“High Fidelity” is one of my all-time favorite novels and the 2000 film (with John Cusack, Joan Cusack, Jack Black, Todd Louiso, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Lisa Bonet, Lili Taylor, and Tim Robbins) is also one of my favorite movies of all time. I’ve watched it repeatedly.
So I was a little apprehensive when I learned about Hulu’s remake in series form. I have avoided the recent [About a Boy (TV series) - Wikipedia](About a Boy). But I decided to check it out—it rocks!
Zoe Kravitz is fantastic as the new Rob. They’ve managed to keep everything that was good about the original—including a lot of the best lines of dialogue and a few of the music queues—but giving everything a new spin.
Rob (Robyn Brooks) owns Championship Vinyl, a Brooklyn record store, and she has a fucked up love life, and the soundtrack is packed with wonderful music. Rob and her two employees, Cherise and Simon (Barry and Dick) are supreme music snobs—their rule about life is “What you like is more important than what you are like.”
Kravitz is wonderful as Rob and does the fourth-wall stuff beautifully. Fantastic first season. I hope Season 2 is good. I’m not sure it should go beyond two seasons.
Like you, I loved the novel and have re-read it many times. I was excited by the thought of a film version, but the reality left me cold. The change of setting meant I could no longer connect to it so well. The book had so many locations that I knew from working in London and it was fun trying to work out which real record stores he had used for inspiration. The film felt like a betrayal and I’ve only watched it once as I couldn’t separate those personal feelings enough.
So maybe I’m not the target audience for this version. I watched the first episode and tried my best to give it a fair viewing. But the additional changes make it feel like a bad copy of a bad copy. Just film the book as it is ffs!
The ‘about a boy’ TV series I actually enjoyed, but only by ignoring the title and pretending it had nothing to do with another of my favourite books. Maybe because the film version stuck quite closely to the book and didn’t generate such negative personal feelings for me.
I’ve seen it and liked it. The London-based book survived - and prospered with - its direct translation to Chicago, and similarly with its more radical retelling in NYC. Universal themes I guess. I like NYC-Barry a lot more than Chicago-Barry.
But farking hell, it is only a minor scene in the book, and only a DVD outtake in the Cusack film, but the sequence with the astonishing record collection for sale for buttons? C’mon Zoe-Rob - unlike the other Robs - you get to meet the utter arsehole whose collection it is, and you don’t buy the lot for twenty bucks? Pffft.
I liked the book, loved the movie, and enjoyed the show. I wasn’t sure how they would go from a shot-for-shot copy of a 2 hour movie to 10 hours of screen time, but I thought it was well done.
I have no personal connections to London, Chicago, or New York, although I have been to all those places. I thought the translation from London to Chicago was brilliantly done. In fact, I think it’s one of the best film adaptations I have seen of a novel I love.
