Neither boring nor spectacular ... just good: "High Fidelity"

You'd think a movie about which you can say, "Wow, they really nailed it," would make you feel good, right? Alas, when the "nailing it" regards how men are rather warped when it comes to the courtship of women, well, you can see how that might make a few fellas a wee bit uncomfortable. (Hee, hee ... I said "wee.")

Fortunately, now that I'm married, I can watch "High Fidelity" without repercussions. No questions about whether I'm going to flake out like John Cusack's character and vacilate endlessly between fantasy and reality while not really advancing my life beyond that week. Of course, this also means I can't stumble into a hookup with a hip singer or flirt with a nubile music columnist. Yeah, it's a trade-off.

I've owned "High Fidelity" for a while and popped it into the DVD player the other night as the truce movie following our usual "Moonstruck" vs. "Die Hard" debate. Even with my married status, this definitely falls into the eminently rewatchable category, as I can still very much identify with Cusack's character always wondering if there's someone better or more perfect or just different out there. That was me in my 20s, although, again, without the hip singer hookup. Best I can claim is scoring with a mayor's niece, and that's not exactly Liz Phair.

Our story has us following Cusack ("The Journey of Natty Gann") as his live-in girlfriend leaves him, spurring reflection on previous "loves" and his life in general, namely as a mopey used record store owner. Disaffected coolness abounds, with Cusack and his nerd helpers, Jack Black ("The Jackal") and Todd Louiso ("8 Heads in a Duffel Bag"), giving us fun scenes in the record store and beyond while Cusack struggles to win back his woman.

Black is pretty funny, and Louiso holds his own as the quiet yin to Jackie's outrageous yang. And we also get a pretty amusing turn by Tim Robbins ("Top Gun") as the guy Cusack's girlfriend shacks up with. The writing is pretty solid, too. Yeah, there are a few too many cases of Cusack pontificating to the camera, to the point that both his witticisms and the so-called heartfelt stuff feel forced. But for the most part we get a pretty good look into the psyche of the not-quite-grown-up man.

More than the whole thing with Cusack tracking down his old girlfriends, the part of the movie that really resonated -- other than what goes into a great mix tape -- was when he realized that moving from girl to girl was just chasing a perfect fantasy that doesn't exist. The underwear bit -- every girl has the worn cotton panties but wears the good stuff for early dates -- is dead-on. This movie also makes me think of a somewhat famous quotation. I forget ... was it Socrates or Plato who said, "No matter how good-looking she is, someone else is sick and tired of her bullsh*t ... "