Word: cusack
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Championship vinyl--a Chicago record store specializing in antique discs--provides Rob Gordon (John Cusack) with a rich life but no better than a marginal living. Mostly it exists to give him a place to argue with his employees (a hilariously passive Todd Louiso and a manically aggressive Jack Black) about musical arcana...
...other words, High Fidelity, of which Cusack is also a co-writer and producer, is a comedy born of depression. Based on Nick Hornby's novel, High Fidelity takes the form of an intermittent monologue, at once glum and knowing, done directly to the camera. Cusack's Rob leads us in and out of various scenes from his sad past and his various current efforts to come to grips with it. This is a daring strategy: the potential for boredom is large. But Cusack is awfully good at calm desperation (or is it barely suppressed frenzy?). We await, with suspenseful...
...Cusack goes back to the marvelous Grosse Pointe Blank with some of the writers, to The Grifters with director Stephen Frears, to the cradle with his sister Joan, who plays a smart, tart role here. That could have resulted in a kind of hermetic insiderism--a desire to break each other up and leave us out of the joke. Instead, they have made something that we can all laugh at--sometimes raucously, sometimes tenderly, often ruefully...
...Told alongside all of this energetic hoopla is the story of Nelson Rockefeller (John Cusack) and his patronage of the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera (Ruben Blades), providing another example of the complex problems that can result when artistic statement is bound to a controlling force. Young Rockefeller didn't count on Rivera painting Lenin and syphilis cells in the lobby of Rockefeller Center, so he orders the mural jackhammered off of the wall in a strikingly literal expression of the casual tyranny of commerce. Yet perhaps the most poignant thread of the film is its only fictional tale, that...
...belief in the power and necessity of the theater, and Ruben Blades, who melts into his small role as Diego Rivera in a perfect impersonation. John Turturro shines brightly as Aldo Silvano, a dedicated member of the "Cradle" cast who parts ways with his family of Italian nationalists. John Cusack is effective as the affably cocky Rockefeller, and Bill Murray and Joan Cusack hit both comic highs and notes of genuine sadness. Less successful are Vanessa Redgrave, who's garishly over the top, and Susan Sarandon, who acts mostly with her eyebrows and strained Italian accent. As Welles, MacFadyen...