90s Music Monday

High Fidelity scores highly in Simon's personal all time top 10 list of films.

For a start it's good - always an advantage in these types of situations. It's also one of the best adaptations of a book to film which deftly takes the central message and transfers them state side without being gratuitous or offending the donor country - in this way it is the anti "The Dark Is Rising" which literally made me howl in anger. I'm serious.

Another person who should take note is Jimmy Fallon who defiled (and I don't use that word lightly) the source pieces of "Taxi" and "Fever Pitch". "Fever Pitch"  was also a book by Nick Hornby who wrote the original "High Fidelity" novel but the Hollywood adaptation was so bad it had to be renamed "The Perfect Catch" in all other English speaking countries. In fact I am lead believe that the British version of a fatwa has been placed on the head of Jimmy Fallon for his crimes against cinema. If his smug, shit eating grin ever appears on the shores of blessed Albion then he will immediately be taken from such place unto a place of execution where he will be beaten summarily to death with cricket bats until he be dead.

Thirdly - is this even the third point? Who keeps count of these things? Points are such a linear way of thinking. If digression was an Olympic sport I'd be 4 times gold medal winner and the International Competitive Digression Committee would be so suspicious I would be tested for steroids and blood doping more often than a Tour de France team - thirdly it's a RomCom about a guy which simultaneously celebrates yet also gently mocks the foibles of the obsessive sex without descending into clichés. In short I'm pretty sure that it's the only RomCom out there that both you and your best gal can enjoy and probably for the same reasons.

Fourthly - since Grosse Point Blank John Cusack can do no wrong. As long as you pretend that he made no films after this one and that the bad films in-between were done by some sort of goatee wearing evil John Cusack. Seriously - go watch Pushing Tin again. It's actually a really good film.

Anyway, so - I like High Fidelity. I like the cinematography (almost too good for a RomCom), I like the actors alot and it's got a line in it that almost always trips up the pseudo music snobbish elite geeks. As a pseudo music snobbish elite geek myself it means that I get to wait for other PMSEGs to inevitably and smugly point out the mistake and then point out that how wrong they actually are[*]. Oooh, just thinking about it gives me nigh sexual chills. That's just how I roll.

And the sound track is, as is to be expected,  pretty damn excellent.

Anyway, today is the kind of sunny, crisp day where I just want to play this song over and over

so, err, I am. My only regret is that I'm not sitting on a warm sun terrace somewhere in a reclined chair, dozing peacefully with a gin and grapefruit juice in my hand.

Anyway, despite not having a video, here's the whole thing

may the remains of your day be peaceful and fruitful. And may Jimmy Fallon fall foul of the unusual and exotically painful.