Top 10 Life Lessons From John Cusack
This month, Sundance Channel is showing two of Cusack’s very best, SAY ANYTHING and HIGH FIDELITY; in those movies and others, Cusack has much to teach us.
Top 10 Life Lessons from John Cusack
John Cusack's entire career is something of a life lesson: you don't need to be conventionally macho to become a leading man. Even in the golden age of muscled-up testosterone, the eighties, Cusack found success in offbeat roles while seeding a career with far fewer rough patches than, say, Sylvester Stallone's. This month, Sundance Channel is showing two of Cusack's very best, SAY ANYTHING and HIGH FIDELITY; in those movies and others, Cusack has much to teach us.
10. Be persistent.
Of course, one man's persistence is another woman's restraining order, but Lloyd Dobler (Cusack) gets his first sorta-date with "Diane Court whoa" (in the parlance of Cameron Crowe's wonderful screenplay) through some gentle prodding: He calls her up. She politely brushes him off. He pushes back, ever so slightly, and she agrees to go with him to a party. The phonecall scene is just one of many classic exchanges in SAY ANYTHING, perhaps the best teenage romance movie ever, and part of what makes it so compelling is the way Diane Court offers rejection, and Dobler/Cusack refuses to give up.
Author: Jesse Hassenger
Catch John Cusack this month, only on Sundance Channel.9. It's what you like, not what you are like.
Actually, much of HIGH FIDELITY builds toward Cusack's Rob Gordon realizing that this isn't true at all. But it's hard to resist the exact lesson author Nick Hornby intends to dispel after listening to Rob, Barry, and Dick match list-making wits in the best record-store movie ever made.
Author: Jesse Hassenger
Catch John Cusack this month, only on Sundance Channel.8. It's what you are like, not what you create.
In BULLETS OVER BROADWAY, Cusack takes his turn standing in for Woody Allen, playing a floundering playwright who discovers a more authentic voice in the form of rough-hewn gangster and secret genius Chazz Palminteri. But while Allen has continued to struggle with the question of whether a great artist must be a great or even a good person, Cusack's surrogate Woody leaves both the bullets and the Broadway to Palminteri, opting for the happier life of a non-genius. Woody hasn't yet weighed in where mixtapes fall in this moral universe.
Author: Jesse Hassenger
Catch John Cusack this month, only on Sundance Channel.7. "Garrulous" is a synonym for "loquacious," "verbose," "effusive," and "chatty." That is to say, there's nothing wrong with a robust vocabulary, even in dunderheaded situations.
As Agent Vince Larkin in CON AIR, Cusack runs afoul of the blustery Duncan Malloy (Colm Meaney, as off-putting here as Cusack is likable) for his brainy, humane approach to his work -- which in this movie involves keeping an eye on a transport plane full of criminals. Because said criminals are played by John Malkovich, Ving Rhames, and Steve Buscemi, among others, the plane naturally gets hijacked. Soulful, wrongfully imprisoned Cameron Poe (Nicolas Cage) forms an unlikely alliance with Larkin on the ground; maybe their bond feels convincing (despite the fact that very little in CON AIR convinces anyone of anything besides "CON AIR is kind of amazing") because Cage and Cusack both began as offbeat young actors before finding themselves on the set of a high-concept smash-em-up summer movie -- and improving it immensely.
Author: Jesse Hassenger
Catch John Cusack this month, only on Sundance Channel.6. Learn to shotgun a beer.
In the first real Cusack rom-com, he plays Gib, a college student who takes an immediate dislike to Alison (Daphne Zuniga) during their cross-country road trip -- at least until he shows her how to shotgun a beer, kicking off a long line of unusual Cusackian courtship rituals (see numbers two and one on this list). THE SURE THING is part of director Rob Reiner's astonishing eighties comedy filmography; at its best, it's a charming riff on IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT, and at worst it's the break Reiner took between THIS IS SPINAL TAP and STAND BY ME (also featuring Cusack, in a smaller role). Then he made THE PRINCESS BRIDE and WHEN HARRY MET SALLY to finish off probably the most influential run of comedies of modern times.
Author: Jesse Hassenger
Catch John Cusack this month, only on Sundance Channel.5. Teenage suicide: Don't do it.
That's actually a lesson from HEATHERS (which came out the same year as SAY ANYTHING), but Lane Myer, Cusack's character in BETTER OFF DEAD, falls into a suicidal funk when his girlfriend dumps him at the beginning of the movie. But he fails to kill himself, and winds up a ski-race champion with a new French girlfriend, an argument against suicide if I've ever heard one.
Author: Jesse Hassenger
Catch John Cusack this month, only on Sundance Channel.4. Be yourself, if only because being someone else can be exhausting, even if that someone else is a semi-famous movie actor.
Maybe Cusack seemed a little more likable in HIGH FIDELITY because it came out just a few months after one of his strongest turns as one of his most pathetic characters: Craig, the hapless puppeteer who discovers a portal into John Malkovich's brain in BEING JOHN MALKOVICH. Like almost everyone else in the movie, Craig has given apparently little thought to John Malkovich before presented with the opportunity to experience life through his eyes, at which point John Malkovich seems like the path to a better, more satisfying life. It isn't, of course, and Craig manages to end the movie in a sadder, more trapped position than where he began. There's a side lesson, then, from Cusack the actor: take chances on weird, dark movies!
Author: Jesse Hassenger
Catch John Cusack this month, only on Sundance Channel.3. You can't go home again, because there's a decent chance it's been turned into a mini-mart.
GROSSE POINTE BLANK is the dark middle movie in the unofficial Cusack Trilogy that began with SAY ANYTHING and ended with HIGH FIDELITY. Though the three movies aren't formally connected (Cusack's WAR, INC., a forgotten mess of a satire with moments of brilliance, bears greater actual resemblance to GROSSE POINTE BLANK), it's easy to imagine GROSSE POINTE BLANK as a dark timeline for an alternate Lloyd Dobler who didn't get the girl: instead of enlisting in the army, as his offscreen dad suggested, Lloyd goes into business for himself and turns into Martin Q. Blank, the neurotic professional assassin who attends his high school reunion in this comedy, penned by the same team (including Cusack himself) that wrote HIGH FIDELITY. In one of the movie's funniest and saddest scenes, Blank visits the site of his old house, which has been unceremoniously turned into a mini-mart – itself unceremoniously destroyed during a subsequent shoot-out.
Author: Jesse Hassenger
Catch John Cusack this month, only on Sundance Channel.2. You can seduce girls with mix tapes.
Of course, it doesn't hurt to look and act something like John Cusack – but several moments of HIGH FIDELITY rank among Cusack's least likable on film, especially considering the movie is nominally a romantic comedy. Really, Rob Gordon's mix of indecision, fumbling, music snobbery, and Cusackian pretty-good looks become a lot more palatable when he focuses his attention on a girl, or a mixtape – in Rob's world, pretty much the same thing.
Author: Jesse Hassenger
Catch John Cusack this month, only on Sundance Channel.
