Monday, September 11, 2006

Empire Records, 1995

The Plot
This movie takes place almost entirely in and around an independent record store. An employee discovers the store will be turned into a big record chain store. So he bets the money and loses. The owner Joe then tries to figure out to explain this to his boss. Other than the opening scene, the entire takes place over the course of one work day.

Cast
Liv Tyler, Anthony LaPaglia, Maxwell Caulfield, Renee Zellweger, Rory Cochrane and Johnny Whitworth

Musician appearances
Gwar as themselves, Coyote Shivers as Berko

The good
I like this record store although I have never seen an indie record store that large. Maxwell Caulfield was great as Rex Manning, a David Cassidy/Donnie Osmond kind of singer. Anthony LaPaglia was very believable as Joe the manager of the record store. Of the younger cast members, I thought Rory Cochrane really stole the show as Lucas. Although I actually knew a guy in college who acted a lot like the Lucas character. The film is overall very funny and moves along fairly quickly. Actually I like just about all of the performances here.

The bad
There are some frantic melodramatic parts here and there and it's a little hard to take, but they are quickly resolved. There is not that much of a plot really, but I think the humor is strong enough that it's not that important.

Grade
3.5 out of 5

Final word
I got my copy for $4.88 at Wal-Mart a while back. I have seen this film easily ten times and it gets little better with each viewing. It's far from perfect, but easy to take. The new version has a few added scenes that add more to some of the characters. My favorite character might be Eddie because of his love of vinyl.

***Up on Tuesday will be Wayne's World 2 as Rock Movies Week continues.

4 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

I just added the movies you have listed (that I havent seen yet) to my Netflix. Thanks! I love some of these flix, can't wait to read all your reiveiws

9:04 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I will have to check out this movie. I've heard of it but never checked it out.

5:24 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I enjoyed it, even though it was pretty much fluff and nothing else. I liked Rory Cochrane, but I thought that Ethan Embry was a riot, especially in his GWAR dream sequence. And there were the young ladies...Liv Tyler, Renee Zellweger, and Robin Tunney; can't go wrong there.

9:23 AM  
Blogger Metal Mark said...

bar-I hope you like the movies.

Fred-It's funny, but a little annoying at times. Still worth it for the Gwar scene alone.

Bruce-Yes, it was a good cast.

Sgt. Fluffy-I didn't see this film until about 2001 so it was several years old before I even heard of it.

10:33 AM  

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