Shot four years ago, when it was called Kids in America, the rebranded Take Me Home Tonight has finally made it to theaters. Was it worth the wait?
"...set in the summer of 1988 ... it does possess a certain backward-glancing innocent appeal."
— Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly"...a reasonably watchable immersion..."
— Stephen Holden, New York Times"As a raunchy romantic comedy or an homage to the 1980s, Take Me Home Tonight is hardly worth a one-night stand."
— Claudia Puig, USA Today"Please take the time to see Adventureland, a great coming-of-age comic romance set in 1987. Especially if you haven't seen it. Take Me Home Tonight, believe me, you've already seen."
— Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune"[Topher] Grace and his collaborators set out to make a typical '80s sex comedy and succeeded all too well; most of the movies they're paying homage to weren't very good, either."
— Nathan Rabin, Onion AV Club"...an aggressively unfunny film which seeks the lowest common denominator in nearly every scene."
— Kirk Honeycutt, Hollywood Reporter
Sure, he's that guy from That '70s Show, but soon Topher Grace will be that guy from that 80s throwback movie Take Me Home Tonight out March 4.
In an interview with EW, Grace talks about how though the movie is an 80s comedy, it's not a spoof.
We love all these "80s movies," but in the movie, we didn’t want to spoof anything. There are conventions, but even those we try to change. My character has a platonic best friend [Anna Faris] who’s a girl, which is in every ’80s film, except they’re twin brother and sister. They steal a red car, but they get caught stealing the car, which never happens. Chris Pratt .... he’s the bad guy who proposes to my sister, and you expect him to be like, "I’m just gonna f—in’ cheat on her," like it would be in any of those movies, but he actually really loves her until the end of the film.
Grace said the only real wink to the decade is the name of the fictional high school.
We all talk about how we went to Shermer High, and you actually see our Shermer High yearbook — that’s the fictional high school that all of John Hughes’ kids went to in his movies.
watch topher grace go Back to the Future in music video for Take Me Home Tonight >> Posted 02.18.11 by reelz 
Production on Take Me Home Tonight wrapped way back in 2007, and the movie has sat on a shelf for years, which typically is a sign that the movie didn't work out as planned. With a script by That '70s Show writers Jeff and Jackie Filgo, and featuring a cast headlined by Topher Grace, the first trailer showed the movie had the makings of a throwback comedy from the 1980s, the same time period the movie is set in. So what went wrong? Grace, who also co-wrote the movie's story and served as executive producer, explained to MTV last December that it was the comedy's rampant drug use that made the studio skittish.
It tested really well. It's an audience film. It's not drama, but there was a real hesitation because there is so much cocaine in it, and our feeling at the time was, "You can't do a movie about Prohibition without alcohol, and you really can't do a movie about partying in the '80s, at the age these kids are, without showing cocaine use."
The movie languished until the arrival of producers Ron Howard and Brian Grazer, described by Grace as "probably the greatest producers of our time."
So, they encouraged us to not change the cut, which I thought was a really cool move. We're so happy with the film. It's creatively exactly what we wanted, and it's exactly the opposite of the normal situation where stuff gets cut. We got to put stuff back in.
So all's well that ends well for a comedy that Grace says was made to feel "like it was literally made in the '80s." The latest red band trailer for the movie certainly supports that claim, though instead of being a Weird Science kind of '80s comedy, it's more like The Wild Life or Fast Times at Ridgemont High, with plenty of party hi-jinks, insensitive humor, drug use, and nudity.
Watch the trailer >> Posted 02.05.11 by Ryan