Friday, Mar 4, 2011 11:03 ET
The problem with 1980s nostalgia movies
"Take Me Home Tonight" is the latest film to sell a cheery misrepresentation of a feel-bad time
By Mary Elizabeth Williams
http://www.salon.com/life/life_stories/index.html?story=/ent/movies/2011/03/04/take_me_home_tonight_gnarly_eighties
Contrary to popular belief, not all of us spent the '80s wang chunging. I understand how you might believe otherwise -- there's nothing like the passage of time to boil any period down to its most distinctive elements, and the '80s were certainly a bonanza of candy-colored, big-haired, Bartles & Jaymes-flavored bonbons. Yet when I see waves of nostalgia radiating from the movie "Take Me Home Tonight," aimed at a generation that wasn't even born when Tawny Kitaen was writhing on the hoods of cars, I can't help thinking how well that time was summed up by a character in last year's Oscar-overlooked "Hot Tub Time Machine": "We had Reagan and AIDS." It's true, kids, aside from Salt n' Pepa, a lot of it sucked.
You don't go to a movie named for an Eddie Money song looking for profound social commentary. I did, however, approach "Take Me Home Tonight," a Topher Grace- and Anna Faris-fueled comedy set in the Pleistocene era of 1988, with an instinctively personal perspective. Unfolding over the course of one action-packed summer night, the movie tells the tale of young people figuring out their futures and scoring with hot members of the opposite sex in a crazy world where phones still have cords. Matt Franklin, played by Grace, is a recent college graduate who finds himself living back at home and working at a Suncoast video, wondering if this adulthood thing is all it's cracked up to be.
As it happens, in the summer of 1988, I really was a new college graduate, living back at home in New Jersey and selling miniskirts and impossibly wide belts at a dismal boutique while "Never Gonna Give You Up" blared in an endless loop on the radio. It didn't exactly feel like the culmination of a lifetime of education and a foreseeable future full of student loan payments. So I identified with "Take Me Home Tonight's" Benjamin Braddock on acid wash ennui, and Matt's candid exchange with his dream girl Tori Fredreking (Teresa Palmer) about the sheer terror of impending mortgages, marriages and loathsome careers. Those are familiar themes to anyone, of any age, who's ever worn a name tag and helplessly clutched a liberal arts degree. It's intriguing, though, how those experiences can seem fresher or funnier when viewed through history's rose-colored Ray-Bans. You want to make a contemporary movie about socially awkward young adults, there's a distinct possibility you're going to wind up in David Fincher territory.
I don't begrudge "Take Me Home Tonight" or the whole "I Love the Eighties" juggernaut its fight for its right to party, but there is something touchingly off-base about it. Sure, it's not "The King's Speech" or "Mad Men" here, but could somebody even try to make an '80s period piece that doesn't just whip the entire decade into one Rubik's cube-shaped blender? The film's opening scene takes place in a Suncoast video festooned with posters of Madonna's 1984 "Like a Virgin" album and 1985's "Back to the Future," and features a prominent rack of Relax shirts. Relax, for Christ's sake. Nobody would be caught dead Relaxing in 1988. You might think that sounds nitpicky, but when they make the movie about 2011 and the characters are talking about Friendster and dancing around to "Milkshake," you'll care, Millennials. Oh, how you'll care.
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