Yeah!
The re-release of Empire Records is perfect timingLaura Snapes reckons this '90s coming-of-age film returning to our screens is more of a comment on the state of the record sales industry than High Fidelity.
"These days, sticking it to The Man is the sort of risibly hoary practise best left to certain dreadlock-sporting has-beens fighting for their right to rock up to a festival an hour late. But 15 years ago this week, a film was released about music sticking it to the corporate old codger in all the most cliched of ways - mostly by talking about it a lot and not really doing anything - but also managing to be totally brilliant.
Empire Records made like a cross between John Hughes'
The Breakfast Club and
High Fidelity (the book of which was first published that same year), charting a day in the lives of a group of teenage record store employees (featuring Renee Zellweger and Liv Tyler) fighting to save their shop from being taken over by the Music Town chain. Which, according to teenage logic, entails putting the shift's takings on a Craps board at a local casino in an attempt to treble the profits and sae the day. And then losing $9000.
It was panned on release - Rotten Tomatoes showed a 24% approval rating, with deluded critics claiming that it was artificial, predictable and dull. Alright, in parts it's cheesy, with characters that make up every '90s teenage movie trope (the girl bound for Harvard, the lovesick puppy chasing her, the floozy, the troubled headcase) and a hearthrob who later went on to star in, erm,
Emmerdale. But through the halcyon glow of nostalgia, it's become a classic.
Buffy The Vampire Slayer,
Juno - the wise-cracking teens in those films wouldn't have existed were it not for
Empire Records, which is laced with amazing quotable teenage pat philosophy - like, "What's up with today, today?" and, "I am guided by a force much greater than luck".
What makes it even more poignant, though, is that, according to Graham Jones, author of
Last Shop Standing, around 550 record shops in the UK have closed down in the last four years alone. The
Empire Records dream of rolling up hungover from last night's gig and goofing around with your friends while occasionally doing some dusting has been quashed by uniform chainstores masquerading as record shops - that expect you to actually do
work. Pfft! In the film, the day is savved by the staff holding a benefit gig on the roof - OK, a predictable ending, but not an inevitable one, like the unhappy endings of most indie record shops. Like they said, damn the man, save the Empire."