High Fidelity

I just re-watched High Fidelity, starring John Cusack.

First, what a wonderful movie. It's got a good story, and even though I don't generally like Jack Black, the casting was brilliant. After watching it this time I read the Wikipedia article on it, and saw that the author approved of the setting change from London to Chicago, a change that made it very relatable for me, since that's more or less where I grew up. When I read the book, it did amuse me that they'd traded in a black woman (Lisa Bonet in the movie) on an American woman (from the novel) to maintain that slight sense of exoticism in his fling.

Or at least that's the way I saw it.

But the thing that got me was that I saw it in its theatrical run, not too long before I came to Japan. A lot has changed; when that movie came out, there was nothing that dated it as anything but its present. Some people had cell phones in 2000, but many did not, and there were none in the film. Napster had been launched a year before, but while there were CDs available in the record store, there wasn't any mention of digital downloading. Again, in the milieu that it's set in, none of this was unusual or dated, but now...

But now.

It's a time capsule of where I was, in more ways than geographical, right before I uprooted myself and fled across the world, only to watch it collapse in twin piles of rubble behind me.