8th
Take Me Home Tonight Review
Every decade needs an eighties prom movie. To kick off 2011, Topher Grace has helped write, produce, and star in his latest comedy, Take Me Home Tonight. Director Michael Dowse weaves a feel-good John Hughes movie that oddly fits with the sensibilities of today. In the late eighties, the film is set in booming Los Angeles on Labor Day weekend. The economy is high, but Matt Franklin (Topher Grace) is down on his luck. Matt just graduated MIT and finished an aimless summer figuring out his life and coming out with no plan. His best friend Barry (Dan Fogler) gets fired from his car-salesman job and his twin sister Wendy (Anna Faris) is getting hitched to one of the biggest douches to grace the eighties. After running into his high school crush Tori Frederking (Teresa Palmer), Matt grows determined to take his shot with the girl of his dreams at the end-of-summer party.
Every year Wendy’s boyfriend Kyle (Chris Pratt) throws the labor-day bash that reunites the entire high school together after college once again. At this final last hurrah of the college graduates, Matt takes this as his last chance for the high school nerd to ask out the high school hottie. A grand auto-theft leads to a bag of coke and many other mishaps that set up Matt’s greatest night of his life.
The eighties theme was pulled off impressively well. The location scouts sought out the great eighties architecture buildings LA has to offer; tantamount cocaine usage becomes an important motif, alongside the theme song of the aptly-named film, “Take Me Home Tonight.” Against the background of the economy boom and the rise of yuppies, Matt’s character choosing not to follow the Forbes 500 path becomes stark as he faces the challenge of letting himself go do things…at least for one night.
Topher Grace plays the usual dorky typecast fellow we all know too well, yet instead of the seventies we moved a decade forward. A couple cameos give the sometimes too predictable film some good giggles. Demetri Martin plays an obnoxious wheelchair bound Goldman Sachs man, who calls out Matt for pretending he works there. Michael Ian Black also co-stars, and watch Michelle Trachtenberg sensually lick a face. However, the best laughs came from Fogler’s character as he gets into strange dance-offs and strange bathroom sex scenarios. Even stranger still, Anna Faris’ character was not a total ditz in this role!
While the film fell into stereotypical niches of the coming-of-age 1980s flicks, the script was written with some freshness that felt a little more real and relatable.
