Time Capsule

Rating: 10/10 (20 October 2016)

Once upon a time there was this magical place called "the record store." It was a place that appeared for many generations following World War II. A place that had a vivid spot in American culture, especially American teenage culture, before we even walked on the moon.
I for one still have cherished memories of piling into a car with my friends, taking the trip out to Tower Records, only to get publicly castrated by the super-hot chick with the pierced nose that worked behind the counter because I brought a copy of the "The Book of Secrets" for my girlfriend.
She forced me to turn around, hold the album high, and announce to the entire store that I was buying Loreena McKennitt.
It was one of the most humiliating moments in my high school career...And you just don't get that level of quality service at Best Buy...let alone Itunes. So occasionally you took a shot in the face for your girlfriend's bad taste...but you also did it in an environment where you were talked into buying Getz and Jobim and a complete collection of Bossa Nova, just because one of the clerks caught you walking through the Jazz section.
"Empire Records" is just like that, it's a time testament to childhood. It's your youth wrapped up into a feature film. It may be a flawed movie, from time to time, but the jokes are there and they are funny. The people that you used to know are all there too.
I can't remember what the hot clerk that made me do the Mummers Dance looked like, but in my minds eye now she looks just like Robin Tunney. James 'Kimo' Wills was the stoner clerk that took me from Pearl Jam to Coltrane in one shopping trip...and if you are out there, whoever did that for me...thank you.
Maybe you were never lucky enough to get a job at the record store, but you still knew some of the clerks very well. You spent your hard earned money there and you can never go home again.
You can never REALLY go home again. Maybe you can head to Rolling Stone, but the staff there are all Millennials and most of their knowledge stops no later than 2006. They are polite to the customers, not surly and hysterical. The Record Stores of today are an empty shell of their former glory...
But you can still watch "Empire Records" you can still go back in time to the day BEFORE the music died...well, before it died again, and, for a little while, pretend you are still living in that time and place where music was played on instruments and people sang without auto-tune.
The movie is like the baseball diamond in "Field of Dreams"...only for audiophiles. What makes it great is that sense of peace in the universe.
For Gen-X to Baby Boomers "Empire Records" reminds us that we were there, and alive, in that little corner of time. Now, twenty-years back, we can watch it with all the warm, glowing, nostalgia it deserves.