Binge-r #189: High Fidelity + The Eddy

Cover Version: Zoe Kravitz (Rob) and David H. Holmes (Simon) in High Fidelity

HIGH FIDELITY S1

Streaming Service: Disney+ (previously on ABC iView)

Availability: All 10 episodes now streaming

With David Bowie’s Let’s Dance on her turntable and Modern Love’s coiled intro literally moving the needle, record story owner Robyn ‘Rob’ Brooks (Zoe Kravitz) explains directly to the camera what makes the opening track on an album work. “It’s got to be familiar, but also unexpected,” she says. The same applies to movies rebooted as streaming shows, which is what High Fidelity is. Stephen Frears’ generous and astute 2000 film, with John Cusack as Rob, has been remade as a 10 episode series. Both screen versions are faithful adaptations of Nick Hornby’s 1995 book, and while the protagonist’s gender has been flipped the similarities between the two versions are layered like harmonies: obsessive about music, scarred by a break-up, and trying to understand their rattled reactions to love.

It takes an episode or two for Veronica West and Sarah Kucserka’s reboot to really distinguish itself, but the nods to its predecessors are affectionate if you recognise them and still amusingly necessary if you don’t. Chicago is now Brooklyn, but Rob still has two argumentative clerks manning her (quiet) store: Cherise (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) and Simon (David H. Holmes) fence with customers, dance to Come On Eileen, and try to divine the mood of their mercurial boss. Simon was one of Rob’s “top five desert island heartbreaks” years prior (they both realised he was gay), but she hasn’t gotten over the last one, Mac (Kingsley Ben-Adir), a Brit whose return to New York after a year away has Rob reconsidering her options.

Rob has some new entanglements, including Clyde from Colorado (Jake Lacy) and handsome Scottish musician Liam (Thomas Doherty) – the latter is an intoxicant for Rob, much as Kravitz’s mother, Lisa Bonet, was playing a similar role in the 2000 film. But High Fidelity works best as a hangout show, riffing on music and enjoying the camaraderie of friends. It makes you feel part of Rob’s small circle of pals, and when she frequently breaks the fourth wall it’s as if you’re the only one who has stuck around to talk with her. In Big Little Lies Kravitz has an uneasy energy, as if something was ajar just beneath the surface, and that roiling watchfulness is here repurposed as comic self-revelations that build up and boil over. With her Gehry building cheekbones and eclectic vinyl collection, Rob is an intriguing focus – one step behind the answers she wants, one step ahead of the realisations she needs. The show isn’t in my top five of the year to date, but it makes a respectable placing.

Kind of Blue: Andre Holland (Elliot) and Joanna Kulig (Maja) in The Eddy

THE EDDY (Netflix, all eight episodes streaming): Set in Paris, there are several shows mixed together in this moody new Netflix series, including an intimate drama about the fractured relationship between a father and daughter, a fictional essay examining jazz’s cultural role, and a crime thriller with club owners getting mixed up with gangsters. Each serves a storytelling purpose, but they never quite elevate each other. What holds them together is Andre Holland (Moonlight, High Flying Bird) as the gruff Elliot Udo, a former jazz great who no longer performs and instead runs the titular basement club with his exuberant partner, Farid (Tahar Rahim). Elliot’s exile in Paris, a long-held tradition for American jazz musicians, as the show acknowledges, has many complications, including his former girlfriend, Maja (Cold War’s Joanna Kulig, underused here), fronting the house band and a just arrived teenage daughter, Julie (Amandla Stenberg). Brit Jack Thorne (His Dark Materials) is the principal writer, with La La Land filmmaker Damien Chazelle directing the first two episodes. Favouring grain over gleam, his handheld camera wends through band rooms and corridors, and this low-key drama is best as a mood piece where the wonder of playing music can suspend need and anxiety. The melodies do what the dialogue can’t.

>> Classic Show/New to Streaming: Amazon Prime Video has finally filled one of the biggest holes in streaming, adding all four seasons of Battlestar Galactica. Starting in 2004, this exceptional 1970s reboot about the remnants of a human civilisation fleeing their android adversaries was a tale of science-fiction survival that examined national trauma, the divide between military and civilian power, and the corrupting power of vengeance. It was, in other words, the most searching and deeply held American screen response to 9/11.

>> Great Shows/New Seasons: Two Netflix shows very much worth catching up on have new seasons available. The second instalment of Dead to Me, with Christina Applegate and Linda Cardellini as best friends connected by deception, picks up directly where the first left off [season one review here]. Catherin Reitman’s Canadian sitcom Workin’ Moms, now four seasons deep, is a tart and sometimes madcap comedy about the impossible balancing act facing mothers after maternity leave [season one review here].

NEWLY ADDED MOVIES

New on Netflix: It falters on Tom Cruise’s hero fantasies, but much of Mission: Impossible - Fallout (2018, 147 minutes) is as entertaining as a Hollywood blockbuster action currently gets; Mid90s (2018, 85 minutes) is the carefully casual directorial debut of actor Jonah Hill, an episodic coming of age tale about a naïve Los Angeles adolescent (Sonny Suljic) discovering the world via a new group of skater friends.

New on SBS on Demand: Lee Hae-yeong’s Believer (2018, 118 minutes) is a feverish South Korean crime film where a cop and his informer delve into a crime syndicate whose nihilistic brutality is unflinchingly documented; Co-written by Michael Palin, Terry Gilliam’s whirlwind ode to childhood fantasy, Time Bandits (1981, 107 minutes), may be the rare film in the director’s body of work that has improved with age.

New on Stan: Always and forever contemporary, Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966, 80 minutes) is a quietly coruscating emotional transference between a mute actress (Liv Ullmann) and the nurse (Bibi Andersson) overseeing her seaside recuperation; Serenity (2019, 107 minutes) is purely for bad – no, terrible – movie devotees, with Anne Hathaway and Matthew McConaughey in a fishing-obsessed tropical noir.

>> Missed last week’s BINGE-R? Click here for reviews of Stan’s arresting Sally Rooney adaptation Normal People, and Netflix’s alternate history fantasia Hollywood and Chris Hemsworth action flick Extraction.

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>> Check the complete BINGE-R archive: 234 series reviewed here, 141 movies reviewed here, and 33 lists compiled here.