Take Me Home Tonight (2011)
Directed by Michael Dowse
Recent MIT grad Matt Franklin should be well on his way to a successful career at a Fortune 500 company, but instead he rebels against maturity by taking a job at a video store. Matt rethinks his position when his unrequited high-school crush, Tori, walks in and invites him to an end-of-summer party. With the help of his twin sister and his best friend, Matt hatches a plan to change the course of his life.
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What critics compared Take Me Home Tonight to
At times director Michael Dowse and his co-writers Jackie and Jeff Filgo are clearly channeling American Graffiti and Dazed and Confused, films that find both humor and pathos in their characters’ failings and foibles and also notably don’t use their period settings as a source of comedy.
Dowse’s film is so formula that it is aimlessly predictable, borrowing from the likes of “American Graffiti” and “Dazed and Confused.”
Like Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused (1993) and George Lucas's American Graffiti (1973), this is one of those coming-of-age comedies that centers on a single wild night.
Taking place over a 24-hour period during which young graduates confront apprehensions about their future paths in life, Take Me Home Tonight only calls to mind better films such as American Graffiti and Dazed and Confused.
That's the way we've often seen it in movies, notably generational touchstones such as "Dazed and Confused" and "American Graffiti."
It?s one of those all-in-one-night comedies in the spirit of American Graffiti and Dazed and Confused, where the characters gain a lifetime of worldliness in a single night.
Directed by Canadian Michael Dowse (“Fubar”) and written by Jackie and Jeff Filgo (“That ’70s Show”), “Take Me Home Tonight” ends up being some weird, occasionally funny iteration of “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” the late John Hughes’ “Lawrence of Arabia,” although in this case a vintage Mercedes stands in for a Ferrari.
Ensembles like "Fast Times at Ridgemont High," "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" and "Revenge of the Nerds" had deep rosters of young talent, and watching them scrimmage onscreen was one of the pleasures of a mostly disposable film decade.
But throughout that decade, filmmakers like Cameron Crowe, Paul Brickman and John Hughes (okay, to be honest, mostly Hughes) took those simple elements and made them into unforgettable cinematic comfort food movies like Say Anything, Risky Business, Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller's Day Off.
Filmed on location in Southport, Terry Stacey's (2011's " Take Me Home Tonight ") cinematography is ravishing, from the golden hues of twilight hour, to the tranquility of the seaside surroundings, to an encroaching aesthetic shadowiness as danger draws near.
Any movie that has two slacker college grads (Topher Grace and Dan Fogler) steal a car as they lip-sync to NWA’s “Straight Outta Compton” gets big style points in my book.
And it’s not as if this movie had any specific reason to take place in the late 1980s, other than as an excuse to include everything from “Come on Eileen” to “Straight Outta Compton” on the soundtrack*.