Bill and Ted get the band back together
BILL & TED FACE THE MUSIC
(PG, 89 mins)
Director: Dean Parisot
Stars: Keanu Reeves, Alex Winter, Samara Weaving, Brigette Lundy-paine
ROCKS
(12A, 91 mins)
Director: Sarah Gavron
Stars: Bukky Bakray, Kosar Ali, D’angelou Osei Kissiedu
WHITE RIOT
(15, 80 mins) Director: Rubika Shah All in cinemas now
‘DON’T TRY to understand it, feel it,” says a sympathetic scientist early on in Christopher Nolan’s brain-scrambling Tenet. Weirdly, that advice holds for those brave souls returning to the cinemas for the decidedly less high-minded
Bill & Ted Face The Music.
Here the vibe is laid-back, as two middle-aged idiots travel through the multiverse to prevent the space/time continuum unravelling.
Thankfully, this time we’re never afraid of losing the plot. Despite the scientific gobbledegook, this should be reassuringly familiar to anyone with the fuzziest of memories of their heyday.
As in 1989’s Excellent Adventure and 1991’s Bogus Journey, air guitars are strummed, old-fashioned phone boxes tumble through time and characters are killed and sent to Hell.
By the time we are reunited united with a hopscotching Death th (William Sadler) the nostalgia has been dialled right up to 11.
When we catch up with Bill (Alex Winter) and Ted (Keanu Reeves) it seems the years haven’t been kind to the dim-witted time travellers.
Their group Wyld Stallyns are now playing wedding receptions and Mexican restaurants, where the big draw is a $2 2 taco deal rather than their bodacious rock.
They’re still married to the medieval princesses (Jayma Mays and Erinn Hayes) but only just. Their first stop is to a marriage counsellor, which the dudes have turned into a misjudged double date.
But at least their daughters love them. Thea (Brigette Lundy-paine) and Billie (Samara Weaving) are horrified that their dads seem to be finally losing faith.
“We’ve spent our entire lives trying to unite the world. And I’m tired, dude,”
Ted confesses.
That’s the cue for time-traveller Kelly (Kristen Schaal) to fall out of the sky. She
brings greetings and a dire warning – unless they can write a seminal rock anthem in the next 77 minutes (in other words, before the end of the film), “time and space will collapse”.
The pair hit on a scheme that combines universe-saving with labour-saving. They decide to send themselves forward in time to steal the song from their future selves who must have already written it.
As the pair tangle with fat and drunk Bill and Ted, musclebound jailbirds Bill and Ted an and wise and elderly Bill and Ted Ted, their daughters hit on a different plan – they wil will head into the past to re recruit the ultimate s supergroup.
It sounds mindbending but fans of the earlier films will find it all reassuringly familiar.
Perhaps ironically, af after a slightly shaky sta start, it’s Death who rea really brings the film to life life. Sadler, who scarily doe doesn’t seem to have aged a day, has both the timing and one-liners to carry us to the finale, which is reassuringly silly but also strangely touching in its old-fashioned optimism.
“Be excellent to each other. Party on.” Perhaps us Generation X slackers do have something to say.
That mantra may strike a chord with the bright young things in Rocks, a shockingly good British drama that speaks the language of the playground of contemporary London.
A wonderful Bukky Bakray leads a multicultural cast of novices as Shola, a plucky 16-year-old – Rocks is her nickname – who has to take care of her
seven-year-old brother Emmanuel (an adorable but not at all cutesy D’angelou Osei Kissiedu) when her depressed mother walks out.
That may make her sound like the heroine of a standard, lottery-funded British misery fest. But Rocks is more striking for what it isn’t. There are no wannabe gangsters and none of the leads are ciphers for political point-scoring.
Writers Theresa Ikoko and Claire Wilson and director Sarah Gavron tell their story with wit, grit and heart.
Rocks’ United Nations of school friends (all wonderful discoveries from casting director Lucy Pardee) approach every day like it’s a party.
And as we find out in the hankieshredding finale, when things do fall apart they try to stay most excellent to one another.
The documentary White Riot takes us back to the time when multicultural London was falling apart at the seams.
It’s 1976, the fascist National Front is on the rise and Eric Clapton has just unleashed a drunken torrent of racist abuse at a concert in Birmingham.
These days that speech would see the guitarist hauled up before a judge but then it fell to a bunch of hippy activists to take him to task.
Their now almost quaint response was to fight fear with understanding. Theatre performer Red Saunders was one of the founders of Rock Against Racism, a ragtag movement looking to put black reggae bands and white punk groups on the same concert bills.
This stylish and perhaps timely film climaxes with RAR’S landmark Carnival Against the Nazis in April 1978, which saw 100,000 people march across the capital to a concert in Victoria Park, Hackney, headlined by The Clash, Steel Pulse and the Tom Robinson Band.