There’s a line in High Fidelity that is just perfect for this essay. Barry (Jack Black) is musing about Stevie Wonder’s awful pop-tastic contributions over the last twenty years and ponders, “Is it in fact unfair to criticize a formerly great artist for his latter day sins- is it better to burn out or fade away?”
After catching Must Love Dogs on cable over the weekend, the question pops up again and once I realized the irony of turning it onto Cusack himself, I had no choice but to put it on paper and see what I got.
John Cusack is the reason I’m still single, I’m 97% sure of it. There should be a warning label on the cover of every available copy of Say Anything… and it should read “Do not watch if under the age of 16 and/or Impressionable to the Point of Romantic Disability”. How was I supposed to know, at the tender age of 12, that Lloyd Dobler not only had no plans to ditch Diane Court and come knocking on my door anytime soon, but that centuries of white male domination, Maxim magazine and monster truck rallies had pretty much insured against him even existing at all?
You get older and you wise up… but there’s Cameron Crowe still lurking in the background, taunting you with Patrick Fugit in Almost Famous (Cusack 2.0 as he’s known in my brain- if you’ve ever seen Saved! and you too think he’s, like, totally adorable, you know what I mean) and Cusack sneaking back every so often, dropping Grosse Point Blank and High Fidelity and Pushing Tin into your lap
Culture Clique 