7. "Empire Records" and "Almost Famous"
Why "Empire"?: Empire Records is a great, Hughes-ian romp through a (sadly) dying land - that of the independent record store. We spend a day with the high-school age employees of the titular Empire Records store and their fatherly boss (Anthony LaPaglia), and the film packs tons of fun, music, and heart into a few hours. Plot is light here, taking a backseat to the music and the characters, both of which might be enough to call the film decent on their own, but when melded together really do take things up a notch. Everyone will find someone to identify with and something to rock out to before it's over - plus, watching performances by up-and-comers like Reese Witherspoon and Liv Tyler before they were household names is a real blast.
Why "Almost Famous?": While "Almost Famous" is, at its core, a story about music, it is also a wilder, and darker, exploration of it than Empire Records. Aspiring Rolling Stone reporter William Miller hits the road with a up-and-coming rock band that embodies the spirit and the conflicts of acts like The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, The Who, and more. Cameron Crowe's mixture of humor, pathos, and rock'n'roll never gets old.
Why Double Up?: Pairing these two films is a music lover's dream. Almost Famous is in many ways the story of rock'n'roll with all its ups, downs, and drug-enduced hazes; Empire Records is in part the story of that era being looked at through rose-tinted glasses as new kinds of music flood the scene. Both films are love letters to music, and marrying that genuine affection to fun characters and offbeat stories makes for a good pair of films.