Take Me Home Tonight

I would like to point out that none of the characters in Take Me Home Tonight actually ever wear any of the costumes shown in this movie poster.  That's not a big deal, by any means, but it's a telling detail.  I'm not a big fan of movies that arbitrarily take place in the past, just because the filmmakers want to poke fun at out of date fashion or ideas.  It's a cheap, lazy storytelling convention that lends itself to a lot of predictable moments.  I wonder if there's going to be someone with a Flock of Seagulls haircut or a Frankie Goes to Hollywood reference?  There is?!?  Shock and awe: that is what I feel right now.

Take Me Home Tonight doesn't have to take place in the 80s, but it does.  Matt (Topher Grace), his twin sister, Wendy (Anna Faris), and Dan's lifelong best friend, Barry (Dan Fogler) are all at a crossroads in their lives.  Matt graduated from MIT, but has spent the summer working at Suncoast Video in the mall (I remember those!  I got my Sonny Chiba 10-pack there!) because he has no idea what he wants to do, and he doesn't want to be a failure.  Movie characters: they're just like real people!

Suck it up, Matt.  We've all been that guy, arms down in the crowd.

Wendy has been dating Matt's antithesis, Kyle (Chris Pratt), for years, and they are finally preparing to move in together; Wendy might have been accepted by Cambridge's master's program, though, which wouldn't fit Kyle's vision for their life.  Barry didn't go to college and became a car salesman instead.  On the day that Barry gets fired, Kyle proposes to Wendy, and Matt is given the opportunity to hit on the high school crush that he never had the guts to approach back in the day.  What, your life events don't precisely coincide with those of your friends and family?  Suck it, loser!  The bulk of the film focuses on Matt's attempts to get Tori's (Teresa Palmer) phone number, with a little time spent on Barry catching up on his missed college years and Wendy realizing how annoying Kyle is.  How does Matt impress his dream girl?  By lying to her, of course.  Believe it or not, that lie puts him in several tough situations, with somewhat humorous consequences.

"My name...?  Henry.  Henry...Suncoast-Video."

This is not a movie that will surprise you. It hits all the basic 80's touchstones that you expect (cocaine, break dancing, soulless capitalism, Dexy's Midnight Runners, etc.) and the characters are all pretty stock.  You mean that the main character and his best friend aren't the cool kids?  And the main character has trouble talking to girls?  What kind of world do we live in?!?  Yes, the movie is pretty predictable.  Yes, the characters are fairly shallow.  If you're willing to accept that --- and I totally understand if you are not --- there is a surprisingly entertaining movie buried underneath all the gimmicky, cliched crap.

A movie with high school friends having pivotal conversations in a car?  How avant garde!

Let's plow through the acting first.  Topher Grace is as awkward and goofy as ever, and he doesn't really change anything up here.  I don't know why he seems to feel most comfortable with characters set in easily identifiable decades, but whatever, it's his career.  Seriously, though, somebody should introduce him to Woody Allen and give him some challenging roles.  Anna Faris, despite being the second biggest name in the cast, has a relatively small role in the film.  I'm not a fan of most of her work, but she was fine as a not-funny character.  Dan Fogler, who I assumed I would be annoyed with in this movie, was surprisingly funny at times.  He didn't do anything too unpredictable or unusual, but he committed to all the stupidest parts in this movie and did his best to make them seem (somewhat) plausible.  Honestly, I was shocked to find myself laughing at some of his bits; I like to think that is a major compliment to him.  Teresa Palmer had a lot less to work with, since a large part of her role was to be an object of desire, but she wasn't annoying and handled the dramatic moments fairly well.

The supporting cast was largely just caricatures, but what else do you expect with a movie that aligns itself so strongly to a decade?  Chris Pratt was a great douchebag character, as usual.   Michael Biehn was a welcome surprise as Matt's semi-unsympathetic father, even if his inclusion in an 80's-themed movie was kind of a gimmick.  Michelle Trachtenberg was underused as an oversexed goth chick, but I'm not really sure if she's talented or not, so maybe she was used enough.  Comedian Demetri Martin was okay as a jerk paraplegic, but it wasn't the raucous bit role that the script clearly intended it to be.  Similarly, Michael Ian Black and Bob Odenkirk contributed almost nothing in their supporting roles.  On the bright side, aging supermodel and former Mrs. Stallone, Angie Everhart, has a topless and creepy sex scene with Dan Fogler. 

Because this is plausible.

Director Michael Dowse isn't particularly well-known for his subtle or thoughtful films.  In fact, this is his highest-profile movie to date, so I guess he's not particularly well-known for anything.  I wasn't impressed by Dowse.  His camera work is pretty standard.  If he has a good rapport with the actors, it wasn't apparent, since several comedic actors (with varying degrees of talent) were not very funny in this movie.  The thing that bugged me most about Dowse's direction is how lopsided this movie is.  The first half-hour is bad.  If you can get past the initial thirty minutes of trite plotting, lame jokes, and poor comic timing, the rest of the movie is kind of cute.  But having that obstacle --- one that will understandably stop many viewers --- is proof of how poorly this film was directed.

"Damn!  Sick burn!"

If you can get past the awful, Take Me Home Tonight has some surprisingly good parts.  Topher Grace has a few moments of sincerity that hint at dramatic potential he hasn't come close to realizing yet.  Dan Fogler, while fat and obnoxious, works well off the joke; I didn't usually laugh at what he said, but I liked his reactions to things.  I thought that the main plot, while very predictable, was well-acted and believable.  And there is one joke about the LAPD that I really, really liked.  I should also point out that the 80's pop culture references are not nearly as frequent as I assumed they would be.  Is that enough to recommend this movie?  Maybe, maybe not.  If you, like me, hate romantic comedies, this is a fairly pain-free (after the first third of the movie) option. 

...and here is the decently amusing music video of a terrible cover of an 80's song I don't like, featuring the cast of Take Me Home Tonight.

Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs

Check it out...it's a computer-animated movie that is not from Disney-Pixar or Dreamworks Animation!  How novel!  Personally, I love me some Pixar films, but tend to have lukewarm reactions to the more jokey and shallow Dreamworks pictures; I have never seen anything from Sony Pictures Animation, though.  How will it stack up? 

Like the children's book of the same name that the movie is based on, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs is set in the island city of Swallow Falls, which is located in under the "A" in "Atlantic Ocean" on maps.  That seems like an awfully flexible location to me, but whatever; the important thing to point out is that this story takes place in a foreign land, but everyone speaks like normal Americans!

"...and finally, we will subvert the youth of America by showing how rad Not-America is, what with all the raining spaghetti and whatnot."

Swallow Falls (which sounds vaguely pornographic) was once the sardine capital of the world, but suffered a huge economic depression when the rest of the world figured out that sardines were "super gross."  For years now, the island has been forced to eat almost nothing but sardines and reminisce about the days when they used to be a special place.  Flint Lockwood (voiced by Bill Hader) has always wanted to do something special and spectacular through science, but he has, almost without exception, only met with failure when it comes to his inventions.  Flint's newest invention, the FLDSMDFR (Flint Lockwood's Diatomic Super Mutating Dynamic Food Replicator) has the theoretic ability to turn water into whatever food you want.  Unfortunately, it requires a lot of power, more than his home can provide.  What does he do?  Naturally, he tries to connect it to the town's power source.  With his history of disastrous inventions, though, he has to do this on the sly, while everyone in town is attending the grand unveiling of Sardine Land, the mayor's newest attempt to revive the island economy.  Flint manages to hook the FLDSMDFR up, but it absorbs too much energy and goes wild, destroying Sardine Land and rocketing into the stratosphere.  The town is mightily angry at Flint, except for his technophobic father (James Caan), who is just disappointed with his weird kid.  But then, the oddest thing happens...it starts to rain cheeseburgers.  Will this finally make Flint a hero, or is something worse on the horizon?  Should Flint be true to his inventing self, or should he travel the well-worn path?  Will being famous finally win Flint his father's admiration and respect?  It's important to ask these questions, because some kid's movies skimp out on their morals.

Since I'm unfamiliar with Sony Pictures Animation, I'll start by commenting on how the movie looks.  Um, it looks fine.  That was easy.  I like that they went with more cartoony character designs than we've been seeing in most animated movies lately; there's a lot of extremely tall/short and thin/thick combinations going on here, so it's fun seeing a company that is willing to have fun with the designs of its human characters for a change.  Aside from that, this has all the polish that you would expect from a computer animated film that cost about $100 million to make.

Oh, sure.  When it rains cheeseburgers in this movie, they look like the Whoppers from commercials.  If I made it rain burgers, they would look like the crap I get in the drive-thru.

As is the style of the time, Cloudy... boasts an impressive cast of voice actors.  The two stars are Bill Hader and Anna Faris (who plays his love interest and learns that women can be smart, too!  Tee-hee!), and they're certainly likable enough.  James Caan does a good job as Flint's gruff, Oasis-eyebrowed father.

"Cuz after allllll...you're my wunderwaaaaaallll..."

I thought casting Bruce Campbell (who is one of the criminally underused voice talents in the industry) as the mayor of Swallow Falls was a great choice.  He's not a huge character, but Campbell does great work with supporting characters that are full of themselves.  Mr. T had a small role as a local police officer, and --- aside from his typical vocal stylings --- I was surprised at how well he delivered some of the more tender lines in the film.  It was bizarre, though, at how underused some of the celebrity talent was in this movie.  Benjamin Bratt had only a couple lines as a cameraman/doctor/pilot, Neil Patrick Harris was cast as a monkey that talks through a Speak and Spell (brilliant idea) but his lines are dull, and I can barely remember Will Forte's contribution to the movie.  For the record, Andy Samberg still isn't funny, even animated.

So, how does the movie hold up?  I have to admit, the first half is pretty cute.  The pace is quick, the humor is story- and character-based, and it sets up the protagonists to win audiences over.  Who doesn't want the girl who is ashamed of her brains to build up some confidence, or the nerd who always fails to finally do something right?  And if the second half of the film built upon that base, this could have been a great movie.  It doesn't.  Once the food starts raining, things just get random.  I understand that, in this post-Family Guy world, random humor is fairly popular now, but the second half of the movie feels cheap in comparison to the rest.  The gags are mostly visual or based on annoying characters.  The one saving grace the second half contains is a surprisingly touching speech from Flint's dad.  I guess it all boils down to this: do you actually care about these characters as the film ends?  For me, the answer is "no."  While I support the Danica McKellar model for intelligence in pretty girls, I found Anna Faris' character to be kind of weenie-ish, and her transformation to girl-empowered was nothing special.  Flint is flawed, which I like, but either through the writing or Bill Hader's voice acting, his troubles all seemed superficial to me.  None of the supporting cast stuck out enough to salvage this movie as comic relief, which makes the misuse of a talking monkey all the more tragic.

How do you misuse this?!?

If you're wondering if children will enjoy watching this movie, the answer is yes.  Kids will watch almost anything, and this is a movie that aims for the ADD crowd.  It is definitely random, but occasionally funny.  If you're looking for something light and inconsequential, there are worse choices than this effort by co-writers/co-directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller.  I just wasn't impressed.  The characters were shallow or painfully obvious, the film's talent was assigned to seemingly random roles, and the story gives way to repetitious silliness for the last 40 minutes or so.  On the other hand, if you want to see a movie with people eating food off the ground, I can't think of a better choice, because the others are probably fetish videos.