Empire Records (1995)

Watched ‘Empire Records’ (1995) on Primevideo.

A movie that should never have been made. Hollywood worse than Bollywood movie.

A bunch of young boys and girls in a record store, Empire Records, each one either a perverted or a maverick, wasting themselves. 

As the movie begins, one of the workers who has been allowed to close the store for the first time, discovers by snooping around that the store is about to be purchased by Music Town, a nationwide music store with many franchises. With the hope to save the store from being taken over, he takes 9000 dollars in the cash register and drives to a casino in Atlantic city, hoping to double the money in gambling and initially wins but loses it all in the end.

In the end, they save it by organizing a benefit party and collecting donations by selling food and drinks, and aising money

In between there is a scheduled store event, the Rex Manning day. Rex Manning, a former 80’s pop idol arrives in the store, signs autographs for a throng of visitors, while trying to promote his new video. And there are some random events, a store worker tries to have sex with him and then runs away, another actually takes him to the bathroom and does it, there is a shop lifter, there is a mock funeral… 

A complete waste of time.

Liv Tyler looks pretty. She is perhaps the only likeable character in the movie.

Renee Zellweger plays Gina, the licentious one who takes Rex Manning to the bathroom and get him to bang her.

The song 'Video Killed the Radio Star' by The Buggles, is the one that inspired ‘Koi Yahan aha Nache Nache’

Lines I noted…

‘My wife left me for another woman and my girlfriend forced me to leave at gunpoint’

‘She hates me’

‘She hates me too. But I have enough sense to hate her back’

‘I'm your typical nutty teenager from America’

‘You chose rap and metal and Whitney Houston. Someone like you needs to diminish their criminal impulses, not magnify them. Maybe some jazz or classical’

‘Did you compare the percentage of teenage male Rex Manning fans to homosexuality amongst teenage males?’

‘The long arm of the law has embraced our friend Warren’ (the shoplifter) 

‘Sometimes reputations outlive their applications’

‘My beatnik father turned this into a record store’

Beatnik - a member of the Beat Generation

- a person who rejects or avoids conventional behavior, dress, etc.

Beat generation - members of the generation that came of age after World War II who, supposedly as a result of disillusionment stemming from the Cold War, espoused forms of mysticism and the relaxation of social and sexual inhibitions.

- members of the generation that came to maturity in the 1950s, whose rejection of the social and political systems of the West was expressed through contempt for regular work, possessions, traditional dress, etc, and espousal of anarchism, communal living, drugs, etc

#westerncinema