1:35
  films. Yes we are.
• 1:37
  Yes, we. Are today on the show?
• 1:40
  We're going back to the turn of the century to talk about a
• 1:42
  personal and collective favorite of ours, High Fidelity.
• 1:45
  Indeed. I know our episodes generally do
• 1:47
  go beyond the two hour mark, and you may have noticed that this
• 1:50
  one's slightly longer than that. There's a reason for that.
• 1:53
  There's an extra special bonus, the Co writer of High Fidelity,
• 1:55
  DV Divincentis. He'll be stopping by after the
• 1:58
  short answer a few questions, so stick around for that one for
• 2:01
  sure. Great guy.
• 2:02
  Oh yes. Very excited.
• 2:04
  First up though, if we're in your top five movie podcasts and
• 2:08
  would like us to keep churning out the big hits, then your
• 2:11
  support on Patreon would be hugely appreciated.
• 2:14
  Yes, it certainly would. Yeah, fantastic.
• 2:16
  I. Wonder how many times you're
• 2:17
  going to reference top five in this whole episode.
• 2:18
  It's. Just too many.
• 2:20
  Top five everything What's your top five hot dinners?
• 2:27
  We'll see, we'll rank them up as we go.
• 2:31
  There's loads of exclusive content on Patreon as well,
• 2:34
  enough to keep you going for the whole year probably.
• 2:36
  You'll get access to our podcast archive.
• 2:39
  Only our most recent 20 podcasts are available on general
• 2:42
  release, and the rest are exclusive only to our Patrons.
• 2:45
  And on top of that, there's an additional 31 podcasts that
• 2:48
  we've created exclusively for Patriot Lords to be getting on
• 2:51
  with. Pure value, isn't it?
• 2:53
  Let's be honest. Do you know how many hours in
• 2:54
  total that is content? Content hours wise, I don't
• 2:58
  know, it feels like about 19 years.
• 3:05
  It's not the years, it's the mileage.
• 3:07
  Lovely that I don't I I couldn't even have.
• 3:11
  It Matt, Matt, so you can. Have the good 76.
• 3:15
  Oh, Matt. Oh, very close.
• 3:17
  Seven. Really.
• 3:19
  Oh. Very good for.
• 3:20
  Me. Matt wins.
• 3:23
  Oh, nineteen years, he definitely does.
• 3:27
  Those hours are increasing every month, so how could you say in
• 3:30
  order that kind of a deal? Yeah, exactly.
• 3:32
  Go to patreon.com/all the Right Movies to sign up.
• 3:35
  Thanks guys. Back to the show Westie.
• 3:38
  Why are we talking about High Fidelity?
• 3:40
  Because it's a fucking great film, isn't it?
• 3:41
  It's just so violent and funny, and the soundtrack picks fucking
• 3:44
  hard. The description of that film is
• 3:49
  in the film. Watch this consistently.
• 3:52
  I would say definitely every month since 2000, since it's
• 3:56
  been a while, every single month.
• 3:59
  I can't remember like a four or five week period where I didn't
• 4:02
  fit this in at some point. Absolutely adore it.
• 4:04
  We haven't stopped talking about this since it came out and I
• 4:07
  think we've kind of modelled ourselves on them three guys and
• 4:12
  we've got exactly the same outlook.
• 4:13
  Everyone says we're snobs and we're saying no, we're not,
• 4:15
  though Everyone says you relate this to about no, we're not.
• 4:17
  But you know, I'm waxing lyrical about camera movements as if I'm
• 4:20
  like Roger Diggins and just now, you know, just, you know, you're
• 4:24
  a movie podcast. I love all these characters.
• 4:26
  I love the world. I love the problems.
• 4:28
  I love how relatable it is, how personal it is.
• 4:31
  Everyone can get something from this.
• 4:32
  And it's really emotional and it's really, really, really
• 4:36
  fucking funny. This is like right on my sense
• 4:40
  of humor scale from like 1:00 to 10:00.
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  It's just absolutely fantastic. I love it.
• 4:44
  Love it. What about you, Matt?
• 4:47
  For me, it's a bit like Spinal Tap in that I think it's good
• 4:50
  for yourself, a bit of variety in our episodes, you know,
• 4:52
  nothing, not all episodes have to be, you know, an absolute
• 4:55
  storm called critically acclaimed classic or big, you
• 4:58
  know, violent crime drama. So to do an episode on a
• 5:01
  romantic comedy, I, I think that's good for us.
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  And in terms of the genre, they were so few romantic comedies
• 5:07
  that have like, the depth of writing that this one does, and
• 5:10
  that has the quality of direction and the quality of the
• 5:13
  acting. It's just a cut above so many
• 5:15
  others in that genre. And I think it's a film.
• 5:18
  It's still not quite as appreciated as it should be.
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  I know obviously it won the poll against some pretty big hitters,
• 5:23
  so it is obviously popular. But I think a lot of people take
• 5:26
  this film for granted that just think, oh, High Fidelity.
• 5:29
  Yeah, that was OK, actually. It's just there's so much
• 5:32
  moderate than I think people give it credit for.
• 5:34
  So it's always a trait to watch. And I think it's great to kind
• 5:37
  of give it its moment to shine here.
• 5:39
  Yeah, absolutely. You mentioned it there, Matt.
• 5:42
  I'm stunned that it won the poll, to be honest.
• 5:44
  And if you don't know listeners, we choose four films for each
• 5:48
  episode and put them on a Twitter poll for them to Duke it
• 5:50
  out. And we always put a couple of
• 5:52
  big hitters in there with some personal favourites that weren't
• 5:54
  like massive successes, just to see how they fare against the
• 5:57
  big boys. And High Fidelity came out on
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  top against the likes of Braveheart, Night of the Living
• 6:02
  Dead, and I just did not see that coming.
• 6:05
  Big surprise. Surprise.
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  I'm like you 2 fellas. I absolutely love this film.
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  I saw it when it came out. I've watched it consistently for
• 6:13
  the last 21 years. Not every month, but pretty
• 6:16
  often. Fucking liar.
• 6:20
  There's just something very confident about the film for me.
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  I always go through it if I'm feeling down, it always makes me
• 6:27
  feel happy. So in keeping with the theme of
• 6:30
  the film, top five Things I love about High Fidelity, there's
• 6:32
  another one for you, Westie. There it is.
• 6:34
  There'll be a market down. I'm a big fan of John Cusack and
• 6:38
  I think it all stems from this film.
• 6:39
  Grosby and Blank as well. I think Jack Black pre fame,
• 6:43
  he's great. I don't think he's ever been
• 6:44
  funnier. The writings amazing.
• 6:47
  I think it's really perceptive about love and relationships and
• 6:50
  like you were saying, Matt, something that's kind of lacking
• 6:52
  from the majority of romantic comedies.
• 6:55
  I do love a good supporting cast and this takes the box from Lily
• 6:58
  Taylor to Lisa Bunny. They all have small parts, but
• 7:01
  they all really stand out. And as you quite rightly said,
• 7:04
  Westie, the soundtrack kicks. Were going to ask.
• 7:06
  Yeah. It really does.
• 7:08
  High Fidelity was produced by Tim Bevin and Rude Simmons for
• 7:11
  Touchstone Pictures and Working Title Films, distributed by
• 7:15
  Buena Vista Pictures and released on the 31st of March
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  2000. Filmed on location in Chicago,
• 7:20
  it was Co written by John Cusack, DV Divincentis and Steve
• 7:24
  Pink and directed by Stephen Frears.
• 7:26
  It stars John Cusack, even the Isla Jack Black and Todd Louis
• 7:30
  saw you ready. Let's get it on.
• 8:05
  Will you open with the 13th floor elevator that's playing
• 8:07
  and Rob Heartbroken Matt, what about this opening scene?
• 8:10
  It's really clever because it just tells you everything about
• 8:12
  them straight away. That first line, what came
• 8:14
  first, the music of the misery. It just shows how his problem is
• 8:17
  in life. He can't separate real life,
• 8:20
  real emotions from music and that's his problem.
• 8:22
  Sets it up straight away and. What a song to start with as
• 8:25
  well. As soon as you hear them open
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  the Yeah you don't miss me babe and you know it.
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  And it's the finest use of the soundtrack, going from non
• 8:31
  diagetic diagetic. Oh yeah.
• 8:33
  Great along. Yeah, yeah.
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  It immediately shows us that music's robes.
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  First and greatest love. The first thing he does when
• 8:40
  Laura leaves is reach for his headphones and the song that's
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  playing. The kind of like angry music you
• 8:45
  might listen to to shield yourself from heartbreak.
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  And the lyrics at the words of defiance.
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  You're going to miss me, baby. What a start.
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  The glory of Gone and Rob wallowing in the self pity of
• 9:04
  his desert island. All time top five most memorable
• 9:06
  break UPS where it is Record Store Championship final.
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  In this sequence, we're introduced to the musical moron
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  twins Barry and Dick, and Rob reminisces about #3 on the all
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  time breakup list, Charlie Nicholson.
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  Before we get into that though, let's get this out of the way
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  immediately, Matt. Top five all time recording
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  artists. Yep.
• 9:27
  Well, from 5:00 to 1:00 and I'll see.
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  Now, Barry would hate me because mine are fairly obvious, but
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  it's honestly they really are. Yeah, there's nothing obscure on
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  here. So yeah, from 5:00 to 1:00 it's
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  Pope, Fleetwood Mac, Aretha Franklin, The Beatles, and boy.
• 9:43
  Oh, lovely. That's strong.
• 9:45
  Yeah, that is strong. That is strong.
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  Westie, come on, give us some sugar.
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  Sugar The Beatles. Well, I've done this twice
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  because you asked for a short answer and I'd never give a
• 9:54
  short answer. What I've got is because this is
• 9:56
  a movie podcast, I've got me top five recording artists of all
• 9:59
  time. But then I've got me other top
• 10:00
  five recording artists from films, so I'll be quick.
• 10:03
  Just not what I asked. Top five recording artists The
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  Beatles, Bruce Springsteen, Paul Simon, Led Zeppelin and Iron
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  Maiden. Nice and.
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  Yeah, 35 from films are The Blues Brothers, Lou and Davies,
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  Soggy Button Boys, Barry Driving the Uptown 5 and Stillwater.
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  Amazing. Lovely, very nice.
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  Mine's got a few similarities to yours.
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  Westie Springsteen top, Dylan 2nd, and then a list of Paul
• 10:33
  Simon, The Rolling Stones, and I'm going to throw a curveball
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  in, and many people might not have heard of this guy.
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  Wester, you're going to hate it, but Jessie mallon's #5 no.
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  Fairly new record, yeah, thrown in with a list of all classics.
• 10:49
  Very pussy pussy. In a minute.
• 10:57
  Right, okay, self indulgence over.
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  Where's the What do you think of this sequence?
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  It's championship final. But I mean, it's just brilliant,
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  like, but as soon as you're in that shop, it's just the perfect
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  record shop, isn't it? Amazing out.
• 11:10
  Of all the stickers of the local Chicago bands that are in now.
• 11:13
  Of the posters that are on the walls, I love the introduction
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  to both Dick and Barry Dick's great when he just walks in.
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  He's almost surprised Rob's there.
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  Good morning, hello. He's just and there's that that
• 11:27
  discussion between Dick and Rob is basically reminds me of our
• 11:32
  relationship, Luke, because every time, like if I when I
• 11:34
  used to come over, every time we used to be out and I'll be like,
• 11:37
  have you have you watched that film or have you listened to
• 11:39
  that record yet? You're just like, yeah, I quite
• 11:40
  haven't absorbed that one yet. And I'm like, I'll tape it for
• 11:43
  you. And you're like, yeah, OK.
• 11:44
  I'm like, I'll just tape it for you and then you'll say yes.
• 11:47
  OK, fine. Yeah.
• 11:48
  Fine, just tape the first one. I'll never listen to it.
• 11:51
  Humidism, but that's what that reminds us of.
• 11:53
  And then my Barry comes in and he's just, he's like.
• 11:57
  Holy shit, height. Holy fuck this guy.
• 12:00
  Brilliant Sects, The New Bell and Sebastian.
• 12:05
  So many little bits in this film that I just use in everyday
• 12:08
  life. And one of them is when Jack
• 12:10
  Black's like, you just have to fucking ruin it.
• 12:11
  Like I do that all the time. See, you say to myself like I'm
• 12:14
  a burn of pizza, Say what's your man?
• 12:16
  You just have to fucking ruin it.
• 12:19
  Were your 4th wall breaking as well when you say that?
• 12:22
  All the time I turn to besides if I'm looking at a camera and
• 12:25
  then just like I had to fucking ruin it.
• 12:27
  Top five pizza toppings. I'm not doing that.
• 12:31
  I love the shop, I love the the open and I love the way that the
• 12:34
  relationships are built between the characters.
• 12:37
  I think it's absolutely, absolutely brilliant.
• 12:39
  Lot about you, Matt. Much the same, really.
• 12:41
  I think this introduction, these characters who were going to be
• 12:44
  so key, it's just so well done because you get that instant
• 12:47
  sense of their relationship with each other.
• 12:49
  So soon as you see Dick, you see how needy he is.
• 12:52
  To get like, Rob's validation on Bell and Sebastian, he has to
• 12:55
  know that he likes it as much as he does, and that swims him up
• 12:58
  brilliantly. And then Bobby comes in and it's
• 13:00
  like a bomb going off, just like everything that's nice and calm
• 13:04
  and quiet about this start of the day, just all up in the air
• 13:06
  because Barry's straight in there and it's hilarious.
• 13:09
  And the thing about this film, everything about it just feels
• 13:12
  so truthful. Yeah.
• 13:14
  And this just absolutely nails that kind of bickering but
• 13:17
  affectionate relationship you get with Co workers.
• 13:20
  I mean, Wesley, me and you work together for years at the cinema
• 13:23
  and all these bits of this film just reminds me of all our
• 13:25
  shifts together. Like when you'd have those like
• 13:28
  long periods of downtime when there wasn't anything going on
• 13:30
  and this is how we would fill the time.
• 13:33
  Just talk about lists in films and getting angry at people
• 13:37
  whose tastes didn't tally exactly like ours.
• 13:39
  Just searching everyone. It's a sore truthful.
• 13:42
  It's so close to home there's. People going into shit films
• 13:45
  that would have like ripping the tickets and like, yeah, right.
• 13:48
  Yeah, there. People on Thursday too.
• 13:52
  I tell you what, that's not going to end with top five.
• 14:01
  First Aid The film just gets that.
• 14:03
  You get that history of these characters straight away.
• 14:05
  You know what? This is how they spend their
• 14:07
  day, Talking about mixtapes, getting angry about opinions,
• 14:10
  debating like the right to use brothers.
• 14:12
  You know what's wrong with them? What's right with them?
• 14:15
  And I love the fact that, like, when Rob addresses the camera
• 14:17
  and he tells us he only hide them for three days, but they
• 14:19
  turn upon the days off anyway. Yeah.
• 14:22
  Yeah. That that just tells you exactly
• 14:24
  what type of people you're dealing with here.
• 14:26
  Because that's one of the themes of the film, isn't it?
• 14:28
  It's about getting that balance between stuff you're passionate
• 14:31
  about and the rest of your life, Right.
• 14:33
  And these guys don't have that balance, Right.
• 14:35
  And you see it most of Barry, I think, like when he has a has a
• 14:37
  go at that guy buying the Stevie Wonder record.
• 14:40
  I mean, he's told the obnoxious to him, called him and asked
• 14:42
  Munch. But it is funny like, like when
• 14:44
  he goes bye bye, like when the logs out.
• 14:47
  I absolutely love that the dialogues release it be it's
• 14:50
  filled with jokes, but they don't feel like jokes, which is
• 14:53
  really great. Yeah, yeah.
• 14:55
  And I do like that at the end, you do get that in joke when
• 14:57
  he's having a good Rob about wearing a Cosby sweater.
• 15:00
  A Cosby sweater. Because obviously Lisa Bunny is
• 15:03
  in this and she started her career on The Cosby Show.
• 15:05
  Yeah, nice touch. Fantastic.
• 15:07
  Very nice that I just called to say I love you.
• 15:10
  Part I just one of my favorite parts in the film.
• 15:12
  Barry's just so funny here. He's accommodating them at
• 15:15
  first. I just got to say I love you.
• 15:18
  Yeah. Yeah, we have it.
• 15:20
  Can I have it? Then?
• 15:21
  No. Do you?
• 15:24
  Even know your daughter. But I totally I wholeheartedly
• 15:29
  agree with Barry here. Like Stevie Wonder made
• 15:32
  superstition and living for the city and then ten years later he
• 15:35
  made this trash. But also that's his biggest
• 15:38
  selling record by a country mile.
• 15:39
  I just got to say I love you. It's it's insane.
• 15:42
  It's awful. It is, it is awful.
• 15:45
  But my question is why would this guy be looking for that
• 15:48
  record? It's a single first of all, not
• 15:51
  an album. And presuming this is set in
• 15:53
  modern day, which which it is like that was really 16 years
• 15:56
  ago. But he's totally right.
• 15:58
  There's no fucking way she likes that record.
• 16:02
  Touching on what you were saying, Matt, I think it's quite
• 16:04
  sad in a way that none of these guys really like each other.
• 16:07
  They're all kind of like snidey and snippy towards each other,
• 16:11
  but they're the people that spend they spend the most time
• 16:13
  with. None of them appear to have any
• 16:15
  friends, possibly because nobody fits their music taste criteria.
• 16:19
  So they're just stuck with each other, bound just by that
• 16:21
  musical snobbery that they have. Yeah, yeah, it's awful.
• 16:25
  Yeah, it's awfully, but they're still probably quite happy with
• 16:28
  that at the same time. So we mentioned them a little
• 16:31
  bit. We're going to get to these two
• 16:33
  guys straight off the bat. What do you think, firstly, of
• 16:35
  Jack Black as Barry Jude? He's.
• 16:38
  Dynamite, isn't he? I think, you know, he's
• 16:41
  sensationalist. And I think what's interesting
• 16:42
  is that, like, Black just wasn't confident at all making this.
• 16:45
  He didn't think he was right. He thought he was going to get
• 16:47
  fired. So I think you've got to give
• 16:49
  Stephen Fries a bit of credit here as well for getting that
• 16:52
  performance out of him and reassuring because black in
• 16:55
  this, I mean, to be honest, black in general, he's like when
• 16:58
  you get a bottle of pop and you shake it up, you really shake it
• 17:00
  up. And if you just whack the top
• 17:02
  off, it's going to go everywhere and it's just going to be a
• 17:04
  mess. If you just twist that cup just
• 17:07
  a little bit, you can, like, fine tune it.
• 17:09
  You can direct it. You can spread wherever you
• 17:11
  want. You know, you know how to use
• 17:13
  it. And that's what black is like in
• 17:14
  this for me. And I think it's free.
• 17:16
  It's just not how much black this film needs and what level
• 17:19
  of black the film needs. Yeah, I do love when he's
• 17:22
  talking to Dick about Anna. He's going and a Moss.
• 17:27
  You made this bruiser. Where exactly?
• 17:31
  Yeah. He is.
• 17:32
  He's hilarious. I love that scene when the guy
• 17:36
  comes in asking about the flyer for the band and he asks and
• 17:39
  what what he plays and Barry just matter of fact, he replies
• 17:42
  nothing. Just plays it really cool.
• 17:45
  And he gives him a fist pump, which he kind of fucks up a
• 17:48
  little bit. He does.
• 17:49
  And then he goes to put his elbow back down on the counter
• 17:51
  and misses. Yeah, nice little moment.
• 17:53
  Just in the background there the guys like want to.
• 17:56
  Keep our sensibilities. Our pop sensibility.
• 17:59
  Yeah, yeah. We take our pop sensibility.
• 18:01
  Looks like he's in Faith No More.
• 18:02
  That guy will just jam. Jack Black is always Jack Black.
• 18:10
  It is hard when he does go a little bit too far, like a wind
• 18:15
  up monkeys, like a Tasmanian devil, isn't he?
• 18:17
  Just like you've got it and free as does control him really well.
• 18:20
  And I think when he's acting around Cusack, I think it
• 18:23
  elevates him as well because I think it's Cusack's reactions to
• 18:25
  him that would be our reactions to him where he totally loses
• 18:29
  it. Like he grabs him at one point.
• 18:30
  He's shaking him. Say I will fucking suck your
• 18:32
  nose. You'll pay big.
• 18:36
  When he's like the Jesus and the Mary Chain and he's just like
• 18:38
  ripping him to pieces, it's like Echo with the Bunny man.
• 18:41
  He's just, you're wrong. You see, that's why Rob puts up
• 18:44
  with him, because he's just sold about 10 LP's there just by
• 18:47
  being the. Guy doesn't know what the folks
• 18:49
  just happened. No idea, but he's got blonde on
• 18:52
  blonde so he's fine. Yeah, yeah, it's gonna be okay.
• 18:55
  The role of Barry was written with black in mind, actually.
• 18:58
  Cusack said that he knew Jack would be his secret weapon.
• 19:01
  He'd made a movie with Tim Robbins that was Bob Roberts,
• 19:03
  and he was also doing his Tenacious D stuff.
• 19:05
  So he knew the secret of it was that he had a musician and a
• 19:08
  great comedian, just hadn't got the role like High Fidelity yet.
• 19:12
  Black had other plans. He was really hesitant about
• 19:14
  taking the role, he said. I was just worried that at the
• 19:16
  time, Tenacious Day had this full head of steam and we were
• 19:19
  playing the big houses and I had this legitimate rock'n'roll
• 19:21
  career that I wanted to protect. I didn't want to fuck with that
• 19:25
  legitimate rock'n'roll career. Tenacious Day?
• 19:29
  Surely there's a comedy band. Yeah, but this, this could have
• 19:33
  done nothing but help. Tenacious day, surely?
• 19:35
  Yeah, yeah, of course. Definitely.
• 19:37
  And in the meantime, while Black was flip flopping, Artie Lang
• 19:40
  auditioned. He's a stand up comic.
• 19:42
  He plays the department store centre in Elf who has the dust
• 19:45
  up with Buddy. Oh, OK, right.
• 19:47
  Yeah. Great, I I really like naughty
• 19:49
  lying actually. But Black turned around after a
• 19:51
  dressing down from Stephen Frears, who told him that
• 19:53
  everyone around him knew he was perfect for the role.
• 19:56
  The only person that didn't was him, and he confessed later that
• 20:00
  he was intimidated working with Stephen Frears.
• 20:01
  He'd loved Dangerous Liaisons and he said I was intimidated,
• 20:05
  that I wasn't going to be good enough and acted to pull this
• 20:07
  off. God bless him.
• 20:08
  God blessing. What do you think about Todd
• 20:10
  Luiso as Dick Westy? Todd Luiso is fantastic in this.
• 20:14
  He's so understated. He's so fucking fragile.
• 20:18
  Yeah, he's a timid little creature, isn't he?
• 20:20
  Like, you'll do anything for anyone.
• 20:22
  And I imagine his mixtapes are just like, fucking amazing.
• 20:25
  Like, everything could be written perfectly.
• 20:27
  Oh yeah, everything could be in the right order.
• 20:29
  My favorite? Well, I love lots of scenes with
• 20:32
  the men, but one of my favourites is when Rob's
• 20:33
  reorganising these records and he's like.
• 20:36
  He wants to stay. Yeah, not alphabetical.
• 20:38
  He's like autobiographical. It's when he's like no fucking
• 20:42
  way that's so good and say you shouldn't keep the piled up like
• 20:46
  this cause the pressure is I'll see you tomorrow.
• 20:50
  Fantastic. He's great.
• 20:51
  What I love about the character is that he's completely the
• 20:54
  other side of this musical moron Twins coin.
• 20:57
  He's the direct opposite to Barry, shy and introvert and
• 21:00
  sensitive, and Barry's just none of that.
• 21:03
  But they both have this musical snob thread running through
• 21:06
  them, and it makes it believable that the two of them would be
• 21:08
  able to work together without killing each other.
• 21:10
  Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a really nice moment
• 21:12
  where they're coming up with the top five records to play at
• 21:14
  Laura's dad's funeral. And Barry says you can't always
• 21:17
  get what you want. And Dixie is immediate
• 21:19
  disqualification because of its association with A Big Chill.
• 21:21
  And Barry says, Oh my God, you're right.
• 21:23
  Probably the only time they agree on something.
• 21:25
  Yeah, yeah, yeah. When no one else is around,
• 21:27
  though, Rob's not there, yeah. And I like this little moment
• 21:32
  that you said he shares with Anna Moss.
• 21:34
  He plays the Stiff Little Fingers and somebody asks him if
• 21:36
  it's a new Green Day and he throws her this look like, you
• 21:39
  know, some people. Totally right.
• 21:42
  I love. That yeah, great.
• 21:44
  And I do like that he finds love.
• 21:46
  And although Barry does take the piss, he's genuinely happy for
• 21:49
  him to smoke that ass. Yeah, yeah, he is great.
• 21:52
  Very good. He's very much the Ying to
• 21:54
  Black's young, isn't he? The like you say, two sides, the
• 21:57
  same coin and Black is like the militant obsessive.
• 22:00
  Like why don't you fucking know on this album?
• 22:02
  Where's Dick? The complete opposite end of the
• 22:05
  spectrum in Wesley mentioned it is mixtapes.
• 22:07
  He will put together an album for you, but just so you get
• 22:10
  like the complete picture, you put on all the beats, right?
• 22:12
  All the deep. All the deep good.
• 22:14
  You'll find some obscure live sessions he's found somewhere
• 22:17
  and you put them on for you. But he's also the type of guy
• 22:20
  like when he does that, he will expect you to listen to it as
• 22:23
  soon as he can. And give you a critique over
• 22:25
  when you come back. Yes, like like he doesn't this
• 22:27
  the next morning. Can't understand why Rob hasn't
• 22:29
  like listened to that album yet or give him his full review.
• 22:32
  That's the type of obsessive he is.
• 22:34
  But I like how that converse just like uncomfortably is
• 22:37
  talking about anything other than music.
• 22:39
  Like when Rob tells me he's broke up with Laura and he to
• 22:42
  tell Barry, it takes him about half an hour to say, yeah, OK,
• 22:45
  I'll tell him. When I tell him about the other
• 22:47
  stuff, he can't process it. It's not a.
• 22:50
  Problem. Yeah, I like him a lot in this.
• 22:54
  I think it's mainly because how well he contrasts with Jack
• 22:56
  Black. To agreed, the role was
• 22:59
  initially offered to David Arquette, who turned it down,
• 23:02
  and also Philip Seymour Hoffman was the name mentioned the great
• 23:06
  Hoffman? Surely just mentioned though.
• 23:08
  Yeah, yeah, surely it was. I'd love to get this guy in
• 23:11
  there. Well, there's no chance, so
• 23:12
  let's go with Louisa. He wouldn't.
• 23:13
  Be good at the Barry, the Ordoneys, but like Lester bands.
• 23:16
  Oh. Yeah, well, well, Almost Famous
• 23:18
  came out the same year. Yeah, yeah.
• 23:20
  I did, yeah. There were two sets built for
• 23:21
  the film, Rob's apartment and championship vinyl and the set
• 23:25
  decorator bought an old record store and shipped all the vinyls
• 23:27
  to the set. And DV Divin sent us the Co
• 23:30
  writer. He loved the set.
• 23:31
  He said it looked authentic as hell and it was stuffed full of
• 23:33
  all these records, posters of Chicago bands.
• 23:36
  He was dead proud of it. And he brought in the production
• 23:38
  consultant Dan Karetsky. He came in and he was proud as a
• 23:42
  Peacock at this set. And Karetsky said, yeah, I mean,
• 23:44
  it all looks great, but what are these fucking records?
• 23:47
  Well the 2nd decorator had bought a Christian record store,
• 23:51
  so all the wreck, all the vinyls were like prayers and hymns and
• 23:54
  shit. Horrible fucking Creed in there.
• 24:00
  Best of Cliff Richard. So that weekend the two of them
• 24:04
  went out and bought like hundreds of records A-Z Aussie
• 24:08
  to put it in front of the record bins.
• 24:09
  So in the film behind like Bright and Later and Blonde and
• 24:12
  Blonde, what's going on of things like The Lord is My
• 24:14
  Shepherd and Abide with me? I just call to say I love you.
• 24:22
  And moving on, we've got a question from one of our
• 24:24
  patrons, that's Brio de Paris. Hello Brio.
• 24:28
  Hello Brio. If you're a patron of ours, you
• 24:30
  get to ask us a question, which we'll answer on the show.
• 24:32
  His question very, very simply. What would the name of your
• 24:35
  record shop be? I'm going to go first here, OK?
• 24:39
  And I'm afraid I'm going to have to be terribly boring, but I've
• 24:41
  had discussions like this in the past many times.
• 24:43
  So my answer I knew immediately it's top five records always has
• 24:47
  been directly influenced by this film.
• 24:49
  Fair enough. That's the name of Rob's label,
• 24:51
  isn't it? You've just stolen it.
• 24:53
  Well, yeah, I know, but that's fiction.
• 24:56
  Just have 5 records in the shop. What about USD?
• 25:02
  Mine is based on the last two podcasts that I've done and the
• 25:05
  fact again that this is a movie podcast so I don't want to get
• 25:08
  too musical about it, but I would call it the vinyl cut.
• 25:11
  Oh, nice. Very.
• 25:12
  Nice, I've just done Apocalypse Now and that's kind of still in
• 25:15
  me head, so I'll call it the vinyl cut.
• 25:17
  Very nice. Lovely.
• 25:18
  What about you, Matt? Because Frank Zappa had a 1969
• 25:22
  album called Hot Rats. Mine would just be hot Mats.
• 25:27
  People might not think that's a record score, though.
• 25:29
  Well, you know, coming on a Saturday, something special out
• 25:34
  the back for them, yeah. Through the curtain.
• 25:36
  Hot masks. Very nice.
• 25:38
  That's great. I'm.
• 25:40
  Going to tell you something for your own good, pal.
• 25:42
  That's the worst fucking sweater I've ever.
• 25:44
  Seen It's a Cosby sweater. A Cosby sweater.
• 25:48
  So following this sequence, Rob does some autobiographical soul
• 25:52
  searching before going to see the ultra cool singing sensation
• 25:55
  Marie De Salle. We're looking at the sequence.
• 25:57
  Let's see our friends listen. Their top five side ones track
• 26:00
  ones to sell visits to the store, and Laura's friend Liz
• 26:03
  tells Rob that she doesn't think much of this Ian guy Westie.
• 26:08
  This whole section is just so good like I need that Marie to
• 26:13
  sell EP like the track listens outrageous she does my heart
• 26:17
  will go on and Ghostbusters like.
• 26:19
  Ghostbusters 911 is a joke. Yeah, it's.
• 26:23
  Crazy, but if she covers Peter fucking fronting that well,
• 26:29
  yeah, I love the fact that there's that really nerdy guy
• 26:32
  looking for it's a Captain Beef fart if it's milk like the
• 26:35
  French import. Let's see with these ass out.
• 26:40
  Horrible. You guys are snobs.
• 26:43
  He's cool as well. Yeah, he's great.
• 26:45
  Yeah, the whole them kind of, you know, seeing their everyday
• 26:49
  lives going through that. But you can still see Rob's pain
• 26:52
  all the way through this, like he's really suffering.
• 26:54
  And I think Cusack brings it really, really well.
• 26:56
  He's always like got the glasses on, his head's down, he's
• 26:58
  smoking. And nobody else is like giving
• 27:00
  him like a real talk, like you need somebody.
• 27:02
  And that's he gets to the end of it.
• 27:03
  And you say I need a ring, Liz. I need to ring somebody who
• 27:06
  understands what being humans about without just talking about
• 27:08
  music like. I'm feeling very basic today,
• 27:11
  yeah. I love that.
• 27:14
  I mean, these guys just absolutely fucking snobs.
• 27:17
  Just so it really elitist we have seen.
• 27:20
  What's your favorite opening track?
• 27:22
  So side ones, track ones. Yeah, yeah.
• 27:24
  What's your favorite opening or opening or an album?
• 27:27
  Unbelievable. But the scary thing is though,
• 27:29
  we've definitely had conversations like this in the
• 27:30
  past. Yeah, definitely.
• 27:32
  Not just in the past. Like yesterday.
• 27:35
  There's one coming up tomorrow and.
• 27:38
  I was going to put this in as a question, what's your favorite
• 27:40
  top side ones? Track ones like Self Known of
• 27:43
  course, but that puts far too much pressure on us to sound
• 27:46
  like diverse and interest without seeing like the opening
• 27:48
  track of the Best of The Beatles.
• 27:54
  Smells like teen spirited of Never mind.
• 27:58
  How about fucking fucking Beethoven?
• 28:03
  What are you, Matt? What do you think about this
• 28:05
  sequence? Yeah, I mean, it is like you
• 28:07
  guys say, it's just that classic debate to have.
• 28:10
  It is the type of thing you would do during downtime when
• 28:12
  you're working and nothing which is going on go on then what are
• 28:15
  your top five? And it is great as how delighted
• 28:17
  barriers by Rob's obvious choices just winding them up so
• 28:21
  much. Like if he, if Robert really
• 28:23
  thought about it and had some really interesting picks, Barry
• 28:26
  would be pissed off, I think. I think he enjoys more the fact
• 28:28
  that he can think of better ones than Rob can.
• 28:31
  And that line about Beethoven, that's so funny.
• 28:33
  That's one of the best lines. It really is.
• 28:35
  Track one side one of the fifths.
• 28:39
  Fucking Beethoven. He doesn't know what he's
• 28:41
  talking about at. That this is the first thing
• 28:44
  that comes to mind. Beethoven.
• 28:45
  I would like to have heard Barry's though.
• 28:48
  Yeah, I would have heard, but I like that, he says white like
• 28:50
  white Heat by the Velvet Underground.
• 28:52
  And the guy says that would be on mine and Barry, not on mine,
• 28:56
  not mine. Continue.
• 28:58
  That other guy, Lucy, he's this is the one he's seen.
• 29:00
  He's in and I think he's because he calls them out on it.
• 29:03
  He does call them snobs and lead us and he's absolutely right.
• 29:06
  You know, they are, it's just being again, back to that theme
• 29:09
  that goes through the similar. How do you balance the your
• 29:12
  actual life and the things that you're passionate about?
• 29:14
  And I think Lewis like really highlights that.
• 29:16
  And and then you get that phone call with Liz because at this
• 29:19
  point, when Rob calls her, you're still 100% on his side.
• 29:23
  You don't know what's happened yet.
• 29:24
  You're with him. And this phone called Villus
• 29:26
  sets it up really nicely for when you you see it from, like,
• 29:29
  Laura's perspective and you realise, you know, actually he
• 29:31
  did a lot of crappy things. And when, like, the naming gets
• 29:36
  dropped in the conversation here, you can practically feel
• 29:38
  like Rob's stomach just drop. Yeah.
• 29:40
  Because that is just such a horrible feeling.
• 29:43
  And this is, again, one of these truthful elements of the film.
• 29:46
  When you've been in a breakup and you hear that the other
• 29:49
  person has moved on before you and there's someone else on the
• 29:51
  scene, it's just one of the worst things to go through.
• 29:53
  And the film absolutely nails that feeling.
• 29:56
  So it's it's got the emotion, but it is also funny, like how
• 29:59
  he's just about keeping it together because he's talking to
• 30:01
  Marie de Salle in the shop and then he just explores when he's
• 30:04
  in the office. I mean, the whole film is just
• 30:06
  so nicely balanced. You get the the raw emotion and,
• 30:10
  and the anger and the upset that he feels.
• 30:12
  But then you just get that comical sex sequence that plays
• 30:14
  out in his head. He can't stop thinking about it.
• 30:18
  And he finally gives in and he saw a bit of that.
• 30:20
  Laura's made it into the top five with a bullet.
• 30:23
  Yeah, it's a very well better accompaniment than Barry White,
• 30:27
  the walrus of love himself. It's outrageous, that secret.
• 30:31
  But just before that, when they're listening to Ian
• 30:32
  upstage, he's reading Love Thy Neighbor.
• 30:34
  Have you noticed? That it's a lovely touch that
• 30:36
  isn't. It really nice and I love the
• 30:38
  way he's trying to figure it out like a detective and he's
• 30:39
  looking through the he's like he's AI Raymond Ray Ian, awful
• 30:48
  cooking smells. He had rings on his fingers.
• 30:50
  I didn't like him and I fucking hate him now.
• 30:55
  Whatever world music was fashionable that week.
• 31:02
  I really like that moment when he finds out when Liz says this
• 31:05
  Ian Guy. What's perfect about it is that
• 31:08
  as soon as that line is delivered, Dick comes bundling
• 31:11
  into the through the door. Seeing that Marie De Salle's in
• 31:14
  the store. And because this is a big moment
• 31:16
  for all involved that you would visit this lowly store, you kind
• 31:19
  of forget this sledgehammer moment, this Ian Guy moment.
• 31:22
  Yeah. And then Rob goes out.
• 31:23
  It's awful. He's carrying around the inlay
• 31:25
  from the CD, which is just a big poster as to Sal's face.
• 31:31
  You've got this really fucking. Embarrassing and.
• 31:33
  So when he walks past Dick, you say maybe we should turn the
• 31:36
  music off? You should turn it up.
• 31:39
  Turn it up. Yeah, that's great writing.
• 31:42
  A perfect timing because it's all being set up just before
• 31:44
  that phone call when Rob's looking at the CD.
• 31:47
  Yeah. Those happening like one after
• 31:49
  the other editors. It comes together fantastically
• 31:51
  well. And on that sex scene, I've been
• 31:54
  Yala, who plays Laura, she was really nervous about it.
• 31:57
  And it was her first American film.
• 31:58
  She's Danish. She only had a couple of films
• 32:00
  before that. And it was scheduled to shoot
• 32:02
  for the whole day. Tim Robbins came in, only had a
• 32:04
  few hours to shoot because he was taking these kids to the
• 32:06
  baseball game in the afternoon. So it was just in the morning.
• 32:09
  And she was thrilled with that. And Stephen Free has cleared
• 32:12
  everyone out the room and called in all the women on set to
• 32:15
  direct this scene. He said you're going to make the
• 32:17
  steamiest, sexiest, funniest sex scene we've ever seen in the
• 32:21
  aisle has said that Free has spent the majority of the time
• 32:23
  sitting in the corner covering his eyes.
• 32:30
  So eventually Laura makes the top five all time breakup list
• 32:34
  #5 with the bullet the. Director.
• 32:42
  On to the main man, the director of High Fidelity.
• 32:44
  That's Stephen Freeze. He's director that we haven't
• 32:46
  mentioned once on any of our episodes, which is a bit of a
• 32:49
  shame, but we're going to write that wrong now and kick off with
• 32:52
  his career in general. So, Matt, what do you think of?
• 32:55
  Free years as a director, I think in general I would say
• 32:58
  he's a director who's not likely to make many people's top ten
• 33:02
  list of directors, I would say. And I think that's because, and
• 33:05
  I don't actually mean this as a criticism, but he's a bit of an
• 33:09
  invisible director. I don't think there's any film
• 33:12
  you can really hold up and say this is what a Stephen Freeze
• 33:15
  film looks like. This is what it's all about.
• 33:18
  He doesn't have that kind of distinctive nature to him as a
• 33:21
  director. But what I think he does have,
• 33:23
  he has a really accessible quality.
• 33:25
  And I think he's someone who just seems really interested in
• 33:27
  people and what look like interesting stories to him.
• 33:30
  And he seems that he's very comfortable, not necessarily
• 33:34
  trying to push the boundaries of cinema, just telling the story
• 33:37
  that he's found interesting. Sometimes that's in TV as well
• 33:39
  as cinema. I don't know if you guys saw it
• 33:41
  but Quiz last year which was the drama about The Who wants to be
• 33:45
  millionaire scandal guy. Saw it.
• 33:48
  Yeah, he. Directed that and I thought I
• 33:50
  was really good. I think you have to respect him
• 33:52
  for the fact he's been going for 40 years now.
• 33:54
  He's actually, you know, had decades and decades where he's
• 33:57
  been going so long that actually there was a number one in the
• 34:00
  60s. Lily the Pink by Scaffold.
• 34:02
  And he's mentioned in the lyrics because he worked with him.
• 34:05
  Yeah, yeah, Mr. Free has had sticky out ears but that's
• 34:08
  happened to him because he worked with him on like early
• 34:11
  promo stuff. So he's been going a hell of a
• 34:13
  long time and I think he's someone if he sought listeners
• 34:16
  films, he you'll get the ones and people go, oh, that film.
• 34:19
  I really love that. So mean made the grifters.
• 34:21
  The Grifters is great, dirty pretty things.
• 34:24
  I really like that the program, which was the film about Lance
• 34:27
  Armstrong a couple of years ago about the Dolan scandal.
• 34:30
  That was really good. So he's always got a very steady
• 34:34
  and a very confident handle on his films, even if they're not
• 34:37
  very distinctive as such. So I'm never going to be sat
• 34:41
  here gone. Can't wait to see what the next
• 34:43
  Stephen Freeze film is. No, not even Stephen Freeze to
• 34:46
  say that. Well, exactly.
• 34:48
  Yeah. You know, I get the fresh.
• 34:49
  He's probably OK with that. But if I see he's doing a film
• 34:52
  where I think actually that sounds really interesting, I'm
• 34:54
  going to be very confident that he'll handle it well and I'll be
• 34:57
  entertained. See if there are hands, yeah.
• 35:00
  Yeah, I'm exactly the same. He is got he's very much an act
• 35:03
  as director. He's very much a character
• 35:05
  director. He's very much a fan of of story
• 35:09
  over, you know, his name and lights.
• 35:10
  He's kind of the opposite to Ridley Scott.
• 35:13
  He's got so visual. This is free as his not he's
• 35:16
  just he's quite introverted and I think he wants to look what's
• 35:18
  going on with emotion and with character development and with
• 35:22
  human relationships. Like Matt said, I mean dangerous
• 35:24
  liaisons, brilliant, not dirty pretty things.
• 35:27
  It's great. I saw, I saw the Queen and I
• 35:29
  didn't quite get it. I would have put money on you.
• 35:32
  Not like in that Westie. Yeah, this for me far and away
• 35:35
  is his best film and you wouldn't even know it to Stephen
• 35:38
  Frears film. Yeah, I think he's someone that
• 35:41
  I've never really delved into and I'm sure I will do after to
• 35:45
  in this podcast seems equally at home with kind of like
• 35:48
  underground art housey films and mainstream pictures, all all
• 35:51
  this. And probably, like you said,
• 35:53
  Matt, the grifters probably as mainstream as he goes.
• 35:56
  Really. Yeah.
• 35:58
  Say that Dangerous Liaisons probably his most highly
• 36:01
  regarded work. I've seen Mary Riley.
• 36:03
  I quite like that. I've seen an early film of his
• 36:05
  called The Hit from 1984, starring Terence Stamp, John
• 36:08
  Hurt and a really, really young Tim Roth, and that was fine.
• 36:14
  Not, not fantastic. I'll probably never go back to
• 36:16
  it, but still a decent, a decent effort.
• 36:19
  He's won a lot of awards, but at the big three, the Oscars,
• 36:21
  Golden Globes and Baftas, he's been nominated several times but
• 36:25
  missed out every time. Shame.
• 36:26
  Shame Kind of reflects what you two guys have been saying.
• 36:29
  Yeah. Yeah.
• 36:31
  So, Wesley, what do you think of his work on High Fidelity?
• 36:33
  Like I've said, I think this is above and beyond.
• 36:36
  He's best for me from like, like what I've seen, which is quite
• 36:39
  limited. And like you look, I think I
• 36:40
  will be checking out more of of his work because I do think
• 36:43
  there's been some hidden gems in there.
• 36:45
  And I think it's he's got control over the whole thing to
• 36:48
  the fact of, you know, you can take Jack Black where he wants
• 36:50
  to and he can rein him in. You can let Cusack go as far out
• 36:53
  as he needs to go and then he can bring him back.
• 36:55
  It seems to get a consistent performance from every single
• 37:00
  actor in the film, no matter how flamboyant they are or no matter
• 37:03
  how quiet they are, like even the skate fuckers, even them
• 37:06
  two, they're brilliant. He raises the game to them and
• 37:09
  they're pretty funny. Everyone kind of works together.
• 37:12
  And I think this film to me feels like a real community and
• 37:15
  a real team effort. And I think that's what Frias
• 37:18
  does. And he kind of brings everyone
• 37:19
  together. And then you feel part of that,
• 37:21
  which is I think it's why it's so comforting and then not
• 37:24
  scared to explore the emotions that the, I mean, there's really
• 37:27
  big themes in this film, big fucking issues here, but it
• 37:30
  never feels like it's overpowering.
• 37:32
  And I think that's what Frias can do.
• 37:33
  You can take that emotion and make it understandable, but at
• 37:36
  the same time not as painful as it should be.
• 37:38
  And I think that's what he does here with with the plume really,
• 37:41
  really, really well. Yeah, I think that he's got such
• 37:43
  a lightness of touch that you don't really notice his work
• 37:46
  here. And I think that's perfect for
• 37:47
  this material. Yeah, absolutely.
• 37:49
  I think he was aware that the source material in the
• 37:51
  screenplay were that strong. That would pretty much all come
• 37:53
  together. All that you need to do is be
• 37:55
  kind of be a safe pair of hands with a lot of experience to
• 37:58
  steer the ship in the right direction.
• 38:00
  And that sounds like I'm down playing his involvement, but
• 38:02
  I'm. I'm really not if this was like
• 38:04
  a like, I don't know, a Tony Scott film or something like
• 38:08
  that. I mean, obviously that's
• 38:09
  ridiculous. But if it were a director like
• 38:11
  him, we know his trademarks and that would have been a
• 38:14
  completely different film, detracting from the narrative,
• 38:16
  the characters, and it would have dominated the whole thing.
• 38:18
  And that's not what this film needs.
• 38:20
  It's harder to do, to have a complete control over it, but at
• 38:22
  the same time step back away from it.
• 38:24
  Exactly. Yeah, Yeah.
• 38:25
  Control. Yeah.
• 38:27
  And this material needed someone like Freeze to make it what it
• 38:30
  is. Example being that scene that
• 38:32
  I've just said about Dassault coming into the store at the
• 38:34
  same time that Rob gets the call from Liz.
• 38:36
  That's executed perfectly. And for me, that's Freeze.
• 38:39
  He's brought that all together. Obviously it's in the writing,
• 38:41
  but he's brought it all together.
• 38:43
  It's it's probably a bit underrated, I think is
• 38:45
  directionally by a few people because what he does is quite
• 38:48
  subtle in a lot of ways. But I think once you kind of dig
• 38:50
  in and he realized what he's brought it.
• 38:52
  I mean, first of all, he's 59 when he makes this film.
• 38:56
  And before this he he's done Dangerous Liaisons.
• 38:58
  After this, he does The Queen. So these really stuffy highbrow
• 39:01
  films. There's no way that it would
• 39:03
  seem that he he would be completely comfortable with the
• 39:06
  film that mentions the likes of Belle and Sebastian in the Beta
• 39:09
  band. Yeah.
• 39:10
  And yet he is. It's like this film.
• 39:12
  It should be like your dad trying to talk about music,
• 39:15
  like, oh, stay your lap. What's one of them?
• 39:18
  No, no. Tony Bennett are there.
• 39:19
  That's what it should be like. It just shouldn't be something
• 39:21
  he's comfortable with. And the second thing that, like,
• 39:27
  is this film, it's so dialogue heavy and it's so like, bass and
• 39:30
  the characters just talking. It could be really stagey.
• 39:33
  It could be really theatrical. It could look like something
• 39:36
  that should be on TV, but it's not.
• 39:38
  It, it still works for me as a piece of cinema because he makes
• 39:41
  it look interesting. Just the way he has Rob always
• 39:44
  walking up and down or jumping in and out of his chair up onto
• 39:47
  his desk. You know, it's never static for
• 39:49
  something that I mean, this could be basically, it could
• 39:51
  look like a feature length episode of Friends, but it
• 39:54
  doesn't. And I don't think for film that
• 39:56
  that is so dialogue heavy. There's not one boring shot in
• 39:59
  this film, and I think Freeze deserves a lot of credit for
• 40:01
  that. Yeah, totally agree.
• 40:03
  Freeze wasn't the first director attached to the project.
• 40:06
  Touchstone bought the rights to Nick Hornby's novel For Half a
• 40:09
  Million with Mike Newell at the helm.
• 40:11
  He was hot after directing 4 Weddings and Donnie Brasco as
• 40:14
  well. Yeah, at the time, he was
• 40:17
  attached to a 1999 film, Push and Tin, which also starred
• 40:20
  Cusack. So, So the way they were on
• 40:22
  solid ground. But when Cusack, Pink and
• 40:25
  Divincentis got a hold of the book, Divincentis had a meeting
• 40:28
  with Newell, who wasn't wild about it being set in Chicago.
• 40:31
  He wanted to transport it back to London, and the reason for
• 40:34
  that is because his family was there and he didn't want to be
• 40:37
  away from them. But that was kind of like a deal
• 40:38
  breaker for the writers because this was their turf.
• 40:41
  They knew the bars and the clubs and the record stores where they
• 40:44
  used to hang out and knew the local music scene.
• 40:46
  It's kind of like part of their DNA.
• 40:48
  And you'll dropped out. And Cusack suggested Freeze
• 40:50
  because he worked on The Grifters with him.
• 40:53
  And similar to what you were seeing there, Matt, Freeze
• 40:56
  didn't really connect with the material because it wasn't his
• 40:58
  era, but he wanted to work with Cusack anywhere.
• 41:00
  So John Cusack's in there. I'm in there.
• 41:04
  Fantastic. I would be the same.
• 41:05
  Yeah. Yeah.
• 41:05
  Luke, John Cusack wants to work with you.
• 41:07
  Fine. I'm off to shoot about.
• 41:09
  Don't care. Doesn't matter.
• 41:12
  Anything except German and silent.
• 41:22
  Lovely. And Cusack suggested that Frees
• 41:27
  speak to Nick Holmby. And Holmby tells this great
• 41:29
  story where there was this kiosk at Arsenal Underground station
• 41:32
  in London where he used to buy cigarettes.
• 41:35
  And he was there one day and the guy who ran the place handed him
• 41:38
  a piece of paper and had written on it, phoned Stephen Frees on
• 41:41
  this number. I'm just out of the blue.
• 41:43
  He wasn't expecting this at all. And the story goes that Frees
• 41:46
  knew somebody who's a neighbour of Holmby's and Freeze asked him
• 41:49
  to get this note over to him and the neighbour knew where he
• 41:51
  brought his cigarettes from, so gave the note to the kiosk
• 41:54
  corner and then totally covert up, which Freeze has no
• 41:59
  recollection of whatsoever. Yeah, sounds like a Nick Hornby
• 42:02
  novel. If he's Nick, if he's Nick
• 42:04
  Hornby's neighbour, why doesn't he just go next door?
• 42:06
  Well, this is it. Just put through his letterbox.
• 42:09
  Just wanted to complicate matters.
• 42:10
  Give it that extra step. Like spy novel what?
• 42:15
  Just knock on. Working with Freas, Divincent
• 42:19
  has said that he learned the greatest lesson a screenwriter
• 42:22
  can learn, that the script is never done.
• 42:24
  You think it's perfect and fully formed, but ideas don't stand
• 42:27
  still. The more you think about them,
• 42:28
  the better they should form. And This is why the writing team
• 42:31
  has such a direct influence and creative involvement, because
• 42:34
  Freas had them on set, working on the script, pitching in ideas
• 42:37
  all the time. And they are creditors, Co
• 42:39
  producers on the film and that happens in general as well.
• 42:42
  The cast and crew all said very nice things about Freas.
• 42:45
  Steve Pink, another Co writer. He used the experience of
• 42:47
  working with him to ask him questions as he was an aspiring
• 42:51
  director himself and he said that he was very accommodating.
• 42:53
  But sometimes he would say fuck off, don't talk to me now.
• 43:02
  Did he not leave a note for the guy where he buys Fuck off.
• 43:08
  During production, they were doing some location shooting
• 43:10
  outside the Lounge Axe. That's where Marie Desaltos are
• 43:13
  set and David and Sanders said to free, you see that alley over
• 43:16
  there? That's where the shot John
• 43:17
  Dillinger to death and his fucking girlfriend tipped them
• 43:20
  off. And Freeze was completely
• 43:22
  stunned. He said, well, why isn't that in
• 43:23
  the script? Put it in, we're shooting it
• 43:25
  now. Oh, he had an involvement in
• 43:27
  that and very nice. And finally on Freeze, there's a
• 43:30
  couple of deleted scenes. I don't know if you've seen any
• 43:32
  of the deleted scenes, fellas. Yes, I've seen one of them.
• 43:36
  Okay, that might be this one. So there's a couple of notable
• 43:39
  ones, The best one, obviously. It stars Beverly D'Angelo as the
• 43:43
  scorned wife whose husband has left her and asked her to sell
• 43:46
  his record collection and send him a check for the money.
• 43:49
  There's loads of rare presents in there and out of spite, she
• 43:51
  wants to sell it for 50 bucks. But Rob can't bring himself to
• 43:53
  do that to a fellow collector. It's a great day.
• 43:56
  I mean, I love the scene. We tweet about it quite a few
• 43:58
  times and I understand why. And it's not in there because it
• 44:01
  does nothing for the narrative. It kind of does build on Rob as
• 44:03
  a character a little bit, but it doesn't really forward the plot.
• 44:06
  But Cusack knew D'Angelo and asked her to come out for the
• 44:10
  scene and she did. And the shot it and Frias
• 44:12
  thought that it didn't look right.
• 44:13
  So he called her back and said, listen, it's my fault.
• 44:16
  I didn't do it right. Can you come back out again and
• 44:18
  do it? So she did, back on a flight to
• 44:20
  Chicago, reshot the scene and then free is cutted and decided.
• 44:23
  Yet the problem isn't the way I did it.
• 44:25
  The problem is that the scene just doesn't go with the film.
• 44:28
  What an absolute bummer nightmare for D'Angelo who at at
• 44:32
  40 years old at the time, smoking hot.
• 44:34
  Still unbelievable. We have the deleted scenes, got
• 44:38
  Harold Ramis playing Rob's dad giving him some, I'd say
• 44:41
  heavy-handed sex advice and Devin Centre said that years
• 44:45
  later he went to a Leonard Cohen gig and heard a whisper in his
• 44:48
  ear. You motherfucker.
• 44:50
  And he turned around and it was Rama saying, how could you cut
• 44:53
  me out of the film? Maybe this is the first and last
• 44:59
  time we'll talk about Phrase on the podcast, but there's no
• 45:01
  denying his place in cinema and his largely unsung work on High
• 45:04
  Fidelity. The cast, me and cast on High
• 45:12
  Fidelity, we're talking about the one and only John Cusack,
• 45:14
  first two players, Rob Gordon. So we're starting off with our
• 45:17
  second question from one of our patrons.
• 45:19
  That's Matt Lum. Hello, Matt.
• 45:21
  Hello, Matt. All the best, Matt, he asks.
• 45:23
  Did John Cusack have the career he should have had?
• 45:26
  At one point he looked like he was going to be huge, then
• 45:28
  seemed to fade real quickly. Westie, would you like to go
• 45:31
  first? Kind of, right.
• 45:33
  He started off incredibly well. I've never seen him in say
• 45:37
  anything. I think was the first thing I
• 45:38
  saw. Sure.
• 45:39
  Yeah. And he's fantastic in that.
• 45:41
  I love him in Grosse Point Blank.
• 45:43
  I love him in and John Malkovich as well.
• 45:48
  I think he's a he's a stand out for me.
• 45:50
  And I thought, well, this was where it was going to, it was
• 45:52
  going to go high because it was just before this came out,
• 45:54
  right. So this about 9899 when the Thin
• 45:56
  Red Line came out. Yeah.
• 45:58
  Yeah. And Cusack's got a role in that,
• 46:00
  which is one of one of the more beefed up roles for, you know,
• 46:02
  the celebrities that were thought he would just absolutely
• 46:05
  stole it. Although he's fantastic in that,
• 46:08
  right. I'd see him in con air as well,
• 46:09
  of course, in that look, man, con air and he's in Stand by Me,
• 46:12
  which people forget about. Yeah, he's good in that 14 O 8.
• 46:16
  Like that's for that Stephen King film.
• 46:18
  He actually makes that pretty watchable.
• 46:20
  Yeah. To to you know it is.
• 46:22
  It makes it accessible if he wasn't in AOP.
• 46:25
  Yeah, yeah, forget about it. It's film called Identity as
• 46:27
  well, which is a kind of guilty pleasure of mine, but I really
• 46:30
  enjoy that. I love that.
• 46:32
  I think he works really well with Lyoto in that.
• 46:34
  It, I don't know, it just kind of fizzled out for me and I
• 46:36
  think he just wasn't getting the roles that really pushed him.
• 46:40
  Gross ranks amazing, obviously, but I think that's it.
• 46:44
  Out of everything, the thing that he's been in, he is massive
• 46:46
  and he's huge. But then you watch the likes of
• 46:48
  the frozen ground that he's in with Nick Cage.
• 46:50
  Nick Cage, Yeah. What the?
• 46:52
  Fuck are you doing? What is this?
• 46:54
  It just doesn't make any sense. It's just he did peak kind of
• 46:57
  late 90s, early 2000s for me, but his peak is so good that
• 47:02
  it's lasted the. Test of time.
• 47:04
  Definitely watch him in this. He's so good when he peaked that
• 47:07
  I don't think he his decline is necessarily a bad thing.
• 47:10
  I think I've got a lot of goodwill stored up from his
• 47:14
  earlier roles that I still hold them in very, very high regard
• 47:17
  even. Now, yeah, me too.
• 47:19
  Very much in agreement. I can't remember who it was now,
• 47:21
  but someone on our Facebook group did pause the question and
• 47:24
  they asked which like kind of forgotten actor do you want to
• 47:27
  see Tarantino or kind of resurrect their creator?
• 47:30
  I don't remember the. Question and my answer straight
• 47:32
  away was Cusack because he deserves it.
• 47:34
  And it was that period between like the lady AD suit of the
• 47:38
  early mid 2000s where just Cusack alone, he was guaranteed
• 47:42
  to get my interest. And I think what's happened to
• 47:45
  him is what happens to a lot of actors.
• 47:47
  He just, he's he seems to have just lost the nose for a good
• 47:50
  project or a good script. And he he was the first actor I
• 47:53
  heard he used the phrase one for them, one for me.
• 47:57
  And what he meant by that was he would do a studio or film.
• 47:59
  So something like Con Air, which he didn't particularly like, but
• 48:02
  he would do it because it got him in like the studio's good
• 48:05
  graces and it would let him do something like Being John
• 48:07
  Malkovich, something he really wanted to do.
• 48:10
  And I think over the years, that one for me, part of it, it's
• 48:14
  completely kind of fallen away from him.
• 48:16
  He's just lost the touch of finding the right ones to
• 48:19
  breakthrough. So he's still doing crap like
• 48:21
  2012 for example, but he's not doing the other stuff to make
• 48:24
  you forgive that. And it's not even necessarily
• 48:28
  he's picking bad films as such. They're just not breaking
• 48:31
  through. So, you know, he does a Spike
• 48:32
  Lee film and he's really good in it.
• 48:35
  Chirac. But it's not Black Klansman, is
• 48:36
  it? Which everyone loved and
• 48:38
  everybody's going to see. It's Chirac, which barely anyone
• 48:40
  has seen, you know? Or he's really good as the old
• 48:43
  version of Brian Wilson in Love and Mercy.
• 48:45
  But when people talk about that film, the one you really talk
• 48:48
  about, Paul Dano, who plays the younger version, kind of cute.
• 48:52
  So I kind of gets forgotten about being in that film.
• 48:54
  And I did read an interview with him last year, I think it was
• 48:57
  with the Guardian, and he was really honest about it.
• 48:59
  And he said, yeah, I'm not hot at the minute and I'm finding it
• 49:01
  difficult to get projects off the ground.
• 49:03
  Hopefully, like you guys, I've got so much goodwill for him.
• 49:05
  I just hope that he he kind of just gets his touchback and he
• 49:09
  just finds that right project that does work for him again,
• 49:12
  because he's a big miss at the minute, I think, Yeah.
• 49:15
  I I agree. Hot Hot Tub Time Machine came
• 49:17
  out. People were raving about that
• 49:18
  and I really couldn't stand that film.
• 49:21
  Yeah, well, I said at the top, big Cusack fan, and it seems to
• 49:25
  be to be like he's been around forever.
• 49:27
  I was stunned to learn that he was only 33 in this film.
• 49:31
  That's crazy. Yeah, because he'd been in
• 49:34
  movies for almost 2 decades before this.
• 49:36
  I like his 80s stuff. I think better off.
• 49:39
  Dad's good. The shoe thing is good.
• 49:40
  See anything like you said, Westie and Grosse Point Blank,
• 49:43
  right up there with High Fidelity for me.
• 49:45
  Yeah. It's an excellent film.
• 49:47
  Yeah. Yeah.
• 49:48
  Then since this, it's really been a bit of a disappointment.
• 49:51
  I was very surprised to find out that he's done about 10 straight
• 49:54
  to video films in the last 10 years.
• 49:56
  Yeah, that's that's unthinkable. I was stunned.
• 49:59
  What I do love though, and westy to counter what you've just said
• 50:03
  and I'll make no excuses for it. Hot tub time machine Brilliant
• 50:09
  I'll. Set it up, you knock them down.
• 50:12
  It's absolutely. I really, really got a real soft
• 50:16
  spot for that film. I love it.
• 50:18
  I can't get away with it. I just can't.
• 50:20
  I don't know. It's great.
• 50:21
  I'll try it again. Just.
• 50:22
  For you. Try it again.
• 50:24
  Don't try the sequel. That's appalling.
• 50:26
  He's not in that one though, No, And I do like the kind of think
• 50:29
  of Grosse Pointe Blank High Fidelity Time Machine as my
• 50:33
  Cusack trilogy. Yeah, but so alike.
• 50:41
  Matt, what do you think of John Cusack as Rob Gordon in this
• 50:44
  film? Well, we've mentioned a few
• 50:45
  times, haven't he put put this along with Grosse Pointe
• 50:47
  Blanket, truly the definitive Cusack performance I think.
• 50:50
  And Time Machine. Well, maybe, but he's perfect
• 50:57
  casting this and he really is. And you talk about actors who
• 51:00
  carry like a movie on their shoulders.
• 51:02
  And this is such a great example because Rob must be front and
• 51:05
  sender in like 95% of this film. Like I think there's only two
• 51:10
  scenes in which he isn't in, I think when Laura's talking to
• 51:13
  Liz and the imaginary sex scene. But those scenes are very short.
• 51:17
  And even then, he's kind of cutting in between them, so and.
• 51:19
  They're in his head at the time. Well, yeah, exactly what I'm
• 51:22
  saying. Yeah.
• 51:23
  They're not even scenes outside of him.
• 51:25
  Yeah. And you've also got the fact
• 51:26
  that he's constantly breaking the 4th wall, and that's
• 51:28
  something that could have ended up really stagey and really
• 51:31
  theatrical and to be honest, a bit annoying.
• 51:33
  But Kusak, he makes it so grounded and it does end up
• 51:36
  sounding like you're just having a conversation with a guy.
• 51:39
  You are just listening like talk about his history and these
• 51:42
  breakups. And I think the reason it works
• 51:44
  is he's just got a really lovely rhythm to his voice.
• 51:47
  I think he's just got a really not realistic way of delivering
• 51:50
  dialogue. And I find it, he's got this
• 51:53
  thing where he just finds really interesting words to emphasize
• 51:56
  in the dialogue, or he's got a great way of phrasing things.
• 52:00
  Like I love that bit where he's listening to things that he does
• 52:03
  love about Laura, and he gets that bit where he saw about when
• 52:06
  she can't sleep and she rubs her feet together and he just goes
• 52:09
  and it just kills me. And then he kind of looks up at
• 52:12
  the camera and he's just lost. He's just lost in that memory
• 52:15
  for a few seconds. Quite puts himself background.
• 52:17
  I think it's absolutely fantastic.
• 52:19
  I think that top. Five as well.
• 52:21
  That's his only top five, where he expands on each one.
• 52:24
  Each point, yeah. Everything else is just a list.
• 52:27
  But that one he expands on each point of Laura's.
• 52:29
  Yeah. He does give some reasons for
• 52:30
  it, yeah. And.
• 52:31
  He says that's a mystery of human chemistry.
• 52:33
  Like nobody can understand it. They just.
• 52:35
  He pulls up four fingers and just silently says four.
• 52:38
  Yeah. Yeah, great, lovely touch.
• 52:41
  Yeah, and I think it's a really honest performance because yeah,
• 52:43
  obviously Kiyosaki's got charm, he's got Chrisman, he's
• 52:46
  intelligent guy, but he also does put across all the less
• 52:50
  likable aspects of him. You know, Rob can be selfish.
• 52:53
  He is a bit of a prick at times to.
• 52:54
  Go. He's a total Dick.
• 52:56
  He's very immature and Kusak doesn't hold back in like
• 53:00
  showing those aspects of him as well, like during arguments or
• 53:02
  or certain reactions to things, but he gets with it because he's
• 53:06
  honest enough to admit his feelings as well.
• 53:08
  And I think it's very difficult shades of a character to make it
• 53:12
  all seem as one. And that's what Kusak does
• 53:14
  really, really well there. And he properly puts Rob on an
• 53:17
  emotional journey through the film.
• 53:19
  I think in a very subtle way. He's a very different guy at the
• 53:22
  end than he is at the beginning, and that's a lot to do with what
• 53:24
  Kusak does. Very nice, lovely words there,
• 53:27
  man. Definitely.
• 53:28
  What I think is impressive is that Rob is one of like the
• 53:31
  biggest assholes ever. But I don't hate him at all.
• 53:35
  And I think that's because of Cusack's performance.
• 53:37
  He's an everyman, a middle weight in his own words, and I
• 53:41
  think that he's relatable in that respect.
• 53:43
  No matter how much nonsense that he spans about relationships,
• 53:46
  where he's dead wrong, there are some things that he says that in
• 53:49
  your heart of hearts, you know, you've done or you've thought.
• 53:52
  And I think that's what makes the character work for me.
• 53:54
  Very, very relatable. Yeah.
• 53:56
  Yeah, it's just that charisma. There's that ability to break
• 54:00
  the 4th wall and then come back from that.
• 54:03
  And I mean, the lesser rat that you would think, is he going to
• 54:05
  turn to the camera now you know exactly when he's not going to
• 54:07
  do it? Yeah, you know exactly when he
• 54:09
  is going to do it. And I think that's you can't
• 54:11
  just put a camera in a room and then just do that.
• 54:13
  That's down to him, purely to him.
• 54:15
  And he's just got such a command over the audience that he knows
• 54:18
  exactly what to say, when to say it and how to say it.
• 54:22
  Like we said, more importantly, you know, there's the intake of
• 54:26
  the cigarette before he does the.
• 54:27
  Yeah, these things one. Really resonate with me, those
• 54:30
  kind of. Moments, damn little, just
• 54:33
  nuances are just so fucking brilliant.
• 54:35
  But he's performance in this as if he's just not even reading a
• 54:39
  script. Everyone else around him is just
• 54:41
  reacting to what he's saying and he is the script and it's that
• 54:44
  fluid. And I don't think honestly
• 54:47
  anyone else could have done this apart from John Cusack at this
• 54:50
  time. It's just such an original
• 54:51
  performance in an original film because it just all clicks into
• 54:54
  place. Really well cast.
• 54:57
  Incredibly well cast for the material.
• 54:59
  What I didn't really realize or or take notice of when I was
• 55:03
  watching it, when I've watched it endlessly over the years, is
• 55:06
  that he's not a very likable person.
• 55:09
  It's understandable why he's totally unlucky in love.
• 55:11
  He's not unlucky. He's just a Dick in love, Yeah.
• 55:14
  Unforgivable at points. It's just like, right, Laura's
• 55:18
  not sleeping with Ian, so I'll go and sleep with Marie de Sal.
• 55:20
  He's a monster. A moment that really kind of
• 55:23
  highlighted it to me and made me think that John Cusack is
• 55:27
  absolutely perfect for this and I don't hear them and I should
• 55:30
  absolutely hear them because of this moment is when he meets
• 55:33
  penny #2 on the list and she tells him this horrendous
• 55:37
  personal trauma that came as a direct result of her
• 55:40
  relationship with him. And all he hears is that it was
• 55:43
  actually him who broke up with her, not the other way around.
• 55:46
  He's like totally self absorbed self law, the narcissist.
• 55:50
  He's a total fucking monster. But I don't hate him.
• 55:52
  And also Penny, she's a fucking dreamboat as well.
• 55:56
  Yeah. Yeah.
• 55:57
  Yeah, she's a. Lovely.
• 55:59
  Yeah, she is. But he makes it all about him,
• 56:01
  yeah. And he's like, oh, that's
• 56:03
  another one I've checked, please.
• 56:06
  I should have done this years ago.
• 56:08
  I should. Have done this years ago.
• 56:11
  A major part of the film is listing, obviously we've we've
• 56:13
  been doing a top fives. He doesn't list his favorite
• 56:16
  records, but the Dear Corners apartment may give that away.
• 56:20
  On the walls there are five framed albums that people
• 56:23
  suggest. They're hip server albums.
• 56:25
  Do you know them? Westie I.
• 56:26
  Don't. I think I know one of them, but
• 56:28
  that'll just spoil it. So if you go for all the five.
• 56:31
  OK, they are. Can you, can you rank them?
• 56:34
  Can you look? What do you think will be his
• 56:35
  top five? OK, well, his or mine?
• 56:39
  Are yours? That's mine.
• 56:40
  Mine. OK, OK right, OK.
• 56:43
  So we've got Double Nickels on the Dime by the Minutemen.
• 56:47
  Never heard that album. That's fine, obviously.
• 56:52
  Worried if it wasn't. Goo by Sonic Youth.
• 56:56
  That's just noise. That's number four.
• 57:00
  Sonic Youth wasn't. It Well Honey by The Beach Boys,
• 57:03
  I'll put that in #3 Tonight's Night by Neil Young, I'll put
• 57:06
  that in #2 Maggot Brain by Funkadelic.
• 57:08
  Amazing album #1 huge. And John Cusack, John's sister,
• 57:12
  she plays Liz, Laura's at first sympathetic friend, who soon
• 57:15
  concludes that he's a fucking asshole.
• 57:17
  Do you know how many films that John and John have starred in
• 57:19
  together? 12.
• 57:21
  It's 10 double figures. Nice.
• 57:26
  How about fucking fucking Beethoven?
• 57:29
  Track one side one of the Fifth Symphony.
• 57:31
  Our final performer in this section is Ibn Yeila.
• 57:34
  She plays Laura. I'll admit that I had to Google
• 57:38
  the pronunciation of her name and listen to the audio of
• 57:41
  someone pronouncing it. And further still, I've even had
• 57:45
  to write it down phonetically so I don't fuck it up.
• 57:50
  I'll just call her Laura. I'm going to refer to her.
• 57:55
  Matt, what do you think of the actress that plays Laura in the
• 57:57
  film? Her performance here and the
• 58:02
  character of Laura in general, to be honest, it's one that I do
• 58:05
  struggle to kneel down. OK, precisely how I feel about
• 58:09
  her. I mean, I think first thought
• 58:11
  the film very deliberately stacks a lot against her from
• 58:13
  the very beginning, when we first made her in the middle of
• 58:17
  a horrendous breakup. Source.
• 58:18
  She was miserable as saying angry.
• 58:20
  It's just not the ideal way to be introduced to a character.
• 58:24
  Like even if it it becomes very justified that she is like sick
• 58:27
  of wrong shit, but it's just not a great introduction in that
• 58:31
  sense. And then you get Rob flashing
• 58:33
  back to these like, idealized versions of all his past
• 58:36
  girlfriends, and she doesn't really stand a chance of living
• 58:39
  up to those. And I understand why the film is
• 58:42
  doing that because the point is you can't live life like that.
• 58:44
  You can't have these idealised versions in your head where you
• 58:47
  conveniently forget all the shit that they've done and you know
• 58:51
  the reasons why you're not with them because that's not how real
• 58:53
  life works. It doesn't matter that, you
• 58:56
  know, surely looks like Catherine Zeta Jones.
• 58:58
  There's still a reason it didn't work out with that.
• 59:00
  I think it just puts Laura in a position where, for me, I always
• 59:03
  feel like she's playing catch up and like all the good stuff that
• 59:06
  they had together. It's kind of he, you see, you
• 59:08
  never really see it as such. And so I don't know whether it's
• 59:11
  her performance as such or maybe it's like a slight misjudgement
• 59:14
  in the writing, but it does seem wild before you understand why
• 59:18
  Rob would be that much better off with her than he is with any
• 59:23
  of his other past girlfriends. And she definitely gets better
• 59:25
  as the film goes on. So it's not a bad performance at
• 59:27
  all. Like, I love the scene where he
• 59:29
  comes home and she's just teasing about his top five jobs,
• 59:32
  you know? I mean, in fact that record
• 59:34
  store on it isn't on there. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 59:36
  I love that. That she kind of counters Rob's
• 59:38
  kind of crazy delusions of grandeur and that you're doing a
• 59:41
  dream job. Yeah, exactly.
• 59:43
  She brings them down and. Yeah, And it's just not a lot.
• 59:45
  And I do like the bid at the end when the gig is going to go
• 59:47
  ahead and he's kicking off about, you know, he might be
• 59:49
  busy. And she goes, Rob, what are you
• 59:51
  ever doing that can't be cancelled?
• 59:53
  You know, should just have the way of, like bring them down
• 59:55
  really nice. You see, you do start to get
• 59:57
  these glimpses of why the word together, but I just don't
• 1:00:00
  really feel. The big emotional beat, like
• 1:00:03
  when they do reunite and I don't know if it's the writing or I
• 1:00:06
  don't know if I'm left to slightly caught by her
• 1:00:08
  performance, but I just don't get from her character what I
• 1:00:12
  think the film wants me to get out of her character well.
• 1:00:15
  There were a few comments on Twitter that have Yayla down as
• 1:00:19
  the weak link in the film and that she was terribly miscast.
• 1:00:22
  Some of the some of the comments and she does seem to stand out
• 1:00:25
  from the rest of the cast for me.
• 1:00:27
  And similar to you Matt, I can't quite put my finger on why.
• 1:00:31
  Maybe it's because she's not a familiar face unlike the
• 1:00:34
  majority of the cast. And it seems like such a left
• 1:00:36
  field choice to have this unknown Danish actress in the
• 1:00:39
  second lead who we've never seen since or before.
• 1:00:42
  I've seen her in Anthem other than this.
• 1:00:44
  I suppose her scene is the one where Rob is outside and she's
• 1:00:47
  at Ian's, and I can feel her emotional anguish here.
• 1:00:50
  She still loves Rob, but she knows that he's only going to
• 1:00:53
  continue to bring her down if she stays with him.
• 1:00:55
  And the easy thing to do is say yes and fold and go back with
• 1:00:58
  him and not doing. That's really painful.
• 1:01:00
  So I am on board with her in that performance.
• 1:01:04
  I don't think she's fantastic, yeah, But I don't think she
• 1:01:06
  deserves the criticism that I've seen.
• 1:01:08
  And, and I do totally buy her that she'd be in that
• 1:01:11
  relationship with Rob. That character, that person will
• 1:01:13
  be in that relationship with Rob.
• 1:01:14
  What I don't like about Laura is that tiny little fringe that she
• 1:01:18
  has, free or bangs if you're American.
• 1:01:26
  Yeah. What do you think of Friends?
• 1:01:30
  What do you think of? Yeah, there is, Laura.
• 1:01:33
  No, I do, honestly, But it's a really selfish thing for me
• 1:01:36
  because I hadn't seen her anything before and nothing
• 1:01:39
  after that I can remember. I put my finger on, really.
• 1:01:42
  So to me, she is Laura and she exists within that world of High
• 1:01:46
  Fidelity and I really love that because if it was a big name and
• 1:01:50
  I saw her in something else, it would kind of dilute this film a
• 1:01:52
  little bit. But now I feel like this is the
• 1:01:55
  relationship that he was in, this is the person that he was
• 1:01:57
  with and this is the person that he wants to be with, and he has
• 1:02:00
  to convince himself to do that. And I think it's his journey.
• 1:02:02
  But she counters that really well when she talks to Liz about
• 1:02:06
  the things that he's fucked up with.
• 1:02:08
  But the the one bit in this film that fucking flaws me and it's
• 1:02:12
  probably one of the most realistic depictions of the
• 1:02:16
  situation that I've seen on film because it's just so beautifully
• 1:02:19
  played out. And it's just held is when our
• 1:02:22
  dad's coffin disappears on the scene and she wails.
• 1:02:28
  And I've heard that before. And it's exactly the same as
• 1:02:32
  that chilling. Nobody knows what to do, where
• 1:02:35
  to look. And it's just honestly probably
• 1:02:38
  one of the most like heartfelt performances of a scene like
• 1:02:41
  that without it's just completely stripped back.
• 1:02:44
  A lot of that's to do with Freya's and a lot of that is to
• 1:02:46
  do with her absolutely genuine performance.
• 1:02:50
  And if you say that she's the weak link in this, she brings
• 1:02:52
  all of the emotion together and also the greatest actress in the
• 1:02:55
  world. She does pull from different
• 1:02:57
  areas that I think mainstream Hollywood audience wouldn't
• 1:03:01
  really be expecting because she is Charles got that little bit
• 1:03:03
  more of a of a foreign movie kind of exploration of emotion
• 1:03:08
  and character without being flamboyant.
• 1:03:10
  It's a little bit more stripped back.
• 1:03:12
  It's just like Mads Mickelson and that kind of respect, but
• 1:03:14
  you put him in a massive film, but he's very still very egg
• 1:03:17
  studied and emotional. I think she's got that as well.
• 1:03:20
  I think as Laura, as this character in this film, she's
• 1:03:23
  pretty fucking grit. Oh, there you have it in your
• 1:03:27
  face. Negative comments.
• 1:03:28
  In your face, negative Twitter. Come at me bro.
• 1:03:33
  Actually, don't. Actually, please don't.
• 1:03:37
  Please don't do that kind of a rejection.
• 1:03:43
  They were really struggling to cast the part of Laura and the
• 1:03:45
  names weren't leaping out at them.
• 1:03:46
  Freeze was at the Berlin International Film Festival and
• 1:03:50
  Yayla was there as part of the entourage for Danish film The
• 1:03:52
  Funnier, which won the Special Jury Prize.
• 1:03:54
  She was at a party and saw Freeze.
• 1:03:56
  She loved Dangerous Liaison so went over to talk to him and
• 1:03:59
  after 5 minutes he turned to her and asked if she'd be able to
• 1:04:02
  act in English and do an American accent and obviously
• 1:04:04
  she said yes. She gave a number and thought
• 1:04:07
  that would be the last she'd hear from him.
• 1:04:09
  That was until a week later when he called, asked if you could
• 1:04:11
  send the script and asked if it was all right if John Cusack
• 1:04:14
  called as well. I think again, Stephen Free is
• 1:04:17
  asking me that. Yeah, fine.
• 1:04:19
  Get him on the phone. Just don't even know with me
• 1:04:21
  tobacconist tobaccon. Tobaccon.
• 1:04:32
  Because I do live in the 1940s. The night of the party free is
• 1:04:37
  called Cusack and the dead of nights said I found Laura and
• 1:04:39
  she's Danish and Cusack was like what the fuck she's not Danish.
• 1:04:43
  But after he watched Mufuni he knew right away what Freeze was
• 1:04:46
  talking about. So the Danish heritage thing was
• 1:04:48
  written into the character with her mother's accents.
• 1:04:51
  And at the week there's like Danish artifacts everywhere
• 1:04:55
  there's flags. Yeah.
• 1:04:56
  OK. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:04:58
  And she'd had a 2 year old at the time.
• 1:05:00
  She was reluctant to make the move to America to pursue a
• 1:05:02
  Hollywood career. She wanted to raise a family in
• 1:05:04
  Denmark. Which is why you've not seen her
• 1:05:05
  in anything else or probably not seen her in anything else she
• 1:05:09
  said about the film. I do see High Fidelity as a
• 1:05:11
  crown jewel in my career and I'm very proud of it.
• 1:05:13
  But I have no regrets that I should have made the jump and
• 1:05:15
  move to America. God bless.
• 1:05:17
  Yeah, good for her. Despite the few negatives, High
• 1:05:20
  Fidelity's got a great ensemble cast with Cusack and Yayla at
• 1:05:23
  the top of the tree. Indeed.
• 1:05:31
  Into the midpoint of the film, we established that Rob is a
• 1:05:33
  fucking asshole. We're taking through his and
• 1:05:37
  Laura's courtship and he exercises his relationship
• 1:05:40
  demons by contacting his top five.
• 1:05:42
  In the sequence that we're looking at here, Rob sells 5
• 1:05:45
  copies of the three EPS by the Beta Band.
• 1:05:47
  He sleeps with Marie de Salle, and then Liz.
• 1:05:49
  Barry's helped to understand the word yet.
• 1:05:52
  Wesley, what do you think of this sequence of events?
• 1:05:55
  Fantastic. Some of the funniest bits right
• 1:05:57
  in the middle here. I mean, how many of us went out
• 1:05:59
  and bought the three PS by the beta band?
• 1:06:02
  Every single I. Definitely did.
• 1:06:03
  I definitely did. You saw more than 5 copies out
• 1:06:06
  there, I'll tell you. Because that track's amazing.
• 1:06:09
  DRY the range is. Huge.
• 1:06:11
  The rest nuts and nuts. No, it's nonsense.
• 1:06:15
  Got absolutely fucking fleeced. It's brilliant.
• 1:06:20
  See See Sputnik break beats. What are you guys stealing for
• 1:06:22
  other people? What are you having Joni
• 1:06:24
  Mitchell now? Condescending break.
• 1:06:29
  Ridiculous. Really condescending.
• 1:06:31
  We've mentioned it before, but when she's like, is this a new
• 1:06:33
  Green Day? Anytime someone plays something
• 1:06:35
  new for me and I've had a few drinks, I was like, this new
• 1:06:37
  Green Day. No matter what it is, no matter
• 1:06:42
  what it is. You hit this track.
• 1:06:44
  Yeah, put it on. What's this new Green Day?
• 1:06:47
  All together reference. Just think you're a knob head.
• 1:06:54
  I don't even like Green Day. You fucking It's a new Bob Dylan
• 1:06:58
  record. Does it sound like the new
• 1:07:06
  fucking Green Day? But this for me is the biggest
• 1:07:12
  moment where Rob's an absolute Dick and just go straight off
• 1:07:14
  and see Seth Marie to sell. It's unbelievable, isn't it?
• 1:07:17
  You know when he says records, books, films, these things might
• 1:07:20
  have called me shallow. It's the fucking.
• 1:07:22
  Truth. Your favorite line?
• 1:07:23
  My favorite line. I'm going to get that on AT
• 1:07:25
  shirt because it's so fucking true.
• 1:07:28
  Every time I meet. But every time I meet somebody
• 1:07:30
  new, like even when I'm in a taxi, you know what I'm like,
• 1:07:32
  I'll say it to somebody, right? Top five.
• 1:07:34
  What's your top five films right now?
• 1:07:37
  I never, I never do a top five of all time.
• 1:07:39
  I'll be like, if you go home tonight, you've had a few
• 1:07:40
  drinks. What's your top five films
• 1:07:42
  today? And then tell us the top five
• 1:07:44
  films. Then I make a judgment on that
• 1:07:45
  persons whole life based. Based on the top five right now.
• 1:07:53
  And then it's just the whole discussion about if you see Evil
• 1:07:57
  Dead 2 yet just doesn't grasp the concept that he hasn't seen
• 1:08:00
  it. He's really struggling.
• 1:08:03
  Is that? Yeah, I'm sorry, Rob.
• 1:08:04
  I'm really struggling here. How the fuck am I?
• 1:08:07
  Supposed to know? Probably you went twice, went
• 1:08:11
  once with me and Dick and then Laura.
• 1:08:13
  Oops, fucking article, isn't he? But that was Wasn't that
• 1:08:19
  originally supposed to be Reservoir Dogs that they were
• 1:08:21
  discussing? Yeah, it is, and I've always had
• 1:08:24
  a problem with this part of the film for that reason.
• 1:08:27
  Like Evil did too. I mean, I do love the film.
• 1:08:30
  It soundtrack doesn't kick fuck an ass though.
• 1:08:32
  Definitely. Not.
• 1:08:34
  But Reservoir Dogs soundtrack does.
• 1:08:36
  Yeah, and that's. And it's Reservoir Dogs in the
• 1:08:39
  book as well. Yeah, it is.
• 1:08:40
  It is. And does he not?
• 1:08:42
  Does Barry not get the point? He gets it wrong when he says
• 1:08:44
  making shotgun Brett animal off screen in the 14th century?
• 1:08:47
  That's Army of Darkness, isn't it?
• 1:08:48
  That's three, isn't it? Yeah, that's the third one.
• 1:08:50
  So it's all over the place this. But then again, it kind of shows
• 1:08:53
  that these guys aren't as intelligent as they think they
• 1:08:55
  are. They don't know absolutely
• 1:08:56
  everything about everything. So there may be some music and
• 1:09:00
  maybe like, you know, do you attract one side once?
• 1:09:02
  But then you start to talk about the Sam Raimi film.
• 1:09:03
  Is it Evil Dead 2? Is it Evil Dead One?
• 1:09:05
  Is it Army of Darkness? And they're getting all these
• 1:09:07
  things mixed up and he's like, it's violent, it's funny, and
• 1:09:10
  the soundtrack kicks fucking arse.
• 1:09:11
  But it's like, well, it doesn't, you've got that wrong.
• 1:09:12
  But try and argue that with Barry.
• 1:09:14
  That's what I really like about. Yeah, it's that he's actually,
• 1:09:17
  yeah, he's got, he's getting it wrong.
• 1:09:18
  And I think that might be intentional because you've got,
• 1:09:20
  you know, three really intelligent writers.
• 1:09:22
  And I'm, I'm sure all three of them have seen the Evil Dead
• 1:09:25
  trilogy. And I think they've put that in
• 1:09:28
  intentionally to go like, Barry's a fucking idiot, He
• 1:09:31
  doesn't get this and he's getting the films wrong.
• 1:09:33
  So how can he understand? Like a a relationship problem,
• 1:09:36
  but he doesn't understand what's in what film.
• 1:09:38
  Yeah, that's really good. Yeah.
• 1:09:40
  To me, one of the best sections. But it does highlight the fact
• 1:09:43
  that Rob's a complete asshole in the middle of it and then comes
• 1:09:47
  out of it again and then you're back in.
• 1:09:49
  It's just great. Yeah, I mean, I don't know how
• 1:09:52
  we can justify these things to himself, because as soon as he
• 1:09:55
  leaves Marie Diesel's site and then he's under it, what does he
• 1:09:58
  mean? What does that mean?
• 1:10:00
  Straight the horses. If we're supposed to understand,
• 1:10:03
  it's like, fuck you, Rob. What about you, Matt?
• 1:10:08
  I love the sword, but I love that little conversation Rob has
• 1:10:11
  with Dick where he says, you know, I'm not going to sell 5
• 1:10:14
  copies of the Beta Band like some conspiracy.
• 1:10:16
  And Dick's just like, do it, do it, do it.
• 1:10:18
  Like there's going to be something really dramatic just
• 1:10:21
  putting a record on. That's all you're doing.
• 1:10:24
  Because he's spinning the CD on his finger.
• 1:10:30
  Yeah, so I love the star, but I think I mean like you guys great
• 1:10:33
  song. It just to see everyone sort of
• 1:10:35
  like nodding weird in the show. But I love that that's really
• 1:10:37
  good and I love it's some of the best writing for me is when he
• 1:10:41
  has that discussion with Laura when the talk about what chance
• 1:10:44
  do they still have? I think it's really heartfelt.
• 1:10:46
  I think it's really mature and and it does have that super
• 1:10:49
  punch line where with the use of Queen where he steps out of the
• 1:10:53
  apartment. We have champions kicks in.
• 1:10:55
  He's doing like the shadow boxing because Laura hasn't said
• 1:10:57
  with Ian yet. And then yeah, you've got the
• 1:11:00
  bit where he sleeps with Marie and obviously 100% agree with
• 1:11:04
  you guys. He's an asshole for doing that.
• 1:11:06
  But I have to say it's the one point the film I genuinely don't
• 1:11:09
  like and it and it kind of goes beyond just his behaviour
• 1:11:12
  because I just. They were going to say I was
• 1:11:14
  just, but I was going to say, yeah, you would wouldn't.
• 1:11:18
  You. I thought that's what you were
• 1:11:20
  going to say. I.
• 1:11:21
  Know he's going to say he's going to say I know he's an
• 1:11:23
  asshole, but you definitely would.
• 1:11:29
  No, no, we couldn't help it out. The reason I don't like it just
• 1:11:34
  feels like wish fulfillment for me.
• 1:11:36
  It's like a step too far. You know, he's the geeky music
• 1:11:39
  guy and he gets to sleep with a hot singer.
• 1:11:42
  It feels just a bit too smug for me.
• 1:11:45
  And I think you could almost take this out the film, and I
• 1:11:49
  don't think we'd have that much of an impact on or in the novel.
• 1:11:51
  She does play a much bigger part.
• 1:11:53
  She comes back at the end and plays a gig in the record shop
• 1:11:55
  at the end here. I just think it doesn't really
• 1:11:59
  add anything to the film for me. Only thing that I think it's
• 1:12:02
  good for is as soon as she goes, it highlights how far Laura is
• 1:12:07
  still under her skin. Because as soon as she's gone,
• 1:12:09
  he just sorts on by Laura again. And that's fine.
• 1:12:11
  I just think it's too convenient that he sleeps with Marie at
• 1:12:15
  this point. See, the way I see this is it's
• 1:12:18
  not it's not Rob's wish fulfillment.
• 1:12:20
  It's more Marie seeing him as an easy, she's using him now.
• 1:12:24
  Rob's being used like he's used people in the past.
• 1:12:27
  He knows for a fact that he's not good enough.
• 1:12:29
  He knows for a fact that it's just throwaway and what's being
• 1:12:32
  used to just just a quick whatever.
• 1:12:34
  And I think she's she's using him.
• 1:12:36
  And I think that's why I buy it. Yeah, maybe, I don't know, just
• 1:12:39
  to smoke. Too convenient.
• 1:12:41
  If it had been anyone who was slightly at any sense of
• 1:12:44
  normality, then he wouldn't have been able to move on as fast.
• 1:12:47
  It would have become a tangle with somebody else.
• 1:12:49
  And Laura, and he's done this. She can disappear, she can
• 1:12:51
  ascend away. There's like this rock star and
• 1:12:54
  just be like, well, that's untouchable.
• 1:12:55
  That was lucky. That's fine.
• 1:12:56
  It works. What is good about it is him
• 1:12:59
  coming back to just that one word yet because it's one of the
• 1:13:02
  funniest scenes in the film. Because it's just the completely
• 1:13:04
  wrong person to ask. Why would you go to Barry?
• 1:13:07
  More people to ask about this. But he's only got Barry or Dick.
• 1:13:12
  You choose Barry every time. I don't know, like, because as
• 1:13:16
  you've mentioned, just Barry's complete inability to actually
• 1:13:19
  understand what the question is. And it just tells you everything
• 1:13:22
  about these guys that he has to frame the question in the
• 1:13:25
  context of seeing a film. He can't have said to him, Laura
• 1:13:28
  said this. What do you think it means?
• 1:13:29
  He has to go this convoluted way of picking a film and pretending
• 1:13:33
  that which he has seen. He isn't even going to pick a
• 1:13:35
  film that he hasn't seen, which would make it simpler because.
• 1:13:39
  And it really confuses Barry. Yeah, exactly.
• 1:13:42
  Fucks them up, yeah. So it's a perfect encapsulation
• 1:13:45
  of their relationship. So out of this whole sequence,
• 1:13:48
  that's by far and we're the most effective bit for me.
• 1:13:50
  Tapping into what you were saying there as well, Matt, I
• 1:13:53
  have absolutely no idea why. Marie De Salle, super cool
• 1:13:57
  singer, obviously Rob's punching.
• 1:14:00
  Yes yes, Why the fuck is she just casually having a drink
• 1:14:03
  with a musical moron twins? Why would she be doing this?
• 1:14:06
  They would be an afterthought at best.
• 1:14:09
  She'd be aware she wouldn't arrange to go out and have a
• 1:14:12
  drink with the two of them. Yeah, it's crazy.
• 1:14:15
  Yeah, she'd have much better things to do, surely.
• 1:14:18
  Certainly. Finally, Anna, that's great.
• 1:14:22
  Dick really smoke that ass. Following this sequence, Rob
• 1:14:26
  finds out that Laura has slept with Ray or Ian.
• 1:14:29
  What is his fucking name anyway? Acting like a lovesick crazy
• 1:14:35
  person? He calls Laura from outside
• 1:14:36
  Ian's apartment. We're focusing our attention on
• 1:14:39
  the scene where Ian pays a visit the store and Rob goes for
• 1:14:42
  dinner at Charlie's place. Matt, she's in the fucking phone
• 1:14:46
  book. What do you think of this thing?
• 1:14:48
  Yes, she is. I think it's really effective
• 1:14:52
  how she's the one that Rob keeps hopping over like you can't deal
• 1:14:55
  with her yet. He can go to four, fine.
• 1:14:57
  You can go see Lily Taylor no problem, as you know.
• 1:15:00
  She's totally fucked up. Exactly as time it was like
• 1:15:05
  there, but you know, he keeps on this now and Charlie because
• 1:15:07
  she's such a big deal. So you need an actress who can
• 1:15:10
  like fulfill that. And I think Catherine Zia Jones
• 1:15:13
  is really good here. You can instantly see why she's
• 1:15:16
  got, like, saw many men under a thumb.
• 1:15:18
  And I love how Rob, who, throughout the film, he's so,
• 1:15:21
  like, confident and articulate for the most part, but when he's
• 1:15:24
  on the phone of her, he's falling to pieces.
• 1:15:26
  He can barely get his words out, you know?
• 1:15:29
  And I love how he tries and he fails to pretend like to really
• 1:15:32
  have to remember who Mark always.
• 1:15:34
  Yeah, but it leaves them on top of the world.
• 1:15:40
  He's I guess I've got over the feet.
• 1:15:42
  I've talked to Charlie. I'm going to go see you again.
• 1:15:44
  It's going to be great. And then in walks Ian.
• 1:15:47
  I mean, and it just brings them down in such a hilarious
• 1:15:50
  fashion. It is.
• 1:15:51
  It's perfect. I mean, Tim Robbins, How good is
• 1:15:53
  Robbins in? This he's used he's.
• 1:15:56
  Absolutely fantastic looks. Ridiculous.
• 1:15:59
  Ludicrous ponytail. And tiny.
• 1:16:01
  Sunglasses, tiny sunglasses, multiple EP scenes, probably
• 1:16:05
  smells of whatever well, food it is this week.
• 1:16:08
  And. Get your Patchouli stink out of
• 1:16:10
  my. Well, that's it.
• 1:16:13
  Because like the film, it's been so grounded and so realistic so
• 1:16:16
  far. When it suddenly switches to
• 1:16:18
  that, to those like fantastical scenarios in his head where he's
• 1:16:22
  beating the shit out of him, that makes it all the more
• 1:16:24
  unexpected and all them off when you like, particularly when
• 1:16:27
  you've got Dick on full cycle on the last one, like wrenching the
• 1:16:31
  AC unit out of the wall and smashing his head in.
• 1:16:33
  And Barry's gone, Yeah. But he's got his belt office
• 1:16:37
  like with him, with his belt, Absolutely fantastic.
• 1:16:43
  And then you get that dinner scene.
• 1:16:45
  And in the whole film, this is the only scene that makes me
• 1:16:48
  feel like tense because you know what Rob wants to say and
• 1:16:52
  Charlie already suspects that he's going to say it.
• 1:16:54
  And you just sit in there, think, don't say it, don't say
• 1:16:56
  it, don't say it. You could be back in it.
• 1:16:58
  You don't say it. Don't say it when he does this
• 1:17:00
  agony. It's hilarious versus agony for
• 1:17:03
  everyone else. And but I think it's interesting
• 1:17:05
  because I think Rob is starting by this point.
• 1:17:07
  He's starting to get clued up a bit about what is and isn't
• 1:17:10
  important and about who isn't important anymore.
• 1:17:13
  And he realizes, actually, Charlie isn't any good for me.
• 1:17:16
  Yeah. Yeah.
• 1:17:16
  So yeah, I think it's really good sequence, really funny, but
• 1:17:19
  it moves the plot on as well and develops Rob.
• 1:17:22
  Yeah, he says Charlie's awful and she really is like she says
• 1:17:26
  I've just got back into town. Of course she's this kind of
• 1:17:28
  person who's got this jet set, a lifestyle because we've got this
• 1:17:31
  fabulous job that takes very exotic places.
• 1:17:34
  I do find it interesting that they've made the most attractive
• 1:17:37
  woman in the film the least interesting.
• 1:17:40
  Yeah, Yeah, very good. That worse than Charlie is Rob's
• 1:17:45
  God awful like puce pink colours, shirt, silk number Oh
• 1:17:51
  it's one of the worst pieces of clothes that I've ever seen.
• 1:17:53
  It's absolutely disgusting. I.
• 1:17:56
  Would rather a Cosby sweater A. Cosby sweater.
• 1:18:00
  I find it funny that Rob is the kind of person who doesn't go to
• 1:18:03
  these types of dinner parties and we can see how uncomfortable
• 1:18:06
  he is and how inferior he feels mixing with these people.
• 1:18:10
  And that's reflected in that shirt.
• 1:18:12
  He's clearly got no fucking idea what he should be wearing at
• 1:18:15
  these kind of things, and I imagine this is the only smart
• 1:18:19
  shirt that he has the. Best.
• 1:18:21
  One, he's fucking awful. It's open as well.
• 1:18:27
  Isn't it? It is open silk.
• 1:18:29
  It's badly worn silk. Yet.
• 1:18:30
  Oh my God. Yeah, terrible.
• 1:18:34
  That sequence when Ian comes in is simply hilarious.
• 1:18:38
  Just every single one of them. Three sequences are hilarious.
• 1:18:42
  Like when Dick gets the phone and punched him and he spit his
• 1:18:44
  teeth out. It's just like the music playing
• 1:18:48
  over the top and Cusack scream and leave the country.
• 1:18:51
  Yeah, leave town. Leave the country, but Charlie
• 1:18:58
  Nicholson? I fucking hate Charlie
• 1:19:00
  Nicholson. Oh, she's.
• 1:19:02
  Awful. Every bone in my body.
• 1:19:04
  She's like, bonjour, bonjour. It's a horrible word what you do
• 1:19:09
  with that for. And then she's like, hey, Jelly
• 1:19:11
  Bean. It's like all these little bits.
• 1:19:13
  It's just these that in the walk that she's got and this
• 1:19:15
  cockiness that she's got, Yeah. She's really cocky.
• 1:19:18
  Bringing his coat over and laying it on the chair and just
• 1:19:21
  being like, right, I don't know what you're going to ask us now.
• 1:19:23
  And then her reaction to it's just like fuck, fuck, fuck.
• 1:19:26
  It's like, it's almost like praising her.
• 1:19:29
  Wow, I've stayed in your head for so long.
• 1:19:31
  It's almost given her that feedback and she's like
• 1:19:33
  relishing it. She's absolutely loving it.
• 1:19:36
  You know, that dinner party is my worst fuck.
• 1:19:38
  I would prefer dinner with the Sawyers of the Texas Chainsaw
• 1:19:41
  Massacre. We've gone for a circle.
• 1:19:47
  Beautiful. The the turn up there and be
• 1:19:49
  like, oh, Wesley, this is everybody, Everyone this is
• 1:19:52
  Wesley and nobody just acknowledges you.
• 1:19:54
  I would just probably, you know what?
• 1:19:55
  Fuck off. It's horrible.
• 1:19:57
  I'm fucking out here. I take that bottle of wine.
• 1:19:59
  I'm taking my shirt with this. This is disgusting.
• 1:20:01
  But it's, yeah, it's just really, really unnerving.
• 1:20:05
  But at the same time, I love how his realization here as a
• 1:20:08
  character, for all the fantasies that he's built up, everything
• 1:20:11
  he thought that was good about her is now what he hates about
• 1:20:14
  her. He thought you had a lot of
• 1:20:16
  things to say. And she had this intellect and
• 1:20:17
  she was just fantastic. And she was just untouchable and
• 1:20:20
  she had this mystique. And then all of a sudden, he's
• 1:20:22
  kind of the veils dropped. And he's saying behind the
• 1:20:26
  curtain and it's she's just annoying and just stupid and
• 1:20:29
  just saying things for reaction and a complete like, soulless,
• 1:20:33
  soulless individual, like just fucking horrible.
• 1:20:35
  But I love the way he comes out of that a little bit more
• 1:20:38
  mature, where he leaves her immature and he kind of leaves
• 1:20:41
  his past there with her. So what I get from that whole
• 1:20:43
  Charlie's dinner thing is that it's like he's almost realizing
• 1:20:47
  that you holy shit. Like everything that I thought
• 1:20:49
  existed about somebody, I've made-up myself.
• 1:20:52
  Like he's created this fantasy that doesn't exist, which Spears
• 1:20:56
  them on and kind of convinces them that you have to work in a
• 1:21:00
  relationship. It doesn't just turn up for you.
• 1:21:02
  It's not just perfect from the start.
• 1:21:04
  You kind of just go out with somebody, just be like, have
• 1:21:06
  that person the most intellectual and the most
• 1:21:08
  beautiful and everything just falls into place.
• 1:21:11
  And I love the way that's addressed here very, very subtly
• 1:21:13
  by Freyas, I think. But it's really heavy-handed in
• 1:21:16
  the performances. But I think the message is quite
• 1:21:18
  subtle. But it's really, really nicely
• 1:21:20
  done because blink and you'll miss it, really, because Zia
• 1:21:22
  Jones is like is so good at delivering that.
• 1:21:26
  Yeah, it's good performance, just an awful brilliant.
• 1:21:28
  Yeah, yeah, it's a brilliant performance and it's an awful
• 1:21:30
  character. And until Rob tells you that
• 1:21:32
  she's awful, you don't realise yourself.
• 1:21:34
  Yeah. You're.
• 1:21:35
  Because you're still holding her in high regard.
• 1:21:38
  Yeah. And as soon as he points it out,
• 1:21:39
  you go, oh, actually, yeah, she's she's crap.
• 1:21:42
  And that's brilliantly done. Just over that, you know what,
• 1:21:45
  6-7 minutes and that dinner party, I think it's brilliant.
• 1:21:48
  Just to go back to what you were saying about Tim Robbins, Matt,
• 1:21:52
  he's performance is great. He's on, he's in under 3
• 1:21:55
  minutes. Yeah, it's hilarious when Rob's
• 1:21:57
  trying to call him earlier on or Rob's trying to call the
• 1:22:01
  apartment and the sat at the dinner table and he gets really
• 1:22:03
  angry and he snaps at the phone to shut it off.
• 1:22:06
  And then he's obviously into this like spiritual shit.
• 1:22:09
  So he closes his eyes to kind of like centre himself and then he
• 1:22:12
  opens up with his big smile on his face.
• 1:22:16
  Very good. He had a similar small role in
• 1:22:19
  Anchorman a few years after this and he said that the only reason
• 1:22:21
  that he took both of these small roles because he was promised a
• 1:22:24
  custom made weed for each part and that he could keep them
• 1:22:28
  after the film had ended. So he's got both of them.
• 1:22:30
  He wears them at Halloween parties now.
• 1:22:32
  He said he wears this one at Halloween parties.
• 1:22:35
  Of course you do. Just Just be like, just be in at
• 1:22:39
  the Halloween party. Just walking in with a spoon.
• 1:22:41
  Just be like I need a second opinion.
• 1:22:48
  By crossing Charlie off the list, Rob has escaped the worst
• 1:22:51
  of his past as he looks to the future, the.
• 1:22:56
  Crew. Moving over to the crew on High
• 1:23:01
  Fidelity, there are 4 credited writers on the High Fidelity
• 1:23:03
  Script DVD, Vincentis, Steve Pink, John Cusack, and Scott
• 1:23:08
  Rosenberg, based on the Nick Hornby novel of the same name
• 1:23:11
  published in 1995. Matt, what do you think of the
• 1:23:14
  writing on High Fidelity? I think it's excellent.
• 1:23:16
  And I think a lot of it comes down to the most important thing
• 1:23:20
  of all, which is understanding the character of Rob and making
• 1:23:23
  him work on screen. Because if you think it's only
• 1:23:25
  three years before this, that Cusack de Vicentes and Pink the
• 1:23:29
  Road Grosse Point Blank together.
• 1:23:31
  And I think there's so many similarities between Martin
• 1:23:33
  Blank in that and Rob Gordon. He absolutely.
• 1:23:36
  Yeah. Men of a similar age, The both
• 1:23:38
  having an identity crisis, the thing.
• 1:23:40
  And what does it all mean? Where's my life going?
• 1:23:43
  Why am I not truly happy? What do I need to do to to make
• 1:23:46
  myself happy that they must have then got this book and just
• 1:23:50
  thought we're 90% there with Rob.
• 1:23:52
  We've pretty much cracked him already in this previous film
• 1:23:55
  that we did. This is so many similarities
• 1:23:57
  between the two. And so because Rob is so front
• 1:24:00
  and center here in this film, if they didn't write him as
• 1:24:03
  accurately as they do, the film would just fall apart because
• 1:24:06
  you you turn this off after 10 minutes, you'd like, who is this
• 1:24:08
  guy? Do I have to listen to him bang
• 1:24:10
  on like this for the rest of the film?
• 1:24:12
  You just wouldn't tolerate it. But they get him absolutely spot
• 1:24:16
  on. The nail, all his positive
• 1:24:17
  attributes, the nail all his flaws, all the negative things
• 1:24:21
  about him, but he's still likable.
• 1:24:23
  And so you go along with him on that journey that they put in
• 1:24:26
  there and you want to see how the story is going to resolve
• 1:24:29
  itself. And because he works, everything
• 1:24:31
  else is falls into place around him.
• 1:24:33
  All the supporting characters make sense and they give them
• 1:24:35
  all really unique personalities that they stand out to write in
• 1:24:39
  some great jokes. There's really fantastic
• 1:24:42
  understanding of human nature and love and loss and
• 1:24:45
  relationships. It's really quite profound
• 1:24:47
  points, I think the right one here.
• 1:24:49
  And they really understand what it's like to be obsessed with
• 1:24:52
  something. So to nail all those elements
• 1:24:55
  isn't easy at all. And the fact that they do, it's
• 1:24:58
  a sort of incredibly impressive and it makes everything in the
• 1:25:00
  film really relatable. And the last thing I'd say about
• 1:25:03
  the script is, is like, I would challenge anyone to write down
• 1:25:06
  the plot for this film and make it sound like makes any kind of
• 1:25:09
  sense. It just doesn't like, oh, guy
• 1:25:12
  breaks up with his girlfriend and he thinks about some other
• 1:25:16
  ones and listen to this music and chat some shit.
• 1:25:19
  I think, you know, the whole thing to sounds like it should
• 1:25:22
  be like a big, like, plotless mess.
• 1:25:24
  But the fact that it isn't, it's because of the way that they've
• 1:25:27
  written it with this real understanding of character.
• 1:25:29
  I think it's excellent. Absolutely, and the writings
• 1:25:32
  that stand out for me from the film, I think it's got this
• 1:25:35
  universal appeal that speaks to a lot of people.
• 1:25:37
  I can certainly relate to its themes.
• 1:25:39
  I'm sure you two guys can as well.
• 1:25:40
  I'm sure anybody listening who's seen the film can relate to at
• 1:25:43
  least one character or one situation in the film.
• 1:25:47
  Rob, Dick, Barry, all the characters.
• 1:25:49
  We all know these people. We work with them, we were
• 1:25:51
  friends with them, or worst of all, we all of them at certain
• 1:25:55
  points. We definitely.
• 1:25:57
  Are. Great writing.
• 1:25:59
  I think the most impressive thing for me is it feels as
• 1:26:01
  though it's just from the heart and comes from the point of view
• 1:26:04
  of truth. No matter how bad it sounds,
• 1:26:06
  it's just stripped down emotions and I absolutely love that.
• 1:26:09
  Westy, what do you think? Yeah, exactly the same as you
• 1:26:12
  guys. I'm not going to deviate
• 1:26:13
  anywhere from that, I think, but a lot of this is in the novel.
• 1:26:15
  I think the novel is fantastic. Absolute most material is is
• 1:26:19
  fucking brilliant. Like I read this and I thought
• 1:26:22
  it was I could relate to the novel and, and thought that
• 1:26:26
  because, I mean, it's based in in the UK anyway, there's a lot
• 1:26:29
  more themes that I could tap into and there's a few more
• 1:26:32
  references that were a bit more obvious to me or a bit more
• 1:26:35
  local. But I think for these guys to
• 1:26:37
  take it shifted to Chicago and then still make it make sense
• 1:26:41
  means it's a very human story, but it's been done in such a way
• 1:26:44
  that's so relatable no matter where it is.
• 1:26:47
  So that I get real comfort from that.
• 1:26:49
  I get real comfort knowing that these guys have taken a novel
• 1:26:52
  based in the UK and then moved it over to Chicago and haven't
• 1:26:56
  had to add any kind of flamboyance to it at all.
• 1:26:58
  It doesn't mean like it's, if it doesn't make sense, it it makes
• 1:27:01
  perfect sense. So no matter where you are or
• 1:27:04
  where you're from, your experience is going to be the
• 1:27:07
  same. It's a very human experience.
• 1:27:09
  Like relationships are the same. No matter if you're, I'm going
• 1:27:12
  to move to Chicago, it's going to be easier, it's going to be
• 1:27:13
  cooler. It's not.
• 1:27:15
  It's just the same emotions. It's the same feelings exactly.
• 1:27:18
  Different setting. And I think they absolutely nail
• 1:27:21
  that. And for me, I read the novel and
• 1:27:23
  I thought that needs to be there, that needs to be based
• 1:27:26
  where it is. That makes perfect sense.
• 1:27:28
  You kind of deviate it all from that.
• 1:27:29
  But what they keep from that book and what they add
• 1:27:32
  themselves, what the ad themselves, is as good as what
• 1:27:35
  Nick, Nick Hornby wrote in that novel.
• 1:27:37
  I think it's it's on a par with the writing in the novel.
• 1:27:41
  It just completely relates to it.
• 1:27:43
  It's got respect for it, and I love that.
• 1:27:45
  Oh yeah, totally. There's very, very rare that
• 1:27:47
  you'll get people adapting a novel to such a degree where
• 1:27:50
  they've got such respect for it that actually comes out on
• 1:27:52
  screen. And they keep certain elements
• 1:27:53
  of dialogue and they keep certain elements of story and
• 1:27:56
  then adapt them to their surroundings.
• 1:27:58
  But they didn't really have to do too much of that here.
• 1:28:00
  And I think it really, really works and really resonates.
• 1:28:03
  Yeah. This makes it really good to
• 1:28:05
  know that if you've got them feelings and you've got them
• 1:28:07
  emotions, which we all have, it's all right.
• 1:28:10
  Because everything. Unifies everybody it is.
• 1:28:15
  It's just really good. I love how humour it is.
• 1:28:17
  It's fantastic, right? Yeah, I agree.
• 1:28:20
  I actually did read the book before I saw the film, which is
• 1:28:23
  kind of like a man in Miracle for me and I and I it is.
• 1:28:28
  It's a fantastic novel as well. I do remember there being a lot
• 1:28:31
  of Hoo ha about the the soul being ripped out of the novel by
• 1:28:34
  transporting it from London to Chicago.
• 1:28:35
  And Nick Holmby was fine with the location change.
• 1:28:39
  He summarized that the location wasn't the central issue, it
• 1:28:42
  just had universal appeal. He said that no matter where he
• 1:28:44
  went in the world, people would always say things like a new
• 1:28:47
  robe, or I was robbing my 20s, or I used to work with Barry.
• 1:28:51
  And after meeting the writing team, Hornby said the most
• 1:28:54
  gratifying thing was that they had thought the book was about
• 1:28:56
  them. And you can't be in safer hands
• 1:28:58
  than that. Amazing.
• 1:29:00
  Nice. You may have noticed there that
• 1:29:02
  there are 4 credited writers on the film, one of which we
• 1:29:05
  haven't mentioned. And that man is Scott Rosenberg,
• 1:29:08
  who's writing credits include Things to Do in Denver.
• 1:29:12
  The Conair Gone in 60 Seconds. Not a resume you'd expect from
• 1:29:16
  the writer of this film. And the reason for that is
• 1:29:18
  because he didn't write one word of the script, right?
• 1:29:21
  When Mike Newell was first on the direct, it was from a script
• 1:29:24
  written by Scott Rosenberg. His version of the script was
• 1:29:27
  set in Boston. It was about an Independent
• 1:29:29
  Record store getting bullied by a Tower Records that had just
• 1:29:31
  opened over the street. Right.
• 1:29:33
  And this script went called and he left the project.
• 1:29:36
  And when the three writers came on board, they were told in
• 1:29:38
  passing that there'd been a draft by Rosenberg, but that was
• 1:29:40
  being scrapped completely. Job done.
• 1:29:43
  During post production, the credits were being finalised and
• 1:29:46
  they received the paperwork from the Writers Guild of America,
• 1:29:49
  which had Rosenberg's name on it.
• 1:29:51
  Cusack called him in. Rosenberg said, I know there's
• 1:29:53
  nothing of mine in your script. I make sure my name's not on
• 1:29:55
  there when it get all tied up. Totally understand.
• 1:29:58
  It's not mine. These are his words.
• 1:29:59
  Job done again. Done.
• 1:30:01
  And then the paperwork comes back and sure enough, there's
• 1:30:03
  Rosenberg's name on it again. So the three writers called him
• 1:30:07
  and explained that his name's still on the documents.
• 1:30:09
  And he said, yeah, yeah. I've been speaking to my lawyer
• 1:30:12
  who told me the way that the Writers Guild rules work.
• 1:30:15
  I have a real good shot of getting a credit on the film and
• 1:30:19
  this rule now not in play but stated that the first writer of
• 1:30:22
  any adaptation would get a full write in credit.
• 1:30:24
  That's ridiculous. It's ridiculous.
• 1:30:26
  It made me reading this, made me angry.
• 1:30:29
  Really angry. Yeah, really shoddy.
• 1:30:31
  He tried to justify it by saying that he got stiffed in a similar
• 1:30:34
  way a few years back and they said so you've been in our shoes
• 1:30:37
  and you still want to go through with it.
• 1:30:39
  And he took offence to this as if they didn't want to be
• 1:30:41
  associated with his name. I mean why would there be a
• 1:30:44
  family? Totally hijacked their work.
• 1:30:46
  What a total Dick move. Yeah, yeah, it is a Dick move.
• 1:30:49
  Sounds so cliched as well. Here's draft.
• 1:30:51
  You know. You know, big companies trying
• 1:30:54
  to take over the little record store.
• 1:30:55
  You know. Who's in that?
• 1:30:57
  Wilfred strokes the night Laura's daddy died.
• 1:31:08
  Move over to the music in the film.
• 1:31:10
  The Howard Shore score kind of goes unnoticed because the
• 1:31:13
  film's dominated by a killer soundtrack.
• 1:31:15
  There's a score. I know, but I read that I
• 1:31:19
  thought Howard Shore as well. Is it?
• 1:31:21
  Wow, OK. Crazy 2000 songs we'll listen to
• 1:31:26
  with 70 being picked out in one guys or another for the film.
• 1:31:29
  Westie, what do you think of the music in the film?
• 1:31:31
  Well, what's not the love? It's just it starts great and it
• 1:31:35
  never dips. 13th Floor Elevators, The Kinks, Velvet
• 1:31:38
  Underground, Love, Bob Dylan, Beta Band, Elvis Costello, and
• 1:31:41
  it's all at the right point. They know exactly where to put
• 1:31:45
  the music in this film and it just resonates so much and lifts
• 1:31:50
  every scene that whatever song's in there, it makes sense to that
• 1:31:54
  scene and it makes sense to the vibe and the feel of that scene
• 1:31:57
  as well, and it just elevates it every single time.
• 1:31:59
  It's what a really good soundtrack should do, and it
• 1:32:04
  does it incredibly well and high fidelity.
• 1:32:08
  I think it's very easy just to pick, say, 70 songs, 70 amazing
• 1:32:12
  songs. Anybody could do that.
• 1:32:14
  But getting it right and thematically right as well, I
• 1:32:16
  think that's a different matter entirely.
• 1:32:19
  Matt, what do you think? Yeah, I mean exactly the same as
• 1:32:22
  you too, because Can you imagine a version of this film where
• 1:32:24
  they don't get the soundtrack? Spot on.
• 1:32:26
  I know it's a disaster. Would be would be absolutely
• 1:32:30
  awful. But that's kind of what I meant
• 1:32:31
  when I said that about free as early with 59.
• 1:32:34
  How's he getting all these song choices spot on.
• 1:32:36
  I don't know if he did have a lot of help with that.
• 1:32:38
  I don't know if a lot of these were like Cusack's suggestions
• 1:32:42
  because obviously it's kind of more his ear and more his style
• 1:32:44
  of music. Well, him, Pink and Devin
• 1:32:46
  Centres, they were kind of chosen as the writers for this
• 1:32:50
  based on the work that they did on Grosse Pointe Blank and the
• 1:32:53
  soundtrack, like the curator for Grosse Pointe Blank as well.
• 1:32:56
  All right. Which is awesome.
• 1:32:57
  And they were. They're all musical consultants
• 1:32:59
  on the film as well. Right.
• 1:33:01
  Oh, there you go. Well, that's why it works so
• 1:33:02
  well then, because it's just every song trices intertwines
• 1:33:05
  with the character so well in in the different like emotional
• 1:33:08
  developments that Rob has gone through and everybody else has
• 1:33:11
  gone through. And I think in total there's 66
• 1:33:14
  different musical artists mentioned in the film.
• 1:33:17
  And as as well as that, there's a lot of fictional bands in
• 1:33:19
  there as well and a lot of fictional albums and a lot of
• 1:33:22
  them that Dick mentions, which at the beginning in his first
• 1:33:25
  scene, he mentions pop girls, etcetera.
• 1:33:27
  That was the Hungarian title of the movie.
• 1:33:30
  Oh, really? Really.
• 1:33:31
  Yeah. I suppose called hungry I.
• 1:33:34
  Like the reference, but it doesn't make sense.
• 1:33:37
  Doesn't really does it? No, but what a great name for a
• 1:33:40
  film. Yeah, pop girls, etcetera,
• 1:33:43
  etcetera. Lazy as fuck that.
• 1:33:47
  Pop girls and that pop girls and stuff and things.
• 1:33:52
  The film's title is inspired by an Elvis Costello song of the
• 1:33:55
  same name, which is about a jilted lovers X and a new
• 1:33:58
  squeeze. Yeah, I think the soundtrack for
• 1:34:01
  me, it's in that elite group, top five movie soundtracks for
• 1:34:04
  me. It's up there with the likes of
• 1:34:05
  Goodfellas and Pulp Fiction, and I'd possibly throw in Grosse
• 1:34:08
  Pointe Blank and in the mix as well.
• 1:34:09
  That's. Amazing.
• 1:34:11
  Amazing soundtrack. And I would say almost famous in
• 1:34:14
  there with around about the same kind of fire.
• 1:34:16
  Definitely. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:34:18
  Well, there's the five in. There you are.
• 1:34:19
  There's your top five. Done.
• 1:34:23
  There's some real standout musical moments in there for me.
• 1:34:26
  Always see her face by love. It's a great song and it plays
• 1:34:29
  over the scene in the store where somebody asks if they've
• 1:34:31
  got soul and Rob replies that all depends.
• 1:34:35
  Great line, great line, fantastic.
• 1:34:37
  And Rob takes a phone call, and this is the call from D'angelo's
• 1:34:41
  character from the deleted scene that we mentioned.
• 1:34:45
  OK, right. Right.
• 1:34:46
  Nice. OK, Yeah.
• 1:34:48
  And also another moment that I absolutely love is when Rob's
• 1:34:51
  explaining the four horrendous things that he's guilty of.
• 1:34:53
  Then quite sorrowfully, he says who wants a drink?
• 1:34:57
  And then boom, the clouds break. And to the strings of Who Loves
• 1:35:00
  the Sun by the Velvet Underground.
• 1:35:02
  Wonderful moment, great song, wonderful moment.
• 1:35:05
  We'll mention a few, but another question from Patreon.
• 1:35:08
  This is Craig Barnes asking this.
• 1:35:10
  He says other than shipbuilding, as it's obviously the best,
• 1:35:15
  obviously great. What are the guys favorite
• 1:35:19
  tracks on the soundtrack? The High Fidelity?
• 1:35:21
  Matt, do you want to go first? Yeah, sure.
• 1:35:23
  Thanks for the question, Craig. For me, I am a fan of some
• 1:35:26
  bastard music, so I am a big fan of that Donald Sebastian track.
• 1:35:29
  Seymour Stein. I presume This is why I've
• 1:35:32
  chosen but Seymour Stein was actually a real record executive
• 1:35:36
  T was responsible for signing bounce like the pretenders,
• 1:35:39
  Ramones, talking heads, etcetera.
• 1:35:41
  So that's your balance passing all the song song about and I
• 1:35:43
  mean it's it's a great intro for Dick's character as well.
• 1:35:46
  I think that that is the kind of stuff just easing them gently
• 1:35:51
  into the week bit of miserable Sebastian.
• 1:35:55
  You'd see why Barry's Fury's added.
• 1:35:57
  So yeah, that one. That one's a big stand out for
• 1:35:59
  me. I love how you and stay your lab
• 1:36:01
  on there as well. Yeah, very nice.
• 1:36:03
  And then at the end, you can't get a better song than Stevie
• 1:36:06
  Wonder. I did the end, Can you?
• 1:36:07
  What a what a way to go out on. Beautiful.
• 1:36:10
  What about you, Westie? I've got a few.
• 1:36:12
  I mean, probably, probably go. For.
• 1:36:14
  It I do. All of them just going to list
• 1:36:17
  the song Classic classic. All sweet nothing.
• 1:36:20
  The Velvet Underground. I love that show most of the
• 1:36:23
  time by Dylan when that comes in.
• 1:36:24
  Jesus Christ. And yeah.
• 1:36:27
  And who loves the sun as well then?
• 1:36:28
  The Velvet Underground sun Fucking brilliant.
• 1:36:31
  Yeah, that or Sweet Nothing. Amazing song.
• 1:36:34
  I like the harm on Intro to the River when Rob's at his
• 1:36:37
  apartment. By Springsteen.
• 1:36:39
  Yeah, most of the time. By Dylan's amazing.
• 1:36:41
  Rocksteady by your girl Aretha. Yeah, amazing.
• 1:36:46
  And I really like Cold Blooded All Times by Smoke.
• 1:36:49
  It's great. That plays in the store when
• 1:36:50
  they're doing the top five side ones, track ones.
• 1:36:52
  Yeah, great. One thing that we haven't
• 1:36:55
  mentioned is a cameo by a certain man called Bruce The
• 1:36:59
  Boss, Springsteen. There he is.
• 1:37:02
  An absolute joy, certainly for me anyway.
• 1:37:04
  There's some conflict and accounts of this.
• 1:37:06
  Some say that Bob Dylan was contacted first but declined.
• 1:37:10
  However, it is Springsteen in the novel, and Dylan's songs
• 1:37:13
  generally don't talk about relationships, so I'm inclined
• 1:37:15
  to disbelieve this. Yeah, but Cusack knew
• 1:37:18
  Springsteen socially and didn't expect him to say yes.
• 1:37:20
  He thought I may as well call him and throw the Hail Mary pass
• 1:37:23
  and get it over with. But to his surprise, he did say
• 1:37:26
  yes. And actually, in the novel, the
• 1:37:28
  narrator wishes that he could deal with his past relationships
• 1:37:31
  like Springsteen does in the song Bobby Jane, Despite that
• 1:37:33
  song being about Steve Van Sant leaving the E Street Band.
• 1:37:36
  Yeah, yeah. And also the boss in the film he
• 1:37:40
  says give that final good looking goodbye to your all time
• 1:37:43
  top five. A line from Bobby Jean as well.
• 1:37:45
  Wonderful stuff. Yeah, that's the last line of
• 1:37:47
  Bobby Jean, isn't it? Good Looking good.
• 1:37:48
  Yeah, Yeah. Beautiful.
• 1:37:50
  Love a minute, absolutely love a minute to the.
• 1:37:52
  It's just so lovely when he's just like, that's the ultimate
• 1:37:56
  vision, isn't it? So do you want that advice?
• 1:37:58
  You want that guy? I know, I know.
• 1:37:59
  I want Springsteen in your bedroom.
• 1:38:02
  That sounds weird. Yeah, just do what?
• 1:38:06
  I do must do. Yeah, do you want to say buy you
• 1:38:10
  the cardboard could have you put at the bottom of your bed?
• 1:38:13
  Oh wow, I've already got one of them.
• 1:38:16
  But yeah, it is fantastic, a fantastic cameo that does not
• 1:38:19
  feel out of place. And it should, no, it should
• 1:38:22
  feel like what the fuck? It should stand out like a sore
• 1:38:24
  thumb and it just blends with the rest of the film.
• 1:38:27
  It's absolutely perfect. Springsteen's riffing on his
• 1:38:30
  guitar in the scene and and when they were shooting at Steve
• 1:38:32
  Pink, Co writer was watching and it suddenly dawned on him, do we
• 1:38:35
  have the rights to this music? Can we play this in the film?
• 1:38:38
  So we had to go over there and and said, excuse me,
• 1:38:41
  Springsteen, can we can we use the stuff that you're playing?
• 1:38:43
  And he was just improvising. So it was fine, but Pink had to
• 1:38:46
  get him to sign a disclaimer that he could license this, the
• 1:38:50
  music. And also I have them on camera
• 1:38:52
  saying this is just improvisation.
• 1:38:54
  This isn't licensed to anybody. This isn't copyrighted.
• 1:38:57
  So there's a tape somewhere, Springsteen saying that.
• 1:39:01
  Also the line where he says they feel good, maybe, but you feel
• 1:39:05
  better. Yeah, That maybe word was thrown
• 1:39:08
  in there by the boss because he argued that he didn't know if
• 1:39:11
  they'd feel better. So that's why he said maybe
• 1:39:13
  Steve Pink said Springsteen made it more sophisticated.
• 1:39:16
  And he was right, Yeah. Well, when's he wrong?
• 1:39:19
  When is he not so? Solid work overall from the crew
• 1:39:26
  on High Fidelity. However, the standouts are the
• 1:39:28
  great writing from a great source and that insane
• 1:39:31
  soundtrack. Fantastic.
• 1:39:36
  The end. Into the closing scenes of the
• 1:39:40
  film, Barry fulfills his musical visionary dreams and joins a
• 1:39:44
  band. And we find out Robes top five
• 1:39:46
  dream jobs and top five things he misses about Laura.
• 1:39:49
  What we're looking at is the sequence where Robes signs the
• 1:39:52
  kinky Wizards to top five records and Laurae dad dies.
• 1:39:56
  Westie. Yeah.
• 1:39:57
  What do you think of this sequence?
• 1:39:59
  They're really fucking good. But you know what?
• 1:40:04
  No, they're not. That's some shit.
• 1:40:06
  It's an actual song, just. Shouting noise, yeah.
• 1:40:10
  Yeah, it's not up your street, but I like it.
• 1:40:12
  I think it's really good. Good.
• 1:40:13
  Awful. The thing that gets me is that
• 1:40:14
  when he walks to the championship, he just walks
• 1:40:16
  right in front of that skate ramp.
• 1:40:17
  What was he expecting right in? Front of you, maggots.
• 1:40:21
  Swinging his back at the. Whoa, whoa.
• 1:40:24
  It's a pretty when you're angry, but what does he expect?
• 1:40:29
  Like, you can see it coming, but it's great.
• 1:40:31
  There's so many, so many good things in this whole sequence.
• 1:40:34
  Top fives at a funeral, Laura's dad tribute list.
• 1:40:37
  And he kind of Barry actually take taps into the emotion of it
• 1:40:40
  and tries to understand it the only way that he knows how to
• 1:40:43
  through music. Yeah.
• 1:40:45
  Because that's the nicest way. When he finds out he's like Oh
• 1:40:47
  yeah, drag, then it's his. Yeah, well, the like the talk
• 1:40:52
  just totally socially inept, like Dick says.
• 1:40:54
  Sorry Rob, because he thinks that's what you should do in
• 1:40:57
  this situation. But at least he tries.
• 1:40:59
  Barry's response? Just ridiculous drag.
• 1:41:03
  And then it goes on. Even Burrito.
• 1:41:05
  Yeah, yeah, And then he goes into like just trying to make
• 1:41:08
  the best of a bad situation but totally loses grasp of it.
• 1:41:11
  And when he's like start singing the song The night Laura's daddy
• 1:41:15
  died, Brother with a night really were angina stuff.
• 1:41:22
  It's just like fucking inappropriate but so.
• 1:41:25
  Far Rob comes out shaking, the slap on his face and.
• 1:41:30
  Then there's that amazing cut again.
• 1:41:32
  It's this genius the way that builds.
• 1:41:34
  And the only thing I don't understand about this sequence
• 1:41:36
  is the sex scene. I don't I understand why it's
• 1:41:40
  there and I understand that you need to think about anything
• 1:41:42
  else but this. But I think it would have been
• 1:41:44
  better for Rob to like, put music on and a song that she'd
• 1:41:48
  forgotten about with a dad or something like that.
• 1:41:49
  I mean, he's covered in mode. He obviously stinks.
• 1:41:52
  He's soaking wet. Like it's kind of be attractive.
• 1:41:54
  It kind of be enjoyable. It's just one of that doesn't
• 1:41:56
  really sit right with me. That's the only bit of the film
• 1:41:58
  that I think, right, OK, that this is a little bit weird.
• 1:42:01
  And it almost feels like Laura is just settling.
• 1:42:04
  She's like, I'm just too tired and not to be with you.
• 1:42:07
  My sentiment's exactly what I. Find I find that pretty tough to
• 1:42:10
  deal with. Like for Rob's been through and
• 1:42:13
  all he's trying to reconcile, she's just kind of going, Oh
• 1:42:16
  well, you know what? Cannot really be bothered
• 1:42:18
  because Ian was an absolute nightmare.
• 1:42:20
  So Rob's not as bad as he and so I'll just kind of settle for him
• 1:42:24
  and maybe that's what Rob deserves throughout the whole
• 1:42:27
  film, but maybe it isn't because he has been an asshole, but he
• 1:42:30
  hasn't been. But then again, that's life,
• 1:42:32
  isn't it? That's how people think.
• 1:42:33
  No one's 100% sure of anything at any point.
• 1:42:37
  That's the only bit out of this whole sequence that I don't
• 1:42:39
  quite connect with. I feel like it's a little bit
• 1:42:42
  disjointed. It loses its loses its shine a
• 1:42:45
  little bit here for me. But that's that's the only
• 1:42:48
  thing. I'm with you Westie on this.
• 1:42:52
  On a similar vein with you on this one.
• 1:42:54
  I understand that having having sex to feel something other than
• 1:42:57
  grief that she's feeling, but again, I'm not too sure how
• 1:43:00
  strong her emotions are for them.
• 1:43:01
  Getting back together does seem like she's settling, which isn't
• 1:43:05
  really a positive message and I would have preferred some
• 1:43:08
  gesture or change from Rob to show that he is worth hanging on
• 1:43:11
  to. That would have made it stronger
• 1:43:13
  for me, which does tap into a slight problem that I have about
• 1:43:17
  the end of the film, which I'll talk about when we cover in the
• 1:43:19
  next sequence. OK.
• 1:43:21
  What I also think is really weird is when they're in the
• 1:43:23
  car, she's talking about how her dad used to bring her and her
• 1:43:26
  sister to this spot that they've parked up at.
• 1:43:29
  And then literally in the next breath, she says, will you have
• 1:43:32
  sex with me? Yeah.
• 1:43:34
  Do Those two images don't really sit well with me?
• 1:43:37
  Yeah, there shouldn't really be similar thoughts, should the?
• 1:43:41
  No, there shouldn't be similar. Thoughts.
• 1:43:43
  Absolutely function you shouldn't go.
• 1:43:45
  From 1:00 to the other immediately and just be like.
• 1:43:49
  But the moment that Rob says I'm sorry and most of the time kicks
• 1:43:53
  in, that gives me chills because I really do feel that that line
• 1:43:57
  is genuine from Rob and the song so melancholy, it taps right
• 1:44:00
  into the feelings. I love it.
• 1:44:02
  This whole sequence, I'd say it's probably my favorite
• 1:44:05
  sequence in the film because it just judges and juggles these
• 1:44:08
  different tones so well. So to start off with, you know,
• 1:44:12
  it's Larry saying how pissed off Dick and Barry are that the
• 1:44:15
  skate fuckers are actually good in their words.
• 1:44:17
  You know, it's so annoying to them.
• 1:44:20
  You know Barry's face, He's just.
• 1:44:22
  So annoyed at it. It's, it's really fucking good.
• 1:44:25
  It's really. Fucking good.
• 1:44:27
  Yeah, and he's so pissed off, so I love that.
• 1:44:30
  And when Rob goes out to like make them the offer to like they
• 1:44:33
  put out the single, you think, all right, so this is where the
• 1:44:36
  film's going, is it? It's going in a slightly
• 1:44:37
  different direction. And then as soon as he kind of
• 1:44:40
  started just into that you, it's just bam, you get that impact of
• 1:44:43
  hearing about Laura's dad. And even though you've you've
• 1:44:45
  never seen him in the film, I think it's still really
• 1:44:47
  impactful just just because of the fact that comes out of
• 1:44:50
  nowhere, which quite often these events do, unfortunately.
• 1:44:53
  So Alfons certainly feel that. And it is set up as well a
• 1:44:57
  little bit earlier when Laura's mother leaves the answer machine
• 1:45:01
  message, she talks about Dad's angina.
• 1:45:04
  Yes. So a nice little set up.
• 1:45:06
  Yeah, it does. Yeah, you're right.
• 1:45:08
  And even then, you guys are kind of touching it already.
• 1:45:10
  It's just the fact that as soon as this real life event happens,
• 1:45:13
  what do they do? They just put it into the
• 1:45:15
  context of music. It's the only way to know how to
• 1:45:17
  handle things and they're all being genuine.
• 1:45:21
  And you can see I'll just by how like stupidly seriously the take
• 1:45:24
  it like arguing over Jan and Dean and which one was in the
• 1:45:26
  car crash. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:45:29
  Disqualifying the song because it was in the Big Chill?
• 1:45:32
  Yeah, it's absolutely ridiculous.
• 1:45:34
  Absolutely. That's the only way, yeah.
• 1:45:37
  It's the only way the know how to deal with life.
• 1:45:40
  Put it in that context straight away.
• 1:45:42
  And and obviously it's Barry who goes one step too far and starts
• 1:45:45
  making up that ridiculous song. You know, it's funny as it is,
• 1:45:48
  but it's it's obviously going to be Barry.
• 1:45:51
  You just like completely. It's.
• 1:45:54
  Really catchy. It's stupidly catchy for
• 1:45:58
  somebody to come up with, but what a night it really was.
• 1:46:03
  Sing a Spinal Tap song. It is.
• 1:46:05
  It really is. And then what I really like
• 1:46:09
  though about the sequence as it goes on, it just shows you how
• 1:46:12
  messy and complicated relationships in life is.
• 1:46:15
  Like at the wake there should just be focused on the grief.
• 1:46:19
  But they're not. They're still relationships and
• 1:46:21
  personal issues to sort out. And yeah, Rob should maybe keep
• 1:46:26
  his lip buttoned a bit here, but I don't blame him for reacting
• 1:46:29
  to Liz, to be honest. Like she's very accommodating.
• 1:46:33
  No, she's she's on a few Bob comments his way and she tries
• 1:46:37
  to back over, but, you know, I don't believe it for one second.
• 1:46:39
  She's trying to wind him up. And no, it's not the time or the
• 1:46:42
  place. But that's just life, isn't it?
• 1:46:44
  You know, that is how, of course, you know, come to the
• 1:46:47
  surface, especially, like, when you've got all these heightened
• 1:46:50
  emotions. And, yeah, that bit where she
• 1:46:53
  does ask Rob to have sex. We're in the car.
• 1:46:55
  Yeah, it's weird and it's messy and it's complicated, but.
• 1:46:58
  So are relationships. Yeah, maybe that's just how
• 1:47:01
  relationships work in the high degree if, I don't know, it is
• 1:47:05
  bizarre, but maybe the fact that it is bizarre is supposed to be
• 1:47:08
  the point. OK.
• 1:47:10
  Well, yeah, yeah, fair enough. Nothing is getting tied up
• 1:47:13
  neatly here. No, no, you're right.
• 1:47:15
  You're absolutely right, brother.
• 1:47:18
  What a night it really was. Mother, what a night really was
• 1:47:21
  just when he stopped. I've got into the line, brother,
• 1:47:30
  what a night it really was. Mother, what a night a really
• 1:47:33
  angina's tough glory be. Finally, Laura and Robert back
• 1:47:44
  together, but Rob has to deal with one final female
• 1:47:47
  distraction. He puts out his record, but
• 1:47:49
  that's to suffer the sounds of Sonic Death Monkey to go along
• 1:47:52
  with it. Matt, final sequence.
• 1:47:55
  What do you think? Final sequence, so starts off,
• 1:47:58
  uses sweetest feeling to begin with.
• 1:48:01
  A joy. It is a joy.
• 1:48:02
  It's a really clever piece of shorthand for me because it's
• 1:48:06
  such a joyous song and I feel it's slightly filling in the
• 1:48:09
  gaps that I feel a missing from Robin Lara's relationship that
• 1:48:12
  I'm not feeling. But then you've got this lovely
• 1:48:15
  tune over the top of it something.
• 1:48:16
  OK, well, that's how I'm supposed to feel, I guess, even
• 1:48:19
  though I'm not maybe too convinced of it.
• 1:48:22
  And it's the portion of the film that starts to feel a little bit
• 1:48:25
  like a sitcom. Like there's a gig coming up
• 1:48:27
  that Rob is completely unprepared for, and Barry's
• 1:48:30
  going to play at it, and he doesn't want Barry to play at
• 1:48:32
  it, but Barry's not going to back down.
• 1:48:33
  How's all this going to get resolved?
• 1:48:36
  I think what's more important though is what's going on with
• 1:48:38
  Robin, his development. So he is back with Laura, but
• 1:48:41
  then he has that little flirtation with the journalist
• 1:48:43
  and he puts together the mix tape for it.
• 1:48:45
  And again, absolute Dick move. He just basically like waves it
• 1:48:49
  in Laurae face trying to make it jealous, trying to get a
• 1:48:51
  reaction out of it which do her credit.
• 1:48:53
  She just doesn't care at all. Just OK fine.
• 1:48:55
  She doesn't and I think it's at this point he's fine.
• 1:48:58
  He's starting to wise up, even if that means he makes like, the
• 1:49:01
  worst marriage proposal I've ever heard in my.
• 1:49:03
  Life. Oh, it's, it's a disaster, isn't
• 1:49:05
  it? God, I mean, it's barely a
• 1:49:06
  proposal. It's awful like.
• 1:49:08
  The end. You sure you actually propose
• 1:49:10
  doing that? Because absolutely ridiculous.
• 1:49:13
  And that's all fine. I just think it's dawn to lay it
• 1:49:16
  on a bit thick by this point. That robs the fuck up.
• 1:49:19
  But he's starting to learn now and starting to grow as a
• 1:49:22
  person, and I do think the rekindling of their relationship
• 1:49:26
  is a little too neat for me. Everything else in this film has
• 1:49:29
  been messy and complicated because that's how life is.
• 1:49:32
  Everything out, it's just clicking together a little too
• 1:49:34
  easily. And it might be case of this
• 1:49:36
  works in the novel, but it hasn't necessarily translated
• 1:49:39
  well to screen because So you get that last sequence in the
• 1:49:42
  club. And I have to be honest, I had
• 1:49:43
  absolutely no idea about Jack Black before this film, so I
• 1:49:46
  hadn't heard a Tenacious D. So I'm in Rob's shoes,
• 1:49:49
  basically, when when he steps up, I thought it was going to be
• 1:49:51
  something ridiculous and ludicrous.
• 1:49:53
  And then he starts belding out the tune and I was like, holy
• 1:49:56
  shit, yeah, she can sing. At least she was.
• 1:50:00
  Absolutely, exactly, 100% in tune with Rob there because they
• 1:50:04
  had no idea Jack Black was capable of that.
• 1:50:07
  And I do like that line at the end.
• 1:50:08
  And I think it's really sweet where the end at the end of the
• 1:50:11
  film where Rob's making them mixtape Laura.
• 1:50:13
  But it's going to be stuff that makes her happy.
• 1:50:15
  And he's starting to understand that for the first time.
• 1:50:18
  And I'm glad they ended like that.
• 1:50:19
  And they don't have something ridiculous like her
• 1:50:22
  announcements just leaving town and there's a big chase to the
• 1:50:24
  airport or the train station stopper.
• 1:50:27
  So I'm really, really glad they don't do that.
• 1:50:29
  And it's a nice way to end it. But again, I just think it's all
• 1:50:32
  a little too easily resolved at this point for me.
• 1:50:35
  I think what would be better is if if you did have that line and
• 1:50:38
  you had that realization from Rob about what do you need to do
• 1:50:41
  to make her happy and not put on songs that he thinks she should
• 1:50:44
  like. But it would work so much better
• 1:50:47
  if they hadn't got back together properly at that point, if that
• 1:50:50
  was still ambiguous. So, you know, she's still on the
• 1:50:52
  scene, they're still in contact. They might get back together,
• 1:50:55
  they might not. But what's important is that Rob
• 1:50:57
  has learned his lesson and moved on and grown up.
• 1:51:01
  I think that would be a much better end than what we get for
• 1:51:03
  me. Yeah, I'm of a similar opinion.
• 1:51:06
  Goes back to what I was seeing before I was talking about a few
• 1:51:09
  moments ago. This moment with Caroline
• 1:51:11
  Forders just feels like it happens far too late in the film
• 1:51:13
  for me. Yeah, I would have preferred
• 1:51:15
  this move maybe 20 minutes forward and maybe the phone call
• 1:51:19
  from Laura telling them that her dad died comes to the point
• 1:51:22
  where he's making the tear for Caroline.
• 1:51:23
  And that's the flashpoint for him to turn things around and
• 1:51:26
  realise that he should be focusing on Laura.
• 1:51:28
  And all the way through, he's been more than about Laura, but
• 1:51:30
  this doesn't stop him from trying to kneel.
• 1:51:32
  Everything inside. Just this just feels out of
• 1:51:35
  place. It has always stuck in for me.
• 1:51:38
  But what I do like in this scene is all of this sequence is Barry
• 1:51:43
  really funny when they're in the store and that he's trying to
• 1:51:46
  not play at the gig. He says Rob, we're called Sonic
• 1:51:49
  Death Monkey. And if Laura and a bourgeois
• 1:51:51
  allure your friends can't handle it, fuck them.
• 1:51:53
  Let them riot with Sonic fucking Death Monkey.
• 1:51:56
  Let them riot. Fucking love that.
• 1:51:59
  You know, you were saying earlier, Westie, that you use
• 1:52:01
  that. I use that.
• 1:52:02
  Let them riot. I always say.
• 1:52:04
  I always use that fuck. Them I'm going to be 20 minutes
• 1:52:07
  there. Fuck them, let them riot.
• 1:52:12
  Like really offensive response, as if bourgeois.
• 1:52:17
  Lawyers are going to riot anywhere.
• 1:52:20
  Yeah. Brilliant.
• 1:52:21
  Yeah, I mean, it's it's great. There's some really good lines
• 1:52:24
  in here when he's kind of like, how can you like Marvin Gaye,
• 1:52:27
  not Garfunkel? What a snow?
• 1:52:32
  What? The fucking prick.
• 1:52:34
  Of course you can. It's the easiest combo to love,
• 1:52:36
  isn't it? But that was shut up or down.
• 1:52:38
  Like stopping a Dick. I do love how this wraps itself
• 1:52:42
  up and I do get that it is a bit neat.
• 1:52:45
  It seems a bit too happy ending without going to Tony Curtis, if
• 1:52:49
  you know what I mean. It's just it is there and there
• 1:52:52
  are elements there that do work. And I do think that the girl
• 1:52:55
  from the reader is kind of thrown in and you think, oh,
• 1:52:58
  well, here we'll go again. But you do get them realisations
• 1:53:00
  when like when's this going to stop?
• 1:53:02
  And you know that Laura's kind of when's walking to stop and
• 1:53:05
  he's has, it's such a big deal, but she doesn't.
• 1:53:08
  And I think what you're starting to do now is move out of Rob's
• 1:53:11
  head and into the real world and everything is not as ridiculous
• 1:53:15
  or as big or as important as what you've seen in the rest of
• 1:53:18
  the film. I think you start moving into
• 1:53:20
  real life and you realise how ridiculous Rob's thoughts are
• 1:53:23
  and have been. It's almost kind of like waking
• 1:53:26
  up from a depression or an anxiety of sorts and just going,
• 1:53:30
  Oh yeah, it's easy. And Laura is the guide and light
• 1:53:32
  and that she strips back all of the bullshit makes him realise
• 1:53:36
  that it's, it's just simple. Rob, stop analyzing everything.
• 1:53:40
  This real celebration here is the fact that that record's gone
• 1:53:44
  out and they actually hear their song being played by Barry, who
• 1:53:47
  doesn't know it's their song. And they then connect over that.
• 1:53:51
  And I think that's enough to rekindle anything in the real
• 1:53:54
  world. That's our song.
• 1:53:56
  He doesn't know it's our song. It's really fucking good, and
• 1:53:58
  Sonic Death Monkey have the best three names of any bands that
• 1:54:03
  I've ever heard in the fucking life.
• 1:54:04
  Sonic Death Monkey's. Amazing.
• 1:54:06
  Yeah, the. Internal OverDrive is amazing
• 1:54:09
  and Barry driving the UK Five is amazing.
• 1:54:12
  Three amazing names. Like there could have been like
• 1:54:15
  3 completely different bands all with incredible names.
• 1:54:18
  And I do think it's one of the me favorite favorite end lines
• 1:54:23
  like Matt touched on. But when he turns to the camera
• 1:54:25
  and says for the first time, I can kind of see how that's done.
• 1:54:28
  Stevie Wonder. Niagara Falls smash.
• 1:54:31
  Love it. I think it's a wonderful moment
• 1:54:33
  to end on because he thinks on the death monkey you're going to
• 1:54:35
  tear the place apart with some like art noise shit.
• 1:54:38
  But then Barry comes on in a suit with his hair done like
• 1:54:42
  what the fuck is going on? He looks great and then the
• 1:54:47
  surprise of his sweet, sweet vocals and everybody loves that
• 1:54:50
  song. It just never feels to put a
• 1:54:52
  smile on my face. That really nice note to end on.
• 1:54:54
  And what I like here is that we've got an ARC for all three
• 1:54:58
  of these record store bombs. Dick's got the girl, Barry's the
• 1:55:01
  lead singer in a band and he's fucking great.
• 1:55:04
  And Rob's much more fully formed adult.
• 1:55:06
  He's successfully owns his first single, he's with Laura, and
• 1:55:09
  realised that the good compilation tape for her should
• 1:55:12
  be full of the stuff that she would like, that would make her
• 1:55:14
  happy. Very nice.
• 1:55:16
  I also like that it ends how it begins with Rob sat on a chair
• 1:55:19
  listening to music, but there's a serenity about him, that kind
• 1:55:22
  of almost a smugness that he's finally cracked it, which is
• 1:55:25
  reflected in the Stevie Wonder song, a direct opposite to the
• 1:55:28
  song that's playing at the start.
• 1:55:30
  Tone and lyrics. Beautiful stuff.
• 1:55:32
  Yeah, fantastic. My favorite though of of the
• 1:55:34
  Jack Black performance is when he's like, it's his hand
• 1:55:38
  movements when he does like this.
• 1:55:39
  There's nothing wrong with me lapping you.
• 1:55:42
  And he's like. His hand was like.
• 1:55:46
  Wow, he's taking the piss and it's still amazing.
• 1:55:56
  Yeah, yeah, great. The original choice for that
• 1:55:59
  song was another Marvel Gear track.
• 1:56:00
  Got to give it up. Black didn't think it fit the
• 1:56:02
  tone and suggested let's get it on instead.
• 1:56:04
  He was 100% right. And.
• 1:56:07
  The idea was to pre record Black's audio track and have him
• 1:56:09
  lip sync. He was nervous.
• 1:56:11
  And the shoot was scheduled for 9:00 AM.
• 1:56:12
  And he said I can't perform at 99 in the morning.
• 1:56:15
  Who can? Let's do it like 9:00 at night
• 1:56:17
  maybe. But when it came to it, he
• 1:56:19
  couldn't lip sync. So the whole performance was
• 1:56:21
  live and in one take. Neil, Oh.
• 1:56:24
  Excellent. Sugar.
• 1:56:25
  Very nice. So all's well that ends well
• 1:56:30
  with all the characters in a better emotional place.
• 1:56:36
  Reception and award. At the aftershore party of High
• 1:56:40
  Fidelity, Tenacious D performed live on stage.
• 1:56:43
  Shame it wasn't Kathleen Turner OverDrive.
• 1:56:47
  Love to see them guys. On a budget of $30 million, High
• 1:56:53
  Fidelity returned a respectable 47.1 million worldwide.
• 1:56:57
  Critical reception was positive as well, The Washington Post
• 1:57:00
  said. Jack Black was a bundle of
• 1:57:01
  verbal ferocious energy and frankly, whenever he's in the
• 1:57:04
  scene, he shoplifts the movie from Cusack.
• 1:57:07
  Yeah, pretty much. I wouldn't say shoplifted.
• 1:57:09
  I would say they're both shoplifted together, Vincent,
• 1:57:13
  Just. No of those are for us.
• 1:57:17
  Yeah. Roger EBIT, our old pal.
• 1:57:21
  What do you think he'd give it? 3.
• 1:57:24
  Three out of four. He actually give it four out of
• 1:57:26
  four. Oh.
• 1:57:27
  Lovely, he said, watching High Fidelity.
• 1:57:29
  I had the field and I could walk out of the theater and meet the
• 1:57:32
  same people on the street and want to, which is an even higher
• 1:57:35
  compliment. Oh lovely, that.
• 1:57:37
  And Rolling Stone said it hits all the laugh bases, from grins
• 1:57:39
  to the force. Cusack and his Chicago friends
• 1:57:42
  have rewritten Scott Rosenberg's script to catch Hornby spirit
• 1:57:45
  without losing the sick comic twists they gave Grosse Point
• 1:57:48
  blank. Have to put Rosenberg in there,
• 1:57:50
  don't they? Yeah, I think you might need a
• 1:57:51
  bit of a bit of a history lesson on the guys and Rolling Stone
• 1:57:55
  you. Listen to this.
• 1:57:59
  Yeah, you're listening, Rolling Stone.
• 1:58:00
  Yeah. Retract it right now.
• 1:58:05
  Finally, USA TODAY was not enamored by the film.
• 1:58:07
  They said let's be kind and just say that High Fidelity doesn't
• 1:58:10
  quite belong beside Growth, Point Blank and the shuwa thing
• 1:58:13
  in Cusack's greatest hits collection.
• 1:58:15
  It's not that he isn't good, more like miscast.
• 1:58:18
  What the fuck rubbish that. Embarrassing.
• 1:58:24
  Embarrassing. Really, really embarrassing.
• 1:58:28
  Empire has it at 446 in their 500 greatest Movies of All time,
• 1:58:33
  Ron The Models placed at the 14th best romantic comedy ever,
• 1:58:36
  and in 2010, Chicago Magazine honored it as the greatest ever
• 1:58:40
  film set in Chicago. Well, OK.
• 1:58:42
  Surprise it is surprise. Big licks.
• 1:58:45
  Really big like that. From a contemporary point of
• 1:58:47
  view, High Fidelity has 91 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and
• 1:58:50
  7.5 out of 10 on IMDb. Big numbers, big film.
• 1:58:54
  So it should. It's fucking massive.
• 1:58:55
  Big tunes, big, huge, massive tune.
• 1:59:00
  The screenplay for High Fidelity was BAFTA nominated, and John
• 1:59:02
  Cusack got a Golden Globe nomination for his performance
• 1:59:05
  as well. But the film's legacy lies in
• 1:59:07
  the goodwill and strong fanbase that continues to hold.
• 1:59:10
  Definitely does. Sequels and influence.
• 1:59:18
  There are no sequels to High Fidelity, of course, but there
• 1:59:20
  have been a couple of adaptations of Home Bees
• 1:59:22
  material. Firstly, in 2006, High Fidelity
• 1:59:25
  was adapted into a Broadway musical and ran for a total of
• 1:59:28
  13 performances over 27 days. The New York Times described it
• 1:59:32
  as a show that erases itself from your memory even as you
• 1:59:35
  watch it. Have that.
• 1:59:40
  Worth catching then, yeah? More notably, there was ATV show
• 1:59:43
  that was released on Valentine's Day 2020.
• 1:59:45
  It flips the gender of heartbroken Rob with Zoe Kravitz
• 1:59:48
  in the lead role. Its locations moved from Chicago
• 1:59:51
  to Brooklyn. Have any of you seen the TV
• 1:59:53
  adaptation? I didn't even know what existed
• 1:59:56
  until two weeks ago. No, but I am aware of it.
• 2:00:01
  Oh. That's a disappointment.
• 2:00:03
  Yeah, and I, I do fancy it, but at the same time I don't want it
• 2:00:07
  to just be like a rehash of what I've already seen.
• 2:00:10
  I've seen a few episodes I was preparing to dislike it, but I
• 2:00:12
  didn't. I think Kravitz is fantastic in
• 2:00:15
  the lead role. The soundtrack, although
• 2:00:17
  obviously not as good as the film, is good, and you can't go
• 2:00:19
  wrong with the source material. But the issue I have is that
• 2:00:22
  there's a lot of stuff in there that's exactly the same as the
• 2:00:24
  film. And I'm not just talking about
• 2:00:25
  the dialogue, even like the cadence of lines being delivered
• 2:00:28
  is identical in a lot of places. If you're going to do a remake
• 2:00:32
  of it or a new adaptation, I think you need to distance
• 2:00:36
  yourself as much as possible while still honoring the
• 2:00:39
  original. That's true, but it is 20 years
• 2:00:42
  old and we are old farts. Somebody who sound like, you
• 2:00:44
  know, dads sitting around. Suppose I can't believe that
• 2:00:46
  we're in the same shit, but they're trying to keep that in
• 2:00:48
  the same tone, and that's fine. In the same spirit, I suppose,
• 2:00:51
  yeah. It's a problem that the writers
• 2:00:53
  of the film had with the show as well.
• 2:00:55
  The credits say it's adapted from the Nick Hornby book, but
• 2:00:58
  they're a direct, like lift and drop moments from the film.
• 2:01:01
  An example is a little Easter egg in joke that was written
• 2:01:04
  into the film for one of their friends that made it into the TV
• 2:01:07
  show. And there's absolutely no way
• 2:01:09
  that the writers of that show could possibly know what that
• 2:01:11
  meant, right? Right.
• 2:01:13
  But it's still made it in the TV show, and it doesn't mention the
• 2:01:16
  writers of the film in the credits or adapted by or
• 2:01:19
  whatever, right. So an appeal was made at the
• 2:01:21
  Writers Guild of America for a writing credit by Divincentis
• 2:01:24
  and Steve Pink, and they got a straight no, Just no.
• 2:01:29
  Fucking ridiculous. Don't bother us considering what
• 2:01:31
  they've been through as well. Like exactly.
• 2:01:33
  It's just, I mean, awful. It's outrageous, especially if
• 2:01:36
  it's like a personal thing and it doesn't really have any
• 2:01:39
  relevance. Dick move.
• 2:01:40
  Another Dick move. But I would, I would say check
• 2:01:44
  it out because the source material, like I said, can't go
• 2:01:47
  wrong with it and there are some really good moments.
• 2:01:50
  It's emotionally involving as well.
• 2:01:52
  Like I say, Kravitz. Fantastic.
• 2:01:54
  Yeah. Great takes the Barry Roller.
• 2:01:56
  See, this is the thing. When I was watching it, I was
• 2:01:59
  thinking, OK, right, OK, it's fine so far.
• 2:02:01
  But before we were introduced to Barry and Dick.
• 2:02:05
  Yeah. And then I was thinking, oh,
• 2:02:06
  God, Barry and Dick, that's got to be nailed.
• 2:02:09
  Yeah. And Barry, I don't know the name
• 2:02:12
  of the actress, to be honest. And she is good.
• 2:02:15
  The guy who plays Dick is just nowhere near as good.
• 2:02:19
  Barry and Dick get on in the TV show, which doesn't fit with me.
• 2:02:24
  Right. No.
• 2:02:25
  It doesn't seem to work and maybe I'm just being a bit of an
• 2:02:27
  elitist snob because I love the film, but that's that's just the
• 2:02:30
  way it is. Yeah, there's more the high
• 2:02:32
  fatality than just the premise, though.
• 2:02:34
  It's the characters and it's the emotions and it's the
• 2:02:36
  relationships. You should just take the idea,
• 2:02:39
  call it something else, and do it exactly in a similar vein.
• 2:02:43
  When Kravitz screams to the screen.
• 2:02:45
  What fucking Ian guy or the equivalent just didn't feel
• 2:02:48
  right. It felt just forced.
• 2:02:50
  Right, fair enough. Well man, just everyone just
• 2:02:52
  don't bother watching that and just watch High Fidelity 4 or
• 2:02:54
  500 times like we have. No, no, I am going to recommend
• 2:02:58
  it. It is good.
• 2:02:59
  It is good. So I think the message here is
• 2:03:02
  read the book, watch the film, watch the TV show even, but
• 2:03:04
  count yourself lucky that you didn't see the Broadway show.
• 2:03:08
  In fact, if you were one of the few that did see the Broadway
• 2:03:10
  show, you probably can't remember it anywhere.
• 2:03:13
  Yes, that's absolutely fine. Top five Broadway shows wouldn't
• 2:03:16
  be in there. Coming next, a new section on
• 2:03:20
  the show and ATRM. First our conversation with the
• 2:03:24
  Co writer of High Fidelity DVD, Vincentis.
• 2:03:27
  Oh yes. The Interview The Co writer of
• 2:03:34
  the film Emmy award-winning DV Divincent This has dropped by
• 2:03:38
  for a chat. Welcome to the show, DV.
• 2:03:40
  Hi, thanks for having me. Great to have you here for both
• 2:03:43
  me and the other fellas at All the Right Movies.
• 2:03:45
  We're all big fans of your work, counting High Fidelity and Gross
• 2:03:48
  Point Blank as personal favourites, so it's a joy to
• 2:03:51
  have you on. Thank you.
• 2:03:52
  I really appreciate. That OK, so let's get into it.
• 2:03:55
  So firstly, when when we talk about films on the show, if
• 2:03:58
  there's a shared screen writing credit, that could be a first
• 2:04:01
  draft by a writer who's often not involved in the rewrites and
• 2:04:04
  then the final draft. And that's not the case with
• 2:04:07
  your writing on Grosse Pointe Bank and High Fidelity.
• 2:04:09
  So the first thing I'm really interested to know is how does
• 2:04:11
  the screen writing process work on something like High Fidelity
• 2:04:14
  where it's a collaborative effort between you, Steve and
• 2:04:17
  John? You're right to wonder about
• 2:04:20
  these strange credits that are on movie posters and in credits.
• 2:04:25
  It's something that gets very weird, and the Writers Guild is
• 2:04:29
  very arcane in the way that they piece through it and decide what
• 2:04:32
  happens. But as a partnership, you know,
• 2:04:35
  every process was different. We wrote a number of films
• 2:04:37
  together, not just the two that got made, but but a couple that
• 2:04:39
  didn't. And the process was always
• 2:04:42
  plastic and fluid depending on where we were in the world or
• 2:04:45
  who was more on top of what. So gross blank was written as an
• 2:04:51
  example. It was based on a screenplay
• 2:04:55
  that pre existed. This guy, Tom Jankowitz wrote a
• 2:04:59
  a screenplay and you know, it happened to coincide with things
• 2:05:03
  that we were talking about. And so we bought it from him and
• 2:05:07
  and turned it into what what you see that movie is with that
• 2:05:10
  process. Steve Pink and I wrote the first
• 2:05:13
  few drafts together and then John came in and and wrote with
• 2:05:16
  us after that. So that was very sort of like
• 2:05:19
  straightforward in that sense. With High Fidelity.
• 2:05:20
  It was a little different. Well, actually it was actually,
• 2:05:24
  it wasn't that different. We started it that way.
• 2:05:27
  There was a period where I was sort of holed up with Stephen
• 2:05:30
  Frears working on it, and then we took it back to those guys
• 2:05:35
  and kept going all together. And then because of the way
• 2:05:38
  Steve and John and I are sort of collectively, we never stop
• 2:05:43
  writing. We're rewriting while we're
• 2:05:46
  shooting for sure. Like sometimes even in the
• 2:05:49
  middle of a scene, we will look at each other like we definitely
• 2:05:52
  had a shorthand. I mean, the three of us went to
• 2:05:53
  high school together and we started, we started doing what
• 2:05:56
  we did. The the sort of writing, I would
• 2:05:58
  say like this sort of core aesthetic of the way we were was
• 2:06:03
  created around like kitchen tables at 3:00 in the morning
• 2:06:06
  in, in Evanston, IL like making crank calls and like just being
• 2:06:11
  stupid together. It goes back that far.
• 2:06:15
  So we did have a sort of shorthand and like, you know,
• 2:06:17
  many a time John would be in front of the camera and he would
• 2:06:21
  say a line and then he would stop and sort of look over at me
• 2:06:24
  and I'd be like, yeah, we can make that.
• 2:06:25
  But like, that's yes. And we would come over and talk
• 2:06:27
  about it and, and, and make a change, you know?
• 2:06:30
  So again, it would never really stop until they pried the camera
• 2:06:36
  from our cold, dead hands. So I guess you can see that in
• 2:06:40
  the right and as well, you can see that you have a shorthand
• 2:06:42
  because the writing is so dynamic and it feels so unique.
• 2:06:46
  And I guess that comes from you known each other since you were
• 2:06:48
  kids. Yeah, I mean, they're also those
• 2:06:52
  movies are filled with in jokes. Not that we were trying to make
• 2:06:55
  in jokes, but like if something came up that made us laugh and
• 2:06:58
  we know that there's six or seven other people that we grew
• 2:07:01
  up with who are going to get it, that would generally be good
• 2:07:04
  enough for us. And there's a bunch of those,
• 2:07:06
  those movies. Yeah, I read that one of those
• 2:07:09
  in jokes made it into the TV adaptation of High Fidelity as
• 2:07:12
  well. Yeah, a couple of them, yeah.
• 2:07:16
  So you you mentioned there about gross point blanket, your first
• 2:07:18
  screen writing credit and that was an original idea.
• 2:07:21
  And as we mentioned on the show I've dealt, it was an adaptation
• 2:07:24
  of a Nick Combi novel. So what's the difference?
• 2:07:27
  Or how different is it to write an adaptation compared to an
• 2:07:30
  original idea? They're very different.
• 2:07:33
  I think that before you set out in either direction, either
• 2:07:37
  adaptation or original, it always feels like it's going to
• 2:07:41
  be easier than the other. And then once you're doing it,
• 2:07:44
  it feels like it's harder than the other.
• 2:07:46
  I'm often thinking like getting the essence of this thing is
• 2:07:51
  really hard. I wish I could just make more of
• 2:07:53
  it up and then the the reverse is true.
• 2:07:55
  As I said, the grass is always greener.
• 2:07:58
  But with adaptation you are identifying something in a in a
• 2:08:02
  pre-existing work that that speaks to you and that you feel
• 2:08:06
  you could add to and elucidate further in a particular
• 2:08:10
  direction. It's much like doing a cover of
• 2:08:13
  a song. Sure.
• 2:08:15
  You know, the emphasis there is making it different is if it
• 2:08:18
  feels like just getting across the exact same idea that's in
• 2:08:22
  the existing work, It's it's really not interesting.
• 2:08:25
  It's it. So adaptation is about literally
• 2:08:28
  adapting something to your brain and to what you feel could be
• 2:08:33
  discussed further within that world and that piece.
• 2:08:35
  Yeah, certainly with High Fidelity, the book was
• 2:08:38
  fantastic. And as I've said elsewhere, like
• 2:08:41
  I initially rejected the idea of adapting it because I loved the
• 2:08:45
  book and I just wanted to leave it alone.
• 2:08:47
  I started to understand and see how there was more to add to the
• 2:08:52
  ideas in that book in a different direction that was
• 2:08:55
  already in my head personally, and I think my writing partners
• 2:08:59
  would say the same. So again, it's building on
• 2:09:02
  something. It's building a church on top of
• 2:09:05
  the Mayan ruin. It's like the same, the same
• 2:09:07
  energy is there, but you're you're sort of changing the the
• 2:09:10
  dynamics. And with an original, you know,
• 2:09:13
  you have an enormous amount of freedom, but you also don't have
• 2:09:17
  sort of the signposts that you have if you're adapting about a
• 2:09:22
  work that's really solid back to High Fidelity, That book is so
• 2:09:26
  solid, you know what I mean? Yeah, it's amazing.
• 2:09:29
  And it has such a a strong point of view.
• 2:09:32
  The dynamics of of a deeply unreliable narrator are
• 2:09:37
  endlessly suspenseful in a way. Once you realize that that Rob
• 2:09:43
  is full of shit, anything can be true.
• 2:09:46
  You know what I mean? You're constantly on your toes.
• 2:09:49
  And there's also in that book, there's this prose that's
• 2:09:51
  wonderful that says so much. And so initially it was we had
• 2:09:56
  it as voice over in the script. And then Stephen Frears came up
• 2:09:58
  with the idea of, of making a direct address to the to the
• 2:10:01
  camera. And then we created a set of
• 2:10:03
  rules around that. Like Rob can't talk to the
• 2:10:06
  camera if anybody else is around, like it's between Rob
• 2:10:09
  and the audience. Like if somebody's standing next
• 2:10:11
  to him, he's not going to turn to the camera and start, you
• 2:10:13
  know what I mean? Because it's a personal moment.
• 2:10:16
  Yeah, he's got to sneak off to talk to the audience.
• 2:10:18
  The audience is secretly with him and it just doesn't work.
• 2:10:22
  Otherwise it becomes kind of dumb.
• 2:10:26
  I suppose the biggest change that you made from the novel was
• 2:10:29
  transporting it over to Chicago that your hometown.
• 2:10:32
  Yes. And I do remember the there was
• 2:10:34
  a lot of Hoo ha about the change of location when the film came
• 2:10:38
  out. Yeah.
• 2:10:39
  Nick Hornby says this as well, that it's not about the
• 2:10:41
  location, it's about it's about the people and it's about the
• 2:10:45
  relationships. And he says that Barry the store
• 2:10:48
  clerk or Rob, he's met them everywhere he's been in the
• 2:10:51
  world. Yeah, it's a culture.
• 2:10:54
  I mean, this sort of microculture of record stores
• 2:10:56
  and extreme music fandom, pop music, condom is certainly
• 2:11:01
  universal, but subcultures in general, obsessive subcultures
• 2:11:04
  in general are that way. It doesn't have to be just
• 2:11:08
  music. It can be films, it can be
• 2:11:10
  knitting, it can be electronics. These worlds like you, you, you
• 2:11:14
  know, you walk into them and there's a bunch of rules and
• 2:11:17
  there's a bunch of ways to piss people off and there's a bunch
• 2:11:20
  of ways to find a hierarchy in them.
• 2:11:22
  And so that is completely transferable to anywhere.
• 2:11:27
  I happen to grow up going to record stores in Chicago.
• 2:11:30
  And I recognized in that book those places were exactly the
• 2:11:35
  same. And the dynamics are the same.
• 2:11:37
  And the foolish dreams and the projections people make onto
• 2:11:40
  music and musicians, that was all completely the same in
• 2:11:45
  Chicago as it was in London. And so if they wanted us to put
• 2:11:50
  it someplace, why wouldn't we? Yeah, you know.
• 2:11:53
  Yeah, big universal themes which transfer anywhere.
• 2:11:57
  Yeah, and as Nick said, you know, just to add something to
• 2:11:59
  what Nick has said, he's told me years ago and he and I are
• 2:12:03
  really close friends now. And and this this comes up and
• 2:12:06
  we laugh about it. He he told me that when
• 2:12:10
  initially it was announced that the film was going to take place
• 2:12:13
  in Chicago, that we had we didn't know each other at that
• 2:12:16
  time. You know, he actually was kind
• 2:12:18
  of nervous about it. He was like, people are upset
• 2:12:21
  and is this a London story? And and then he, as, as you
• 2:12:25
  noted, he just realized, like now this isn't about London.
• 2:12:29
  The story's not about London. It's about these kinds of
• 2:12:32
  people. And they're everywhere.
• 2:12:34
  Yeah, he sounds, I mean, he sounds like a great guy and he
• 2:12:37
  sounds like he's very adaptable because I could understand that
• 2:12:41
  taking your baby and then kind of putting it somewhere else
• 2:12:45
  might be a bit of a worry, but he seemed as if he was totally
• 2:12:47
  cool with that. Well, Nick has said something
• 2:12:49
  else really interesting to me about that dynamic.
• 2:12:52
  He said, you know, a lot of authors are and including him in
• 2:12:55
  the past, get freaked out about somebody fucking up their book
• 2:13:00
  with a movie. And Nick said that it was a
• 2:13:02
  revelation to him one day when he realized like a bad film
• 2:13:07
  adaptation of a book has never made anyone think less of the
• 2:13:10
  book. Yeah, it's a good point.
• 2:13:12
  It in fact it's heightened it's reputation if anything.
• 2:13:15
  Possibly, yeah, because people are talking about it.
• 2:13:17
  People are like, well, it's not as good as the book.
• 2:13:19
  So it's yes, you're right. There's an attachment of
• 2:13:21
  superlatives suddenly to the book itself.
• 2:13:23
  Yeah, yeah. In fact, to go step further,
• 2:13:26
  like Nick does not adapt his own books and and doesn't want to.
• 2:13:30
  And a lot of authors are like, I like, it's very common that when
• 2:13:36
  a film company options a book to turn it into a film, that part
• 2:13:41
  of the author's contract is that they want a first crack at
• 2:13:44
  adapting it. A lot of authors want to be,
• 2:13:47
  they want to adapt their own book.
• 2:13:48
  But Nick's point of view is that that's it's just boring.
• 2:13:52
  He's already done it. He did the book.
• 2:13:54
  Yeah, it makes sense, yeah. And Nick is an accomplished and
• 2:13:58
  really great screenwriter as well, so it makes sense that he
• 2:14:00
  would, if he's going to write a screenplay, he'd want to find a
• 2:14:04
  newer pastures. Yeah, absolutely.
• 2:14:06
  I'm looking at both Grosse Pointe Blank and High Fidelity.
• 2:14:09
  We noted on the podcast that we feel there are similarities
• 2:14:13
  between the two central characters, Martin Blanc and Rob
• 2:14:15
  Gordon. Was that deliberate or, or was
• 2:14:18
  that something that struck you when you were reading the novel?
• 2:14:20
  Or do I mean, I suppose the first question would be, do you
• 2:14:23
  feel the same way that we do? I do is a really specific
• 2:14:28
  chemistry involved in our collective, Steve, John and I,
• 2:14:32
  our collective interest in those stories and that character like
• 2:14:38
  as an example, like a brief background on the Grosse Pointe
• 2:14:41
  Blank thing. John had just made a production
• 2:14:43
  deal with Paramount Pictures in like 1992 or something.
• 2:14:47
  And Steve and I had both moved out to Los Angeles as well.
• 2:14:52
  And one thing I remember John and I talking about and joking
• 2:14:55
  about is like the idea of what the ultimate American man is.
• 2:14:59
  And we would just like joke around with the archetypes and
• 2:15:03
  the, the cliches. And I remember one day we were
• 2:15:06
  playing basketball and, and we cracked ourselves up because we,
• 2:15:12
  we decided that the ultimate American male would be somebody
• 2:15:15
  who kills, obviously, and money would have to be involved.
• 2:15:19
  So the ultimate American male would be a, a man who kills for
• 2:15:22
  money. Ha, ha, we laughed.
• 2:15:24
  We thought it was very funny. Not long after.
• 2:15:28
  And I was like, I was basically living in my car and I, I was
• 2:15:32
  bartending and I would make some extra money reading, doing
• 2:15:35
  coverage of scripts for John. And coverage coverage means a
• 2:15:38
  script comes in, is submitted and somebody not John reads it
• 2:15:42
  and does an analysis of it. And I'd get 100 bucks a script
• 2:15:45
  or something like that from Paramount.
• 2:15:46
  And one thing you're not supposed to do, I don't know if
• 2:15:51
  I've ever told this story. One thing you're not supposed to
• 2:15:53
  do is open unsolicited submissions.
• 2:15:56
  So if it comes in the mail in some Manila envelope from some
• 2:16:00
  person out in the world, you're supposed to throw it in the
• 2:16:03
  garbage because of liability. You're not supposed to read
• 2:16:06
  these things because if you do and you wind up having a similar
• 2:16:09
  idea, that person can sue you and say you read it in the
• 2:16:12
  script, you got it. But I frequently could not help
• 2:16:15
  myself because I was found the scripts coming and I was like a,
• 2:16:20
  you know, 25 year old asshole. So I was like, these scripts
• 2:16:24
  suck. All these scripts suck.
• 2:16:26
  So I was like, well, let's see what's coming.
• 2:16:27
  Like occasionally I'd dip in and see what was coming over the
• 2:16:30
  transom through the mail. And I opened this middle
• 2:16:32
  envelope and there is a great title on the front page.
• 2:16:35
  It's a gross point blank. And I was like, well, that's
• 2:16:38
  clever. And I started reading it and it
• 2:16:42
  wasn't formatted, really. It was formatted sort of like a
• 2:16:45
  television. It was very spare, you know, it
• 2:16:48
  was like, not a whole entire screenplay.
• 2:16:50
  But the idea of this, the basic idea was in there, which is that
• 2:16:55
  this contract killer is going back to his high school reunion.
• 2:16:58
  And I just thought based on that conversation that John and I had
• 2:17:00
  about a guy who kills for money, like this thing was felt like
• 2:17:04
  the perfect vehicle for the ideas that we were talking
• 2:17:06
  about. And the world of denial that
• 2:17:09
  that men live in to survive and the collateral damage that
• 2:17:14
  causes around around them when they're in denial about their
• 2:17:17
  their own nature. And so I showed it to John and
• 2:17:21
  Steve and they agreed. And we found the guy, Tom
• 2:17:25
  Jankowicz, and we bought it from him.
• 2:17:26
  And then we set to work turning it into, you know, adapting it
• 2:17:31
  what we were thinking of. And, you know, again, like the
• 2:17:35
  ideas that we were attracted to were this, this sort of, you
• 2:17:39
  know, conversation about a man who is in denial about the
• 2:17:45
  damage that he causes around him.
• 2:17:48
  And that is very much the same as Rob, who, by the way, in the
• 2:17:52
  movies was Rob Gordon. In the book, it's Rob Fleming
• 2:17:55
  and Nick thought because Nick is a big music reader and
• 2:17:59
  overthinker, he thought that I had the name of the book is Rob
• 2:18:03
  Fleming and I changed it to Rob Gordon.
• 2:18:06
  He thought because I was possibly giving a nod to a guy
• 2:18:10
  who wrote this book called It Came from Memphis named Rob
• 2:18:13
  Hood, and it's a brilliant book. If you haven't read it, you
• 2:18:16
  should read it. I have heard it.
• 2:18:17
  Their name rings a bell. It came from Memphis.
• 2:18:20
  It's, it's one of the best books I've ever read about a
• 2:18:22
  subculture or about a place, about a secret history of a
• 2:18:25
  place. Anyway, I had simply one day
• 2:18:28
  needed to write the last name as I was writing the screenplay and
• 2:18:31
  I, I was flipping through the book and couldn't find Rob's
• 2:18:34
  last name. And so I just made it up.
• 2:18:36
  I made-up Gordon because he's a family, family, friends of ours,
• 2:18:39
  my family. Rob Gordon is very much like
• 2:18:43
  Martin Blank in that he has an idea of himself that's not
• 2:18:48
  accurate. He's very good at making excuses
• 2:18:51
  for himself and he's not a good guy.
• 2:18:53
  Like that's like the big scene about that character.
• 2:18:56
  Like it's, it's always kind of upsetting to me when I see or
• 2:19:00
  when I, I have seen men sort of think highly of him or identify
• 2:19:04
  with him. Be like, he's just like me.
• 2:19:06
  I'm like, then you got some fucking problems, man.
• 2:19:09
  Like you got a that's not it. He's not a hero.
• 2:19:12
  He's an anti hero really. Yeah, absolutely.
• 2:19:14
  You know, he doesn't even really fully get it together at the the
• 2:19:17
  end of the story. He gets it together enough.
• 2:19:20
  Yeah, that's yeah, exactly. Just just enough.
• 2:19:24
  But he's not fully formed. He hasn't fully arced.
• 2:19:26
  No, and he never will, and none of us ever will, really.
• 2:19:30
  And anybody who thinks that they've completely changed into
• 2:19:32
  the person they're supposed to be is definitely fooling
• 2:19:35
  themselves and you. So it's a lesson that's not
• 2:19:39
  really hit on the head in the book or the movie, but it's it's
• 2:19:42
  there if you if you want it, which is that if you try to make
• 2:19:46
  yourself a better person, you, you can only get so far.
• 2:19:50
  And that's OK as long as you get far enough to be able to at
• 2:19:54
  least be a decent person to those around you most of the
• 2:19:57
  time. Like, that's a huge win, I
• 2:19:59
  think. And I think Rob is inching
• 2:20:01
  towards that at the end of the story.
• 2:20:03
  But Martin Blanc is is similar. They both find their way to a
• 2:20:06
  place at the end of the story where they can kind of exist in
• 2:20:11
  a more conscious way about, you know, in terms of their
• 2:20:14
  interactions with those around and particularly they're women.
• 2:20:18
  But they're not perfect at all, and they're absolutely whatever.
• 2:20:21
  The scene would come would be next after the last scene of
• 2:20:25
  Grossman Plank or High Fidelity It it would involve Martin Blank
• 2:20:29
  or Rob Gordon fucking something up for sure.
• 2:20:32
  And it has to be said that an actor like John is irreplaceable
• 2:20:39
  in terms of playing characters like this.
• 2:20:42
  It's almost impossible to find an actor who can get away with
• 2:20:47
  as much bad behaviour and still be sort of instinctually,
• 2:20:50
  intrinsically loved the way John can.
• 2:20:53
  Yeah. It just doesn't happen, you
• 2:20:55
  know? Well, this is what we said on
• 2:20:57
  the podcast. We were saying that because Rob
• 2:20:59
  isn't a fantastic guy, but the thing that really does make him
• 2:21:03
  lovable and that you don't hate him is John Cusack's performance
• 2:21:08
  and John Cusack as as an actor and just as a as the persona
• 2:21:12
  that he gives off. He's, I mean, perfectly cast.
• 2:21:15
  Yeah, I mean, and we're so fortunate to be writing this at
• 2:21:19
  him, you know what I mean? I think.
• 2:21:21
  And also, I mean, by the way, at the time, the sort of era of
• 2:21:24
  these two movies getting made, they were much easier to set up
• 2:21:27
  movies like this than they are now.
• 2:21:29
  I'm convinced that neither one of those movies could have been
• 2:21:31
  made today. Wow, that's sad.
• 2:21:33
  Yeah, I just don't think so. But what made it certainly
• 2:21:36
  easier was whoever was paying for these movies could look at
• 2:21:39
  this kind of character and then look at John and be like, OK, I
• 2:21:42
  can see that. I can see how this actor can get
• 2:21:45
  these complex things across while still being likable.
• 2:21:51
  Yeah, absolutely. You've written two films
• 2:21:53
  directed by Stephen Free as this one and Leah the Favorite.
• 2:21:57
  How closely did you work with Stephen Duran production of High
• 2:22:00
  Fidelity? Like side by side like I was, I
• 2:22:03
  never left his side at all. Like pretty much, pretty much
• 2:22:08
  from first contact in London. Like I that was it.
• 2:22:12
  And Steven is a director who has so much outward facing value,
• 2:22:17
  like he is completely smitten with the mystery of what actors
• 2:22:22
  are. He loves actors.
• 2:22:24
  There's the only thing more fun than watching an actor do a
• 2:22:27
  great performance on a Stephen Frew set is watching Steven
• 2:22:30
  watch that actor. And he is like that also with
• 2:22:33
  writers. He values you as a writer.
• 2:22:36
  He wants you around. He wants to know if something
• 2:22:41
  makes sense. If it doesn't, he wants to turn
• 2:22:43
  to you and say, well, that doesn't make sense.
• 2:22:46
  What's what is this? I don't understand.
• 2:22:48
  And then you are engaged in a dialogue about it and you figure
• 2:22:53
  out a better version without fail.
• 2:22:55
  Or you're able to explain it to him and he goes, oh, I right, I
• 2:22:58
  see. OK, fine.
• 2:22:59
  He holds writers in very high esteem and doesn't consider them
• 2:23:03
  done just because they've turned into screenplay.
• 2:23:07
  That's the way he works. He, like John, Steve and I'd he
• 2:23:11
  never thinks that the words are finished until they've been
• 2:23:15
  executed correctly in a way that, you know, on a set.
• 2:23:19
  Because that's often seen as a negative thing, being rewrites
• 2:23:22
  and rewrites on the day or on set.
• 2:23:26
  I know the coins are fully formed, they write their script,
• 2:23:29
  and that doesn't get touched when they're shooting.
• 2:23:31
  But it makes sense to say that an ID is never done.
• 2:23:34
  You you said that an ID is never done.
• 2:23:36
  That was the advice that Stephen gave you, that IDs can always be
• 2:23:40
  worked on, that can always be made better and always be made
• 2:23:42
  better. And that makes perfect sense.
• 2:23:44
  Yeah, I think that, you know, I mean, I've, it's happened to me
• 2:23:47
  a million times where I write a scene and I think it's, I
• 2:23:50
  rewrite it and rewrite it and rewrite it and think it's
• 2:23:51
  bulletproof and it's perfect and all the beats make sense.
• 2:23:54
  And this thing calls back to that thing.
• 2:23:56
  And it's this, you know, wonderful, you know, cathedral
• 2:23:59
  of words. And then three actors start
• 2:24:02
  saying it and you've realized that it's got problems and it's
• 2:24:06
  got repetitions and it's got holes and it's got something
• 2:24:08
  that doesn't make sense. And the way the way this actor's
• 2:24:10
  doing it is a lot better than you thought, and he should have
• 2:24:13
  two more sentences to that effect.
• 2:24:15
  And so as long as you're not overwhelming actors, if you see
• 2:24:18
  it in a way suddenly that it can be better, you make it better.
• 2:24:21
  I think there's some actors who who do so much preparation and
• 2:24:24
  arrive with such a concretized idea of the way it is that you
• 2:24:28
  can't really mess with them in that way.
• 2:24:30
  You can't make changes too much and that's fine too.
• 2:24:34
  But yeah, any opportunity to to get it better is is great.
• 2:24:38
  Yeah, I heard you went on a little road trip as well with
• 2:24:41
  Stephen cross country. Yeah, he loves.
• 2:24:43
  He loves America. He'll never live here.
• 2:24:45
  It's one of those, one of the British directors from his era
• 2:24:48
  that didn't move here, unlike most of them.
• 2:24:51
  But he loves, he loves it here and he loves driving across the
• 2:24:54
  country. Yeah, well, who doesn't?
• 2:24:56
  He's, he's a, he's a great road trip partner.
• 2:24:59
  Well, movie music, it's really, I mean, we talk about it a lot
• 2:25:02
  on the show. It's really important to us
• 2:25:03
  here. I think we agreed that High
• 2:25:05
  Fidelity is in the all time top five movie soundtracks.
• 2:25:09
  And I know that you're credited as music supervisor on the film.
• 2:25:11
  So could you take us through the process of deciding the songs
• 2:25:14
  that go into the film? Because I believe there were
• 2:25:17
  thousands of options, thousands of tracks listened to.
• 2:25:20
  Yeah, it was such a sort of complex thing with that movie
• 2:25:26
  because you've got, you know, your main sort of location is a
• 2:25:30
  place where music is being played.
• 2:25:32
  Everybody's talking about music both in the store and then out
• 2:25:36
  of the store. There's a lot of sort of like,
• 2:25:38
  bills to pay. There's also the temptation that
• 2:25:43
  has to be avoided to just put your favorite music in.
• 2:25:46
  It's something you have to grow. It's an instinct that is, it's
• 2:25:49
  acceptable, but you have to grow out of it.
• 2:25:51
  You have to understand that if the character just likes all the
• 2:25:53
  music you like, it's probably doing something wrong cuz the
• 2:25:57
  character's not you. And that was certainly true for
• 2:26:01
  me with Rob. You like stuff I'm not a huge
• 2:26:05
  fan of. I'm not a huge Bob Dylan fan and
• 2:26:08
  I think that character is a huge Bob Dylan fan, you know, But you
• 2:26:12
  know, the John and Steve and I, I mean, Frears sort of didn't
• 2:26:17
  have an opinion. He was like, well, whatever you
• 2:26:19
  guys, whatever makes sense to you guys.
• 2:26:21
  And of course he'd have an opinion when he actually heard
• 2:26:22
  it against picture. He'd be like, no, not that.
• 2:26:25
  But in general, he left it to us.
• 2:26:27
  You know, the three of us have many spirited debates about the
• 2:26:31
  music for various parts of the film, A lot of horse trading.
• 2:26:36
  And then you also are up against the basic economics of it.
• 2:26:40
  I mean, we had AI believe we had a bigger budget for music for
• 2:26:44
  Grosse Pointe Blank than we did for High Fidelity.
• 2:26:47
  Right. Wow, I'm very surprised.
• 2:26:49
  Yeah. The same parent company like
• 2:26:51
  Grosse Pointe Blank was I think Hollywood Pictures, which was a
• 2:26:55
  subsidiary of Disney, and I believe High Fidelity was
• 2:26:59
  touched on, which is also a subsidiary of Disney.
• 2:27:01
  So you're talking about the same company and we had the same
• 2:27:04
  fairy godmother musically, this woman, Kathy Nelson, who was
• 2:27:07
  sort of pivotal and key to us even doing High Fidelity and
• 2:27:10
  she's sort of the the grand queen of soundtrack records.
• 2:27:15
  Anyway, High Fidelity had more music cues in it than any film
• 2:27:19
  in Disney history or in the company in the corporate.
• 2:27:22
  Wow. It had more cues, yeah.
• 2:27:25
  And and and we had less money to work with than than Grossman
• 2:27:28
  Blank. But we we did it one of the ways
• 2:27:31
  that it wasn't the reason we worked with independent, a lot
• 2:27:33
  of independent music, but it did work well for us that we got
• 2:27:37
  very inside with a lot of music that's not super popular,
• 2:27:42
  wonderful music, which absolutely made sense for these
• 2:27:45
  characters. It is set in Chicago at a
• 2:27:49
  particular time and the movie is filled with chicago-based label
• 2:27:56
  music, Drag City Thrill, Jockey. There's tons of that in the
• 2:28:01
  movie because it just makes sense for the time and place.
• 2:28:04
  Yeah. It also turns out that that is
• 2:28:06
  easier than licensing Aerosmith Records or Rolling Stones
• 2:28:11
  Records, you know? Yeah.
• 2:28:13
  So the process of deciding songs for the film, I mean, you sit
• 2:28:16
  there and you put things up against the movie, and you watch
• 2:28:18
  it and you see what happens and see if it makes sense.
• 2:28:21
  And you can be completely committed to the idea from the
• 2:28:25
  moment you wrote the scene. You could know the song, and
• 2:28:28
  then you could watch the movie with the song against it and see
• 2:28:30
  that it does not work. A Grosse Point Blank story about
• 2:28:34
  that. Like there's a scene in Grosse
• 2:28:36
  Point Blank where Martin Blank goes to look at his childhood
• 2:28:38
  home and he sees that it's turned into a convenience store.
• 2:28:42
  The idea that I had for that scene was that he's listening to
• 2:28:46
  a song when he pulls up and he sees it, and he's in shock.
• 2:28:49
  And he walks through the front door of what used to be his
• 2:28:51
  house, and it's a convenience store.
• 2:28:52
  And as he crosses the threshold, the song seamlessly becomes a
• 2:28:56
  muzak version of the song. Yeah, it's living that day.
• 2:29:00
  Yeah, Now I originally wanted that to be Smells Like Teen
• 2:29:04
  Spirit, right? And it's in the script and for
• 2:29:09
  weird reasons. New Courtney Love, from when
• 2:29:12
  nobody knew who she was when we were like 19 years old or she
• 2:29:17
  was like, really young. And I reached out to her and she
• 2:29:21
  was like, yeah, well, you know, if the other guys say it's OK.
• 2:29:25
  So then I had to basically, I, I arranged the screening for Dave
• 2:29:29
  Grohl and Dave Grohl and I sat down and watched the whole movie
• 2:29:33
  with that song in that spot. And I'm sitting in this dark
• 2:29:36
  theatre next to Dave Grohl watching this.
• 2:29:38
  And you know, this thing that I thought of when the scene was
• 2:29:42
  written, and as it starts playing and I'm actually sitting
• 2:29:45
  next to Grohl, I realize it doesn't work at all.
• 2:29:49
  It totally doesn't work. And we watch the rest of the
• 2:29:52
  movie, and then the lights come up and he's like such a great
• 2:29:55
  movie. I was like, thanks.
• 2:29:56
  I was like, I don't know. He's like, yeah, I don't know.
• 2:29:59
  I was like, I don't think it actually works.
• 2:30:00
  He's like, yeah, I don't. I don't really either.
• 2:30:02
  I don't, yeah. Thank God, because if he said
• 2:30:05
  yes, if he said it works perfectly, that would have been
• 2:30:08
  an ugly conversation. I said I, I mean, if he said I
• 2:30:11
  love it, it works perfectly, I probably just left it in.
• 2:30:12
  Yeah. But yeah, it was really, it was
• 2:30:16
  really weird that like I realized that it didn't work and
• 2:30:20
  so tried Live and Let Die, couldn't get the rights from
• 2:30:25
  Paul McCartney and Wings. And so went around the corner of
• 2:30:28
  the record store, got the Guns and Roses version and put it on.
• 2:30:30
  It was the, it was the best of all three ideas.
• 2:30:33
  It was the best version. Yeah, I think it's worked
• 2:30:35
  perfectly. But like, that gives you an idea
• 2:30:38
  of the weird alchemy of it. Like you have.
• 2:30:40
  You can have the idea and it's by no means correct until it
• 2:30:45
  actually works. It's like a setup between 2:00.
• 2:30:48
  It's like setting up two friends of yours on a blind date.
• 2:30:50
  Like, it may make complete sense, but it could also totally
• 2:30:54
  not. Yeah, it could be a disaster.
• 2:30:55
  Yeah, a disaster, Yeah. So, you know, the process was us
• 2:31:00
  just putting songs up against picture and talking about it and
• 2:31:03
  talking about it and arguing about it and debating it.
• 2:31:05
  And then there was some things that had to be decided
• 2:31:08
  beforehand because they were actually being discussed, you
• 2:31:11
  know, like the Peter Frampton song for Lisa Bonet or the Beta
• 2:31:16
  Band for selling the, you know, selling the copies in store.
• 2:31:19
  Like those things had to be kind of decided upfront.
• 2:31:21
  And there was a moment when we actually wanted to use a lot of
• 2:31:24
  Beta Band. We even wanted to have it maybe
• 2:31:26
  score the movie. And it didn't come together
• 2:31:30
  because they weren't, I can't remember what the deal was with
• 2:31:33
  them, but they were having difficulties at the time.
• 2:31:36
  I think there's actually documentary made about it at
• 2:31:39
  some point. But yeah, I mean, for every idea
• 2:31:43
  that did happen, there's like 14 that didn't.
• 2:31:45
  Yeah. Well, that Beta Band moment, I
• 2:31:48
  mean, it's a great song and it's a great moment in the film.
• 2:31:51
  And we talked about it on the podcast.
• 2:31:53
  Rob, I will now sell 5 copies of the three EPS by the Beta Band.
• 2:31:56
  And we all agree that we all went out and bought the three
• 2:31:59
  EPS by the Beta Band as soon as we saw that film.
• 2:32:02
  Fantastic. I mean, it's literally a
• 2:32:03
  commercial for the baby. Yeah.
• 2:32:07
  And it's funny, I found them because my oldest friend is this
• 2:32:11
  guy Dan Kuretsky in Chicago. Who Co founded Drag city records
• 2:32:16
  and you know, I, I would still be probably listening to classic
• 2:32:20
  rock stations if it wasn't for this person.
• 2:32:22
  He's pointed out like hidden alleys of music to me my whole
• 2:32:26
  life that have made the music I love a completely different
• 2:32:31
  world. And that was an example.
• 2:32:33
  You know, I consulted with him closely while I was doing a lot
• 2:32:36
  of things with this movie. And one thing I, you know, I
• 2:32:37
  said to him, I was like, I need to find something that has a
• 2:32:40
  universal appeal but that people don't know about because Rob has
• 2:32:44
  to be turning him onto it. I don't want it to be old.
• 2:32:48
  I want it to be new, but I don't want it to be arcane or
• 2:32:52
  difficult to get your head around.
• 2:32:53
  And he was like, there's this guy, these guys called the Beta
• 2:32:55
  Band. And sure enough, you know, I was
• 2:32:58
  like, perfect. Yeah.
• 2:33:00
  I think everybody needs a friend like that.
• 2:33:02
  I certainly do. Yeah.
• 2:33:04
  OK, finally then, DV, I've read that out of you, Steve and John,
• 2:33:09
  you're the biggest music fan, so I've got to ask you top five
• 2:33:13
  records. I don't have top five records.
• 2:33:18
  I'm sorry to disappoint. It's just, and mostly I would
• 2:33:21
  say it's because it's always changing.
• 2:33:23
  Yeah, it's just, it's it's all, it's always changing.
• 2:33:27
  I think what's more, maybe more interesting to discuss is the
• 2:33:30
  idea why we want top five of anything.
• 2:33:34
  OK. You know, I think we think it
• 2:33:36
  has to do with order, the human instinct to have order of some
• 2:33:40
  kind. Yeah, I think it also involves
• 2:33:42
  the human instinct to relate to one another by either agreement
• 2:33:47
  or by spirited disagreement. And the the last thing I think
• 2:33:52
  about top fives is that, and this is something that
• 2:33:55
  definitely relates to Rob as a character, is the modern world
• 2:34:00
  instinct to define oneself by what one likes.
• 2:34:05
  Yeah. I don't know if I could do that
• 2:34:07
  this morning. How's that for a demural?
• 2:34:10
  Disappointment. Have you do not have a favorite
• 2:34:13
  album? Name one.
• 2:34:15
  I mean, I can tell you, here's what I'll do.
• 2:34:17
  I'll tell you what what's going on on my Spotify right now.
• 2:34:20
  OK. How about that?
• 2:34:22
  Cool. OK, I've been listening to Don
• 2:34:25
  Williams, Minnie Ripperton has been getting a lot of play.
• 2:34:29
  This group called Sick Alps SICAL PS:.
• 2:34:34
  I've been diving deeply into Little Richard because I saw his
• 2:34:39
  wigs were being auctioned on a celebrity possession auction
• 2:34:44
  site and I thought about they were so cheap.
• 2:34:46
  It's like you get his Little Richard wig for like $700.00 and
• 2:34:49
  I was like, not a lot of money for, you know, Beethoven's DNA,
• 2:34:53
  basically. Robert Wyatt.
• 2:34:55
  I've been listening to that a lot.
• 2:34:56
  I've been listening to the new Two Chainz record a ton, which
• 2:34:59
  is a great record. Early Bee Gees because of that
• 2:35:02
  documentary. That Bee Gees documentary.
• 2:35:04
  Cool, yeah. Main course, that's the
• 2:35:06
  falsetter. That's the falsetter record.
• 2:35:08
  That's the first, the first moment of Barry Gibbs.
• 2:35:11
  Fanny Bee tender with my love I think is on there great track.
• 2:35:15
  Incredible Peter Green end of the game.
• 2:35:18
  Right, OK. Definitely don't want to just be
• 2:35:20
  Mr. Like old Records guy because I fucking hate that.
• 2:35:25
  And I think that people should keep trying to listen to new
• 2:35:28
  music, even if it you don't have, even if you don't have the
• 2:35:31
  instinct to, I think you should just force yourself to because
• 2:35:34
  there's a thing that happens where if you don't notice it
• 2:35:37
  already, you'll notice this going forward, which is that
• 2:35:41
  people's interest in music is most sort of like fertile and
• 2:35:43
  thickened in like from the time that they hit puberty until like
• 2:35:47
  their late 20s and frequently for the rest of their lives.
• 2:35:51
  That's the music that they listen to.
• 2:35:53
  It's the music they discovered then.
• 2:35:55
  And that's fine. And it's completely organic and
• 2:35:57
  natural. You start paying attention to
• 2:35:59
  other things and there's probably even some brain
• 2:36:00
  chemistry stuff going on where you stop being curious or
• 2:36:04
  plastic about what you can take in.
• 2:36:07
  And I think it's really good for you as a person to try and push
• 2:36:11
  through that. It's a little, it's a little
• 2:36:14
  eating your vegetables, but I, it's a, in a fun way, I think
• 2:36:17
  it's also like exercise or, you know, it's something that like
• 2:36:21
  when you're a kid, you want to run around all day because you
• 2:36:23
  have all this energy, but then later you have to make yourself
• 2:36:26
  run around all day a little bit to, to, for your own health.
• 2:36:29
  And I think it's the same with with music tastes.
• 2:36:33
  You have to try and give new things a chance and I think it's
• 2:36:35
  good for your brain to do it. Yeah, absolutely.
• 2:36:37
  Because you know, you know you'll get the benefits of it if
• 2:36:40
  you do that, but it seems like a big uphill struggle to do it.
• 2:36:44
  It's the doing that's the problem.
• 2:36:45
  You know the benefits at the end of it.
• 2:36:47
  Absolutely. OK, well, I couldn't get the top
• 2:36:52
  five out of your DV, but it's been great talking to you.
• 2:36:54
  Thank you so much for coming on the show.
• 2:36:57
  Not at all. I really appreciate everything
• 2:36:59
  you've you've brought up and, and it's, you know, it's a total
• 2:37:03
  pleasure to talk about these things.
• 2:37:04
  Oh wonderful, a pleasure is absolutely all ours.
• 2:37:07
  I know our listeners will love it as well.
• 2:37:10
  Good luck with the new show as well.
• 2:37:11
  Hope it all works out well for you.
• 2:37:12
  Thank you so much. Yeah, anytime.
• 2:37:18
  All the rank. Means be the ranking.
• 2:37:21
  There you have it. DVD Vincentis.
• 2:37:23
  Wonderful man, wonderful anecdotes.
• 2:37:26
  Thanks for stopping by. OK, the final track on the tape
• 2:37:29
  is a classic. It's the all the right movies
• 2:37:31
  ranking. Westie, would you like to give
• 2:37:33
  us your summary and score for High Fidelity?
• 2:37:36
  Yes, I I mean, I think everyone knows, like, even when you meet
• 2:37:42
  instead, you know how much I adore this film and I do love
• 2:37:45
  it. And I hope that we've done it
• 2:37:46
  justice because I do feel it's one of them films that deserves
• 2:37:49
  the energy and it does deserve the time.
• 2:37:51
  And it does deserve to be up there with probably, you know,
• 2:37:54
  one of the greatest kind of, if you're gonna say romantic
• 2:37:58
  comedies. I mean, I kind of stand that
• 2:37:59
  phrase and I won't say it's a romantic comedy.
• 2:38:01
  I would just say it's a life film.
• 2:38:03
  And it's a life film that I completely tap into.
• 2:38:05
  And I completely understand because it's one that I relate
• 2:38:08
  to 100%. And there's always something I
• 2:38:10
  can get from this. And even from when I first saw
• 2:38:13
  it, you know, 21 years ago to now, it's always been relevant.
• 2:38:17
  And I think it always will be relevant.
• 2:38:19
  I think there's always these emotions and these situations
• 2:38:22
  that people go through these stages.
• 2:38:24
  And to me, it feels like a very close, very good friend.
• 2:38:27
  And it's given us a lot of ideas on how to be more interested
• 2:38:31
  socially by just asking people. Top five shit, which is what
• 2:38:36
  I've done forever and I'll continue to do it because you
• 2:38:39
  know what? It fucking works.
• 2:38:41
  And books, records, films, these things matter.
• 2:38:44
  It's the fucking truth and it really, really is.
• 2:38:46
  And I don't even think it's shallow.
• 2:38:48
  I think that's just an absolute fact.
• 2:38:51
  Fucking hell, we wouldn't be sat here talking the way we do about
• 2:38:55
  films every fortnight, and we wouldn't be as close as we are
• 2:38:59
  without these things. And I think you can tell a lot
• 2:39:02
  about people by their tastes in them three things.
• 2:39:05
  And I don't think you should judge people for it.
• 2:39:07
  I think you should use it as a tool to help you understand
• 2:39:11
  somebody else. And I think that's what this
• 2:39:12
  film does really well. And you can't understand people
• 2:39:15
  because of what they love, because music, film, books, them
• 2:39:20
  things tap into emotions. And for me, this is one of my
• 2:39:23
  very favorite films. So whatever you get from that,
• 2:39:26
  that's absolutely fine. I'm quite happy to wear me hard
• 2:39:28
  on me sleeve and say this is definitely in me top ten of all
• 2:39:31
  time. It's just a film that I just
• 2:39:34
  adore and I'll always watch it. So for me it's a massive 10.
• 2:39:39
  Big, big, big, lovely. No surprise really, Westie, I
• 2:39:42
  know how much you love it. There you go.
• 2:39:46
  Matt, what about you? OK, the negatives out the way,
• 2:39:48
  there are some aspects to this film that don't work for me.
• 2:39:52
  Rob sleeping with Marie, I don't think that works as a storyline.
• 2:39:55
  Laura's character, whether it's the performance, whether it's
• 2:39:58
  the right. And it's just not quite there
• 2:40:00
  where I think it needs to be to work in the film for it to have
• 2:40:03
  the impact at the end that I think it should.
• 2:40:06
  And I think all the really good stuff in the film is in like the
• 2:40:09
  1st 2/3. That last third, it gets too
• 2:40:12
  little too many, little too easy results.
• 2:40:14
  Or that's not great for me either.
• 2:40:16
  But apart from that, there is very little to criticize about
• 2:40:19
  this film. Majority of the performances are
• 2:40:22
  just so good, even small ones like Liz, like Dick that could
• 2:40:27
  be characters who could be so easily glossed over, but they're
• 2:40:30
  not. They're still really memorable.
• 2:40:32
  All the cast bring something to it.
• 2:40:33
  The screenplay, it's just so good.
• 2:40:36
  The writing is just excellent and and for his direction I
• 2:40:39
  think does deserve more respect and attention than it usually
• 2:40:43
  gets because it's all down to him to just judge everything so
• 2:40:46
  perfectly and he does that and the film is whole.
• 2:40:49
  It's really funny and it's just full of observations on life and
• 2:40:52
  love that you do take something from like, like, I see there's
• 2:40:55
  there's always something to to watch and it's got shit.
• 2:40:58
  Yeah. That is what it should be like
• 2:41:00
  or that is what it shouldn't be like.
• 2:41:02
  Or that happened to me. And I get that.
• 2:41:05
  And for for that to happen a few times throughout the film, you
• 2:41:09
  know, it's really quite miraculous, to be honest.
• 2:41:11
  A lot of films struggle to make one good point about life.
• 2:41:14
  This makes several to me. Yeah, I agree.
• 2:41:16
  And it ultimately feels like you're hanging out with a good
• 2:41:19
  friend when you watch this. But I also knew going in this, I
• 2:41:23
  did have the feeling that you 2 did like the film a bit more
• 2:41:26
  than me. And I think that's true.
• 2:41:27
  I've just never had this pegged as an absolute all time favorite
• 2:41:30
  for me. It's hard to say why.
• 2:41:32
  It just doesn't have that extra something to elevate it to that
• 2:41:36
  level for me. It is a great watch.
• 2:41:38
  If anyone's not seen it I would sell.
• 2:41:40
  Highly recommend it, but it's not an all time favorite.
• 2:41:43
  A few bits and pieces don't work so it comes out as an 8.5 for
• 2:41:47
  me. Wow, it is bullshit.
• 2:41:50
  The state of preference. OK, fantastic.
• 2:42:00
  Well, I'm not going to go over all ground.
• 2:42:02
  I love the film, my perception of it has changed since I
• 2:42:05
  watched it in my 20s. The fact that Rob's is
• 2:42:08
  emotionally stunted idiot wasn't really apparent to me when I was
• 2:42:11
  younger. No, I didn't really pick that up
• 2:42:13
  until quite a few years afterwards.
• 2:42:15
  Just a cool guy, isn't he? Fantastic.
• 2:42:18
  He's a great LP to music. Got some hot ex girlfriends?
• 2:42:21
  Yeah. What's not the love?
• 2:42:23
  Leather jacket red silk. This year A.
• 2:42:25
  Few minus points for this silk shirt.
• 2:42:28
  Apart from that, great guy. But I guess that's down to age
• 2:42:32
  and experience. But the film does absolutely hit
• 2:42:34
  the mark for me still. I just see it differently now.
• 2:42:36
  I guess the slightly worrying thing that I've taken away from
• 2:42:39
  watching this, and I have thought about it for many years,
• 2:42:43
  is that Rob, Barry, Dick, some of the things that they say,
• 2:42:47
  they're definitely still on the money.
• 2:42:50
  Yeah, definitely. I do love the performances, the
• 2:42:54
  writings fantastic, the dialogue and the perception of what it is
• 2:42:58
  to be in a relationship and the pitfalls and the complexities of
• 2:43:01
  that are fantastic. Soundtrack amazing and although
• 2:43:06
  it's still a go to and a personal favorite, I am not
• 2:43:09
  giving it top marks. I know it was a tricky one and I
• 2:43:13
  was thinking 10 all the way but haven't analysed it a bit more
• 2:43:16
  and my thoughts and feelings about it.
• 2:43:18
  I mean, it's like an all familiar friend to me and it is
• 2:43:20
  one of my personal favorites, but I'm not going to give it top
• 2:43:23
  marks. And the reason for that is
• 2:43:25
  because the moment I mentioned earlier how the final third is
• 2:43:28
  structured does bother me a little bit.
• 2:43:30
  Just a little bit, just a little bit.
• 2:43:33
  So it's losing 1/2 a mark and it's 9.5 out of 10.
• 2:43:36
  Oh, shame. Still big shame shame.
• 2:43:39
  So what? Massive 9.5 what do you want?
• 2:43:43
  Point 5.5 All right, Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's what I want.
• 2:43:50
  As always, we've had a poll running on Twitter for our
• 2:43:52
  followers on there. They've been scoring High
• 2:43:54
  Fidelity out of 10. Here are some comments that I've
• 2:43:57
  picked out. First of all though, OK Jenny G
• 2:43:59
  at OP Jenny G said Chicago Wicker Park Gen.
• 2:44:04
  X cringy romance grunge scene. I actually really like the
• 2:44:08
  remake. Silence.
• 2:44:12
  No idea. You want to say to that?
• 2:44:14
  No. Any score?
• 2:44:14
  Did she score it? She didn't score it, she's just
• 2:44:17
  spoken staccato sentences. Yeah, I just, I just good for
• 2:44:21
  you, Jenny. She was the only thing I
• 2:44:22
  understood there, Jenny. Cargo.
• 2:44:25
  Yep. Fine.
• 2:44:27
  Next one. Next.
• 2:44:29
  Next. They were actually, if you
• 2:44:32
  weren't forgivable, fours and threes being dished out, which I
• 2:44:35
  was, I was stunned to say. That's outrated.
• 2:44:37
  Me at Lucas Jackson 67 said 9. The dialogue's great, it
• 2:44:41
  essentially launched Jack Black, the battery jive Let's Get It on
• 2:44:45
  Cover is Red Hot, and it has an all time great closing credits
• 2:44:49
  song. The only bad thing in the film
• 2:44:50
  is even the Isla. I disagree, I think she's great.
• 2:44:53
  And finally, James Aussie Pew. At James Aussie Pew.
• 2:44:55
  He's a patron of ours. So James, he said this and gross
• 2:45:00
  point blank and Kubrick. Kubrick fucking ass.
• 2:45:02
  Wow, now Kubrick. Imagine.
• 2:45:05
  Keep late in the day. Keep.
• 2:45:06
  Doing high fidelity shot. With lots of Strauss in there.
• 2:45:15
  Two top five Strauss. Oh, James said this and gross.
• 2:45:24
  Bang Bang and Cusack's best. Love the characters in the
• 2:45:26
  movie, unique personalities and all relatable to people we've
• 2:45:29
  all met in life. Great to see how that internal
• 2:45:32
  monologue we all have that makes us question ourselves as
• 2:45:35
  represented. And a killer soundtrack to a
• 2:45:37
  Nine for me. Spot on.
• 2:45:39
  And with all the scores combined, high fidelity
• 2:45:41
  averaged, What do you think out of 10 fellas?
• 2:45:44
  8.5. Nine because people who love it
• 2:45:47
  really love it. Yeah, including us.
• 2:45:50
  Well, it got a 7.5 out of 10. Absolute bullshit.
• 2:45:57
  That is disappointing. It is, yeah.
• 2:45:59
  You're reading it wrong. That's that's that's incorrect,
• 2:46:05
  but fine. Incorrect.
• 2:46:08
  Just stay recheck him off. So, Luke.
• 2:46:09
  It's bullshit to stay in this preference.
• 2:46:12
  It is absolute bullshit. So with all the scores combined,
• 2:46:16
  that gives High Fidelity an overall score of 35.5 out of 40.
• 2:46:21
  Go to alltherightmovies.com/leaderboard
• 2:46:23
  to see how the film fares against the other 48 films that
• 2:46:26
  we've covered on the podcast so far.
• 2:46:28
  As we mentioned at the top, to support what we're doing here
• 2:46:30
  and to allow us to create exclusive content, you can sign
• 2:46:33
  up to be an ATRM patron. We've removed the shout outs to
• 2:46:36
  our directors Chair patrons for the time being because the list
• 2:46:38
  was just getting out of control, but we really couldn't be more
• 2:46:41
  appreciative of your support. Guys.
• 2:46:43
  Thank you very much. Yeah.
• 2:46:44
  Thank you guys. Fantastic.
• 2:46:45
  Amazing. Thank you.
• 2:46:46
  Great guys. For all show notes, credits and
• 2:46:48
  references that we used in the production of the podcast, you
• 2:46:51
  can visit alltherightmovies.com/podcast/high
• 2:46:54
  Hyphen Fidelity. All the Right movies will return
• 2:46:57
  in two weeks when John, Pi and Matt bring you the behind the
• 2:47:00
  scenes story of the action sci-fi extravaganza that is
• 2:47:03
  Terminated 2 Judgement Day. Excited about that, Matt.
• 2:47:07
  I am all all three of us prepared to give a big love in
• 2:47:09
  for Edward Furlong I. Fucking doubt it.
• 2:47:12
  Get ready for that. And for our patrons, TuneIn next
• 2:47:17
  Friday is the three of us here tackle the inaugural episode of
• 2:47:20
  our brand new double feature show where we'll be talking
• 2:47:22
  about the Chris Nolan early career classics, Memento and
• 2:47:25
  Insomnia. Not to be missed for sure.
• 2:47:28
  That one. Definitely not.
• 2:47:30
  You have to listen to it backwards.
• 2:47:31
  Yep. So if you aren't a patron
• 2:47:36
  already, sign up for that and have a lot of fun, even if you
• 2:47:40
  do have to listen to it backwards.
• 2:47:43
  It'll make more sense. And in the meantime, you can
• 2:47:46
  catch us on our social media platforms.
• 2:47:48
  On Twitter, we are at all the under score right movies.
• 2:47:51
  On Instagram, we are at all the under score right movies.
• 2:47:54
  And search all the right movies in Facebook.
• 2:47:56
  And our website is all the right movies.com.
• 2:47:59
  We're off to sort our record collection out into
• 2:48:01
  autobiographical order. No fucking way.
• 2:48:06
  Just don't stack them up. Under the pressure.
• 2:48:09
  See you soon guys. Thank you very much.
• 2:48:11
  Cheers guys. Mother One tonight.
• 2:48:13
  It really was. Hey Rob, you fucking asshole.