What I Watched -- Empire Records

Ahh. There's nothing like a classic mid-90s teenage angst movie. As those movies go, this one is awesome. So awesome, in fact, that I watched it a hundred times in the mid-90s.

Seeing it again this weekend was interesting, both because it now seems much more teenager-y than it did when I was actually a teenager (as with most things designed for that age group), but also because the version I saw included a number of scenes that had been cut from the original DVD release. Many they had been wise to do without all those years ago. Other scenes, especially the ones about Lucas and Joe, actually add something of minor substance to the movie.

Joe is a has-been drummer who now manages a record store (a la High Fidelity) and a crew of rowdy employees, Lucas among them. Lucas (ever the Zen philosopher) is closing the store one night, realizes Joe is in negotiations to turn the store into a franchise of a major chain store due to money problems, and takes all the cash in the safe to Atlantic City -- where he promptly loses it. The rest of the movie is the falling apart and coming together of the employees, their friends, and the kid who tries to rob the place, in an attempt to save Empire Records ("open 'til midnight") from becoming a Music Town.

In watching it, look for early Liv Tyler, Ethan Embry, Robin Tunney, and Renee Zellweger (who didn't look quite so strange then). Also stars Anthony LaPaglia as Joe, Maxwell Caulfield (of Grease 2 fame) as the autograph-signing and terribly vain Rex Manning, and the even-then-strange-looking Debi Mazar.