06.04.02 - 6:57 p.m.

Once again, my fabuloso seestor and I are sharing the same brain. Just this morning I was thinking about High Fidelity and how it works and doesn't work as a movie and Bassett writes about more or less the same thing.

Oh, media naranja.

So this is what I was thinking: High Fidelity makes a better transition from book to movie than About A Boy did because of its confessional qualities. Sure, it's cheesy, but John conveyed so much more with his talking-to-the-camera schtick than Hugh did with his clever, emotional crows' feet. There's only so much you can do with an expression or even a voice-over, and Nick Hornby's writing DESERVES to be seen as well as heard. When you look at someone's face as they're speaking passionately, you instantly sense the feel of the moment. When you're hearing it as narration, I think you lose some of the emotional immediacy.

I'm not saying every movie should be breaking down the fourth wall, but think of Rob Gordon's soliloquies and how you can grasp his patheticism, his resentment and his confusion toward Laura and the whole process of growing up. Think about his reaction to Charlie being in the phone book - "she should be on Neptune!" or whatever the exact quote is because I don't have it burned into my memory right now - and how well you realize his amazement.

Contrast that with my favorite passage from the About A Boy book and how much better you would have sensed Will's feelings for Rachel if you'd seen him speak it:

"Will had never wanted to fall in love...it had always struck him as a peculiarly unpleasant-seeming experience, what with all the loss of sleep and weight, and the unhappiness when it was unreciprocated, and the suspect, dippy happiness when it was working out. These were people who could not control themselves, people who, if only temporarily, were no longer content to occupy their own space, people who could no longer rely on a new jacket, a bag of grass and an afternoon rerun of The Rockford Files to make them complete."

Imagine Hugh agitated, imagine him speaking those words while pacing his apartment, maybe sitting on the couch, trying to relax and put his feet on the coffee table, then distractedly jumping up again. Doesn't THAT give you a better picture of Will as a character?