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film review

Tower Records was a retail-chain colossus that’s fondly recalled by former employees, vinyl buyers and the loquacious founder Russ Solomon in actor-turned-documentarian Colin Hanks’s love letter of a doc, All Things Must Pass.

"It was the music that was important in people's life, and we were how they got it."

Russ Solomon, roughly the Sam (the Record Man) Sniderman of the United States, is talking about his Tower Records, a retail-chain colossus fondly recalled by former employees (including Dave Grohl), vinyl buyers (including Elton John and a suddenly old Bruce Springsteen) and the loquacious founder Solomon himself in actor-turned-documentarian Colin Hanks's love letter of a doc.

We learn of the party-hearty environment and family-like vibe of a world where it was cool to write off cocaine as a business expense. And we see the hubris and myopia that doomed the industry. An oversentimental Hanks is no maestro as a director – mostly it's former workers and executives spinning tales, fun and games until the Internet killed the record-store star.

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