Why Bill and Ted are the heroes we need in 2020
When “Bill & Ted Face the Music,” a sequel to “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure,” was announced, I didn’t get all the fuss.
Who cares? Who wants to revisit a dumb comedy about a couple of timetraveling morons, no matter how big a star Keanu Reeves has become in the meantime?
To be fair, I had not actually seen “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure” or its first sequel, “Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey.” So maybe that reaction was a tad unfair.
Now I have — the original streams on Hulu and the sequel is available for rental or purchase on video on demand.
And, now, the idea of another installment is most excellent.
OK, sorry. No more Valley-speak for the duration. Although it’s tempting to talk about how Bill and Ted talk, when they say things like, upon meeting God, “Congratulations on Earth. It is most excellent and Bill and I enjoy it on a daily basis.”
Meeting God, you say? Yes. That and so much more.
Bill and Ted’s friendship is genuine and appealing
The original, which came out in 1989, is a cult hit — cult hit now, actual hit when it was released, making more than $40 million on its $6.5 million budget.
How can you not like a movie in which Reeves says, “Strange things are afoot at the Circle K”?
It’s not just funny (and it is, in the best dumb-fun way), but it’s also sweet. Bill S. Preston, Esq. (Alex Winter) and Ted “Theodore” Logan (Reeves) have a genuine friendship, the kind of connection you make in high school and hope lasts. They’ll gladly make fools of themselves for each other.
They’ll make fools of themselves anyway, but you get the idea. Here’s what I don’t get.
Why isn’t “Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey” the one everyone talks about? Because it’s better.
Why ‘Bogus Journey’ is better
It deserves the cult status, and more, as a mind-bending bit of moviemaking. It doesn’t skimp on the stupidity, but it throws in killer references to films like “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” and “The Seventh Seal” that are not just showing off.
German Impressionism and Ingmar Bergman in a “Bill & Ted” movie? Yes, and the nods actually work in the context of the film.
And they’re laugh-out-loud funny. Sadly, the movie can’t sustain this kind of whacked-out brilliance all the way through. But so what? “Bogus Journey” is the Bill & Ted I’ll go back to, and think of fondly when “Bill & Ted Face the Music” comes out. Happily, it’s written by Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon, as were the first two films.
(A note: Not everything has a ged well. There are lots of “babes,” and worse, Bill and Ted call each other a homophobic slur after hugging — in both films. Yes, the phrase was casually tossed around then. No, that doesn’t make it right, and doesn’t make it comfortable to hear today.)
For the uninitiated, and we will proceed as if spoiler alerts aren’t needed for a 31-year-old movie, “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure” tells the story of the title characters, who are rock-head stupid high school students who have to ace a history report if they are to pass the class and stay in school. They don’t care about that so much, but it would also mean the end of their band, Wyld Stallyns.
That, they care about.
But it turns out Bill and Ted’s music will one day bring peace to the universe, uniting all people, bringing on a utopian society. Which they won’t get to do if they don’t pass history.
So Rufus (George Carlin), an emissary from the future, comes back by way of telephone booth to help. Bill and Ted use the telephone booth to travel through time, collecting historical figures for their report, including Napoleon, Joan of Arc (Jane Wiedlin of the Go-Go’s) and Sigmund Freud.
Is it good? If the notion of Billy the Kid and Socrates tossing a Nerf football in the background while Bill and Ted scheme makes you laugh, this is a movie for you.
If not, what’s wrong with you? In “Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey” a villain from the future sends a couple of lookalike robots — Evil Ted and Evil Bill — to kill Bill and Ted to prevent them from becoming the Two Great Ones.
What’s surprising is that they do kill them, and this leads to the most inspired part of the film. Death shows up, played by William Sadler and looking just like Bengt Ekerot in “The Seventh Seal,” to claim them. Bill and Ted escape by pulling a “Melvin” on him — telling him his shoes are untied and giving him a wedgie.
Playing Twister with Death
Bill and Ted eventually go to Hell, which has the weird angles and backdrops of “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.” Younger versions of themselves relive harrowing moments from their childhood — surreal nightmares that are genuinely scary, just stuck right there in the middle of this dopey comedy.
In “The Seventh Seal,” the dying knight plays Death in chess for his life. Bill and Ted play him in Battleship, Twister and Clue, among other games. Once they beat him he is at their service, and that’s when the movie gets really funny — a trip to Heaven and a hardware store, among other places, with Death becoming the butt of more and more jokes. Sadler is fantastic; honestly, at some point every time he walked on-screen I laughed out loud.
Things kind of fall apart after that but by then you’re so invested it doesn’t really matter.
Why ‘Bill & Ted’ still matters
So what makes these kinds of movies appealing, still?
Well, they’re funny. Not hilarious, not deep, not thoughtful. You’ve heard of escapism? This is like escapism squared — escapist escapism.
Do we ever need that right now. If you haven’t noticed, the world is upended. A quick glance at your Twitter feed is almost guaranteed to increase your anxiety. Sometimes it seems as if whatever can go wrong does, and that we’re surrounded by people who aren’t interested in making it any better.
Enter Bill and Ted, whose status as leaders is looking better in comparison all the time. They even find the words to inspire humanity:
“Be excellent to each other” and “Party on, dude.”
Those statements are like the movies themselves. They seem kind of silly at first. But, right now, they seem like just what we need.
“Bill & Ted Face the Music” is available on demand, and showing locally at Fox-Bay Cinema Grill in Whitefish Bay (foxbaycinemagrill.com). It’s also showing at Schubert’s Hartford Theatre and West Bend Cinema.