None of the Heart or Wit of John Cusack Original
The 2000 movie that pretty well defines what this and other niches film sites do on a regular basis, High Fidelity, that starred John Cusack and a pre-twitchy Jack Black, has been turned into a streaming show on Hulu.
After 5 heartbreaks…it’s finally time to face the music. High Fidelity premieres February 14th, only on Hulu. A departure from Nick Hornby’s 1995 novel and beloved 2000 film, Hulu’s High Fidelity centers on Rob (Zoë Kravitz, who also serves as an executive producer), a female record store owner in the rapidly gentrified neighborhood of Crown Heights, Brooklyn who revisits past relationships through music and pop culture, while trying to get over her one true love.
Check out the trailer below:
Two things about this:
- Immediately you get the sense that this is a copy of a Xerox of the original. Zoe Kravitz might be an okay face, but she sure ain’t Cusack.
- This means that the charm of the original—which was the fast-paced dialogue—becomes just more sauce for the goose in our post-Internet era.
Sure, it checks all the superficial boxes from the original—the breaking of the fourth wall, the “top five” listing trope, and even the scattershot of intimate relationships both at the record store and in real life—but something is missing.
The Irony of Informed Critique Here Is Missing
The best line in the movie High Fidelity is “…what really matters is what you like, not what you are like… Books, records, films – these things matter.” Which is a critique that only hits its mark if you have actual knowledge and reverence for the things that came before.
Just so you have a point of reference, here’s the original trailer for the film below:
The irony of the post-Millennial generation that this streaming series targeted at is that, they have never really immersed themselves in books in the last 20 years or criticality of any kind—much less records and movies—because of the flattening presence of the Internet and social media.
Thus, the audience this is targeted toward doesn’t demand nearly as much from the culture that seeks to serve them.
Kravitz—the daughter of Lisa Bonet, one of the original actors in the movie, and Lenny Kravtiz, the now washed-up musician—states in the trailer that she “thinks just the right amount.”
We think not.
What Are We To Make of All of This?
Well, in the continuing effort to mine the past in order to entertain audiences without much more than a meta-ironic understanding of the past—see the upcoming Dirty Dozen remake and the current tragic end to Star Wars for more evidence of this—High Fidelity on Hulu won’t generate that much interest.
Which is really too bad, because the original source material, as well as the 2000 film, have a lot of lessons to deliver to audiences in the forgetful present.
High Fidelity from Hulu drops on February 14, 2020.
