SUCK MY DISC

DVDs and Blu-Rays for the week of July 19th, 2011

 

TAKE ME HOME TONIGHT

**1/2   out of ****

 

“Take Me Home Tonight” is a fucking sloppy mess. It rarely makes sense. Characters are constantly doing asinine things that completely contradict everything that has been developed up until that point. Wild contrivances appear out of nowhere, just to move the plot somewhere it didn’t belong in the first place. And that is to use the term plot as loosely as possible, as the thinnest of stories is used to just sting together an endless series of jokeless skits that go nowhere. But, TMHT, as all the kids are calling it, remains borderline watchable almost the entire time, and there are certain ways this would have been the case if the movie was worse.

Topher Grace plays Matt Franklin, a kid who just can’t figure it out. Stop me when any of this sounds familiar. He’s a little straight-laced, but his best friend is a whacky party animal. No? Nothing yet? I’ll keep going. He had a crush on the most popular girl in high school, even though he was a nerd. Come on? Now you’re fucking with me. None of this rings a bell? Fine. Guess what, asshole? He never had the balls to talk to her in high school, but now, ten years later, he finally has his chance thanks to a huge party that leads into the wildest night of his life. Yeah. That’s right. All of that happens in this movie for the first time ever. Believe it.

 

To the best of my knowledge, three of these movies came out every week throughout the 80’s. Some of them stood the test of time, and are Basic Cable Classics today. Some of them even deservedly so. What I can only imagine is a complete coincidence, TMHT takes place in the 80’s. After the first ten minutes or so, when they have gotten through all of their cassette-music-and-large-cell-phone jokes, the movie mostly forgets this fact, at least on the surface. But what remains after the obvious stuff is a genuine 80’s innocence, an innocence that carries us through even the cocaine scenes. This is in stark contrast to every movie of its ilk since “American Pie”, which the thinly veiled plot was mostly used to connect as many “gross-out” scenes as possible, or at least what passed for gross-out back then. Now, a comedy like “American Pie” would have to be gross by vividly showing anal sex, using no fewer than three fists, and probably a cup of some sort. But in the mid-90’s, we all thought it was pretty crazy. This movie, with the exception of a couple scenes that ruin what I think the film was trying to do, would fit right in “back in the day”. And here’s where the filmmakers missed a step.

 

 

 

I’m not saying, in this post-post-irony world we live in, that everything has to be in-genuine, meta, or self-aware in order to be good. But, in this one particular instance, I think this movie could have taken a page out of, say…the ”Black Dynamite” book and put their tongue a little more firmly in cheek. The script, for the most part, could have remained the same (maybe have a joke or two somewhere), but the director, lovingly and spoofingly, should have shot this movie as someone would have 25 years ago. Instead, what we’re left with is a movie that wants to have its coke and snort it, too.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

surprising lack of potential carries this movie in just about every way, from a cast that’s almost likeable, to bits that you never laugh at, but can’t help but re-imagine how they would be funnier. I must reiterate that this movie is far from good, but there is a soft spot in my heart…wait, I don’t feel that strongly. There is a spot on my nuts…that I really need to get checked out. My mom says it’s cancer, but I think she’s just covering up the fact that she gave me herpes. There is a spot on my butt that I poop out of. There is a spot on my kidney…yeah, I’ll just go with kidney…that makes me kind of hope that this movie does become the Basic Cable Classic that many of its predecessors became. It may not deserve it, but it’s a little better than it seems, and it might just convince a future filmmaker that he or she can do it correctly.

 

-Ryan Haley