High Fidelity Family Review

Rob, a record store owner and compulsive list maker, recounts his top five breakups, including the one in progress.Thirty-something Rob Gordon, a former club DJ, owns a not-so-lucrative used record store in Chicago. He not so much employs Barry and Dick, but rather keeps them around as they showed up at the store one day and never left. All three are vinyl and music snobs, but in different ways. Rob has a penchant for compiling top-five lists. The latest of these lists is his top-five break-ups, it spurred by the fact that his latest girlfriend, Laura, a lawyer, has just broken up with him. He believed that Laura would be the one who would last, partly as an expectation of where he would be at this stage in his life. Rob admits that there have been a few incidents in their relationship which in and of themselves could be grounds for her to want to break up. To his satisfaction, Laura is not on this top-five list. Rob feels a need not only to review the five relationships, which go back as far as middle school when he was 12, and try to come to terms with why the woman, or girl as the case may be, left him, but also, in the words of Charlie Nicholson, number four on the list, "what it all means" for why he has ended up where he is, which is nowhere, personally or professionally, close to what he envisioned. He also has to come to terms with what it means that Laura has moved on to Ian Raymond, a man for whom neither had any respect when they were together.High Fidelity follows the 'mid-life' crisis of Rob, a thirty-something record-store owner who must face the undeniable facts - he's growing up. In a hilarious homage to the music scene, Rob and the wacky, offbeat clerks that inhabit his store expound on the intricacies of life and song all the while trying to succeed in their adult relationships. Are they listening to pop music because they are miserable? Or are they miserable because they listen to pop music? This romantic comedy provides a whimsical glimpse into the male view of the affairs of the heart.—<[email protected]>Arrested development confronts 30-something Rob Gordon when Laura, his smart and successful lover, leaves him because he hasn't changed since they met. He reviews his top five worst breakups (he constantly makes top-five lists, though usually about music). He recalls each breakup, reconnects with these former loves to find out why they dumped him, and wallows in misery from losing Laura. Much of it plays out at his vinyl record store where he and two clerks, socially-inept savants, live and breathe obscure contemporary music. Rob makes fruitless attempts to win Laura back, indulges in new relationships laced with fantasy, and tries introspection. What will Laura do?—<[email protected]>