Empire Records (PG-13 / unrated)
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This came out in 1995, but I'm not sure when I first saw it. It must have been on TV, but it could have been in the late 90s or the early 2000s. I'm writing this review in 2020, after having seen it again on DVD, an extended, unrated version of the film that was first released in 2003. That's probably not the version I saw on TV, but I don't really remember anything about the movie from the first time I saw it, not even how I felt about it. I kind of have the feeling I wasn't all that into it the first time, but I could be wrong. Either way, I definitely enjoyed it a lot this time. It did pretty poorly at the box office and critically, but I guess it has something of a cult following. And I definitely think it's a fun movie. It doesn't seem particularly realistic, but if it were, it would probably be a lot more boring. Also I should say that it has a really good cast and a lot of good music.

Anyway... I'm not sure how much to actually say about the plot. It's about a group of people who work at a record store called Empire Records. The store is managed by a guy named Joe (Anthony LaPaglia) who has decided to let an employee named Lucas close up on his own for the first time. He lets a woman come into the store to shop after it has closed, and... I think she has an effect on the way he thinks about things, for some reason. But after she leaves, when he's counting up all the money the store has taken in for the day, which he's supposed to deposit at the bank, he comes across some information in Joe's desk that suggests the store's owner, Mitchell, is planning to sell it to a chain of record stores called Music Town. Lucas doesn't want that to happen, so on a whim, he takes the money (about $9000) to Atlantic City, trusting in fate to let him win enough for Joe to buy the store from Mitchell, himself. And at first he wins, but then he loses everything.

The next day, Joe shows up to open the store, and finds out the money hasn't been deposited, and isn't in the store's safe, either. So he has to try to keep Mitchell from finding out about this until he can figure out what to do about it. Meanwhile, we meet various eccentric employees, including Corey (Liv Tyler), Gina (Renee Zellweger), Debra (Robin Tunney), Mark, A.J., Berko, and probably some others. (It was hard for me to keep track of everyone who started shifts at different times throughout the day, and whether some characters were even employees or just regular customers.) And Lucas eventually shows up and tells Joe what happened to the money. (Lucas seems to me very zen and pseudo-philosophical about everything, though it seems that wasn't his personality until the start of the movie, when he was closing the store. From that point on he became sort of like Ferris Bueller, but without the charmed existence.) Everyone's got their own issues they're dealing with, but I don't want to spoil any of those plot points. Oh, and at one point a kid who sarcastically calls himself "Warren Beatty" gets caught shoplifting, and he... spends a lot of time in the store, waiting for the police to come get him. Twice. To top it all off, it's "Rex Manning Day," when an aging pop star named Rex Manning (Maxwell Caulfield from Grease 2) does a publicity event at the store. He's got an assistant named Jane (Debi Mazar) who eventually realizes she doesn't want to work for him anymore.

And... I don't know what else to say. There's just a whole lot of random plot threads sort of haphazardly stitched together into a movie. I can understand anyone thinking it doesn't work. But I liked it. I found all the characters interesting; at least all the major ones. And I found all the plot threads interesting, each in very different ways. And I don't care if the movie was well put-together or not. I just like the fact that it was put together at all.