Empire Records
Can you tell what's wrong with this quote from Empire Records?
"What's wrong with you? Yesterday you were normal and today you're like the Chinese guy from Karate Kid" (yep, Mr Miyagi was Japanese).
Mr A and I watched Empire Records yesterday. This movie was peopled by emotional kids . The guys wore turtlenecks and gradpa cardigans, floppy hair (the beard of the 90s), whilst the girls appearance included shaved heads, retro tartan and mens pants. It seemed that in the grunge-lite movies of the 90s, guys appropriated femininised accessories (lots of wrist jewllery) tempered with facial hair and girls appropriated masculine attire such as heavy boots, tempered with fluffy midriff bearing tops.
Already the store seems so quaint, from a far off era. Its pitched as a cool indie/alternative music store, stocking CDs, vinyls and tape, staffed by younge people who are all knowing about music. It's a large space with balcony levels, listening booths, a resident musician, performance areas-basically an endangered retail space. Who provides all that passive browsing area anymore? The idea that customers are privileged to browse in your sttore and be educated about music, that they are in fact there to learn from the musically knowledgeable staff, is just quaint. I can remember visiting a music store in Boulder, Colorado, a liberal minded university town. The record store was exactly like Big Star, it was comforting to travel to the northern hemisphere and encounter the same indifferent music store staff, who had enthusiastically edited every A-Z band label with complex musical descriptors but wouldn't even deign to look up from the counter and acknowledge my presence.
Empire Records shows a retail space that provides a social connection, the staff are the leaders, a young shoplifter is going to extreme efforts to become a staff member there, the assumption being that all customers aspire to being a permanent fixture and will donate all their spare funds to rescue the store. So quaint, so 90s.
My 2011 self watched Empire Records thinking that for the retail store to survive, it needed to diversify, that it needed to be a space small enough to be run by 2 or 3 people. If you're a large retail space then you're actually providing privatised open space for people, an interactive socialising space, which is important, but also needs people who purchase your product. Large retail spaces, such as malls with their department stores, chains and food court, become the social connecting space for people missing the village square or too far (geography and income wise) from places like the Central Markets.
So I've digressed. But Empire Records was pleasingly nostalgic, an enjoyable grunge lite film that now has retro value due to the passing of time. Liv Tyler is really an untalented actress, struggling to perform as an angry version of a beautiful girl; Renee Zellweger is in her early incarnation as just another cute blonde before she finally got roles that stretched her. Johnny Whitworth, who I thought was a failed actor, actually quit acting not long after this movie and didn't resume his acting career for another decade. The soundtrack is still great and the characters are reasonably believable for the time. The wikipedia entry (which, of course, must be true...) says the film lost 40 minutes in it's edit, which would explain some disjoints. We liked it!
"What's wrong with you? Yesterday you were normal and today you're like the Chinese guy from Karate Kid" (yep, Mr Miyagi was Japanese).
Mr A and I watched Empire Records yesterday. This movie was peopled by emotional kids . The guys wore turtlenecks and gradpa cardigans, floppy hair (the beard of the 90s), whilst the girls appearance included shaved heads, retro tartan and mens pants. It seemed that in the grunge-lite movies of the 90s, guys appropriated femininised accessories (lots of wrist jewllery) tempered with facial hair and girls appropriated masculine attire such as heavy boots, tempered with fluffy midriff bearing tops.
Already the store seems so quaint, from a far off era. Its pitched as a cool indie/alternative music store, stocking CDs, vinyls and tape, staffed by younge people who are all knowing about music. It's a large space with balcony levels, listening booths, a resident musician, performance areas-basically an endangered retail space. Who provides all that passive browsing area anymore? The idea that customers are privileged to browse in your sttore and be educated about music, that they are in fact there to learn from the musically knowledgeable staff, is just quaint. I can remember visiting a music store in Boulder, Colorado, a liberal minded university town. The record store was exactly like Big Star, it was comforting to travel to the northern hemisphere and encounter the same indifferent music store staff, who had enthusiastically edited every A-Z band label with complex musical descriptors but wouldn't even deign to look up from the counter and acknowledge my presence.
Empire Records shows a retail space that provides a social connection, the staff are the leaders, a young shoplifter is going to extreme efforts to become a staff member there, the assumption being that all customers aspire to being a permanent fixture and will donate all their spare funds to rescue the store. So quaint, so 90s.
My 2011 self watched Empire Records thinking that for the retail store to survive, it needed to diversify, that it needed to be a space small enough to be run by 2 or 3 people. If you're a large retail space then you're actually providing privatised open space for people, an interactive socialising space, which is important, but also needs people who purchase your product. Large retail spaces, such as malls with their department stores, chains and food court, become the social connecting space for people missing the village square or too far (geography and income wise) from places like the Central Markets.
So I've digressed. But Empire Records was pleasingly nostalgic, an enjoyable grunge lite film that now has retro value due to the passing of time. Liv Tyler is really an untalented actress, struggling to perform as an angry version of a beautiful girl; Renee Zellweger is in her early incarnation as just another cute blonde before she finally got roles that stretched her. Johnny Whitworth, who I thought was a failed actor, actually quit acting not long after this movie and didn't resume his acting career for another decade. The soundtrack is still great and the characters are reasonably believable for the time. The wikipedia entry (which, of course, must be true...) says the film lost 40 minutes in it's edit, which would explain some disjoints. We liked it!
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