A lot to say about dating

Rating: 6/10 (2 January 2020)

This director had a sexual awakening when he saw Say Anything and thusly developed a fetish for John Cusack being sad in the rain. Even made him get down in the dirt, like a straight male fantasy of women mud wrestling. Totally irrelevant comment I'm making right now, I know, but it was an odd amount of dramatic rain scenes for a single movie.
This is an extremely realistic story about the insecurity of significant others, and the uncertainty of the future we have with others. How fearful we are of commitment, failure at our goals, being alone, and that jumping for one slightly better thing could cause us to lose what good thing we already have.
I feel like this movie was niche relevant to the year 2000, and nothing beyond, which is manifestly fitting when you consider that every line of dialogue out of John Cusack's, or Jack Black's, mouth is about niche interests. The artists and albums and songs he references or jokes about are constantly obscure ones. I had to turn on subtitles just to know which artists etc he was saying because they were so unfamiliar. Like a foreign language. You could make the argument that this was purposeful, that Cusack's character was supposed to be elitist and therefore possessed a wealth of knowledge a layman wouldn't. However, I always felt like the viewer was supposed to be on his side for these jokes. These chastising remarks for customers who have bad taste for liking [Song/Band] was where I was should be laughing, in on the joke. It never happened.
I felt like I, the viewer, should have envied Cusack. Should have thought of him as a cool guy for owning a record store, and having a catalog of hot past girlfriends. But really I just was annoyed with him. He does redeem himself by the end, sort of. The movie at least stayed true to its themes of realism, that even in our redemptive moments, we still retain traces of our destructive tendencies.