In what's a documentary that's likely to appeal to music tragic, collectors and those longing for the bygone era of in store shopping that moonlighted as an excuse to go and hang out with real people in a real environment, son of Tom Colin Hanks's documentary examination of the rise and fall of Tower Records may not achieve anything of a true noteworthy nature but it's certainly a thorough and insightful examination of the one-time retail juggernaut and a reminder that with our attention now on online retail and social media interaction, we are losing and missing out on a wonderful experience that used to be readily available to all shapes and sizes.
All Things Must Pass (inspired from a sign posted on a closing Tower Records store and no doubt the famous song) utilises extensive archival photos of the expanding businesses stores, over locations from the USA, Japan (where the name continues to do decent business) and England and Hanks finds a winning formula with a range of talking heads that were involved for many a year with Tower Records.
We get to spend a large portion of the docos runtime with founder and colourful character Russ Solomon who with nothing more than ambition and drive created a world spanning retail empire that's focus was on music for music lovers that extended from staff through to everyday customers or the not so every day like frequent store visitors such as Elton John and Eric Clapton. It seems like such a foreign thing in today's climate that employees started as packing room clerks to high end management and the focus Tower had on encouraging each store to have its own flavour and as long as the job gets done, who cares what happens before, after or in-between is something that is highly unlikely to be a practice of retail chains of the modern era.
All Things Must Pass will be a lovely walk down memory lane for those that use to count their visits to Tower Record stores as a weekly or monthly highlight and for those of us like me that never got to experience the wandering up and down of their aisles it's a pleasant and workmanlike examination of what made the name such a power in its early days and also a sad reminder of what today's consumers are missing out on 3 purchase happy Elton John's out of 5
All Things Must Pass (inspired from a sign posted on a closing Tower Records store and no doubt the famous song) utilises extensive archival photos of the expanding businesses stores, over locations from the USA, Japan (where the name continues to do decent business) and England and Hanks finds a winning formula with a range of talking heads that were involved for many a year with Tower Records.
We get to spend a large portion of the docos runtime with founder and colourful character Russ Solomon who with nothing more than ambition and drive created a world spanning retail empire that's focus was on music for music lovers that extended from staff through to everyday customers or the not so every day like frequent store visitors such as Elton John and Eric Clapton. It seems like such a foreign thing in today's climate that employees started as packing room clerks to high end management and the focus Tower had on encouraging each store to have its own flavour and as long as the job gets done, who cares what happens before, after or in-between is something that is highly unlikely to be a practice of retail chains of the modern era.
All Things Must Pass will be a lovely walk down memory lane for those that use to count their visits to Tower Record stores as a weekly or monthly highlight and for those of us like me that never got to experience the wandering up and down of their aisles it's a pleasant and workmanlike examination of what made the name such a power in its early days and also a sad reminder of what today's consumers are missing out on 3 purchase happy Elton John's out of 5