Bill & Ted make a most excellent return, dudes

And we couldn't be happier to see it

It’s Friday, August 28, and here’s where we are…

Let me ask you a question…

Are you more entertained today that you ever were in the past?

I ask because you have more entertainment options than you have ever had before. It seems like that should be the result, right?

I mean, you have access to more media instantly than anyone could ever consume. You can buy books instantly, and they’ll appear on a magic machine where you can store them all and walk around with an entire library in your pocket. You have hundreds and hundreds of movies and TV shows available at the push of a button. You have entire libraries of music on your phone. There are thousands of hours of podcasts on every subject you can imagine produced every week.

We are drowning in an ocean of media from the moment we wake up, and we have so much choice we are often paralyzed by it. But does all of this content actually make us content? Do we feel satisfied? Or does this much choice simply drive us to a constant state of collection and acquisition, fostering an addiction to the new that never actually scratches any itch?

When I think of how many movies I have right now and how easy it is for me to watch what I want, when I want, how I want, I am amazed. This is science-fiction compared to what it was like when I was a kid, and how can I be upset about any of it? I have gone one step further and set up my own media server so I can access my own private library from anywhere, and it is a delight. It makes me so happy to be able to pull up any of my films at any time.

I don’t always get the sense that people are enjoying what they’re watching or reading or listening to these days, and I think part of what happened was this idea that none of it is special or distinct. It is all just “content.” It’s been turned into one homogenized featureless thing that we’re just supposed to consume on a steady drip, instead of being individual experiences that we’re having. It doesn’t help that we’ve frontloaded everything so the marketing and the hype are 99% of the experience now, with the actual release of something feeling like an afterthought. People pick their sides of a battle line before they’ve even seen a film now, and the conversation is all driven by anticipation. Pick a website… any website… and then pick a film. Search for how many articles they publish on a film before it is released, and then how many they publish after it’s released. It is not a sane or healthy ratio, but we’ve somehow accepted it as business as usual, and it turns everything into noise, just something to feed the machine.

As I chip away at the ‘80s book, I’m struck by how much work it feels like I’m doing, but how different and even quaint the distribution world was by comparison. There is an avalanche of titles every week now, more than anyone’s watching, and we have fewer moments that unify us. Because there is so much pop culture, there is less and less chance for it to speak to everyone. Our attention is too scattered. Our interests are too diverse. And there are too many places now to see things, too many of them locked behind paywalls. The days of the three network world are long gone, and instead of setting us free, it feels like it has turned pop culture into a massive pop quiz we’re all required to study for at all times unless we want to be left behind.

I’m still chewing on my own feelings about theaters and the movies being released to theaters in America right now, but there is plenty to focus on that can be seen at home right now, and today, I want to give the primary focus to a film audiences have been waiting to see for a long time now, one it felt like we would never actually see.

And no, I don’t mean The New Mutants.

Bill & Ted Face The Music
Keanu Reeves, Alex Winter, Kristen Schaal, Samara Weaving, Brigette Lundy-Paine, William Sadler, Anthony Carrigan, Erinn Hayes, Jayma Mays, Hal Landon Jr., Beck Bennett, Kid Cudi, Amy Stoch, Holland Taylor, Jillian Bell, Dave Grohl, DazMann Still, Jeremiah Craft, Sharon Gee, Patty Anne Miller, George Carlin
cinematography by Shelly Johnson
music by Mark Isham
screenplay by Chris Matheson & Ed Solomon
based on characters and situations created by Chris Matheson & Ed Solomon
produced by David Haring and Scott Kroopf and Alex Lebovici and Steve Ponce and Ed Solomon
directed by Dean Parisot
Rated PG-13
1 hr 28 mins

In the second sequel to the original cult comedy, Bill (Winter) and Ted (Reeves) once again travel through time and reality to try to unite the world through song… but this time, their daughters are along for the ride.

It is immediately clear as the closing credits roll on Bill & Ted Face The Music that original writers Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon are still the ones penning the adventures of these sweet-natured time-traveling goofballs. There is a voice that is immediately recognizable here, sincere and silly and just smart enough to be cheerfully stupid, that is the same comic voice that rang loudly in the first two films.

It helps that Dean Parisot has a real knack for both comedy and the trappings of genre. His Galaxy Quest works because it never plays the science-fiction as the joke. It’s good at both. Here, he’s very nimble with the world-building, and that means he has all the room in the world to just let his actors be playful. That’s important, because Bill & Ted Face The Music is unusual among most modern effects comedies in some big ways, and Parisot knows exactly what makes this a “real” Bill & Ted movie.

I think of most effects-driven comedies as frantic. The gold standard that studios have been chasing since the ‘80s are films like Ghostbusters and Gremlins and Back To The Future, films where there are big effects and thrilling set-pieces but where there’s also a sense of humor driving everything. Unfortunately, even when it’s the same filmmakers trying to recapture that magic, you end up with something like Evolution more often than you end up with a Gremlins 2. The movies end up being loud and busy more than they are funny, and it can leave you with nothing to really hold onto as an audience.

Bill & Ted Face The Music is gentle, though, mellow about the way it tells a very specific story about what happens when you reach a point in your life when you start to suspect that you are never going to live up to whatever promise or potential once defined you. Picking up from the seemingly-triumphant conclusion of Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey, the film quickly unravels that success. It’s clear that Bill & Ted were pushed into a spotlight they never wore comfortably, and they find themselves unable to live up to this incredible expectation that’s been placed on them.

They’re still married to the princesses from the first film (played now by Erinn Hayes and Jayma Mays), and Little Bill and Little Ted, introduced at the end of Bogus Journey, turned out to be daughters, not sons. Billie (Lundy-Paine) and Thea (Weaving) are very much chips off the old blocks, which is great for their relationships with their dads, but not so great when it comes to having jobs or moving out of their childhood homes. The guys are frustrations to everyone around them, and they’re reaching the point where they are starting to feel like they’re never going to put it all together.

Enter Kelly (Kristen Schaal), the daughter of Rufus (George Carlin), the guy who reached out to them from the future in the first place. Kelly has been sent to bring Bill and Ted to the future to discuss their problem, and from the moment she arrives, the film pretty much never takes a breath. They go to the future. Then a bunch of other futures. Then their wives go to the future. Then their daughters. Then reality breaks. Then everyone goes everywhere else and everything gets even sillier, and through it all, what could easily turn into chaos and noise manages to all work towards that same end goal: how are Bill & Ted going to unite the world?

It’s safe to say, without ruining the film, that Solomon and Matheson seem to believe that whatever damage we’re causing to our world and whatever failures we have faced in our own lives, our kids have the chance to do better. To be better. Our kids can pick up where we left off and our kids can take what we’ve learned and they can build something new, something we can’t even imagine. There is a profound sweetness to the overall optimism of Bill & Ted Face The Music, and one of the reasons I would imagine this film will resonate deeply with audiences who already love these characters is because there is such hope and such simple decency behind all the choices made here. It is an optimistic film, a movie about the apocalypse that truly believes that all it will take to change the world is a song we can all sing together, and I want to believe in that as fervently as this film does.

Excellent Adventure and Bogus Journey are very different movies in terms of tone and story structure, and it’s interesting to see how Face The Music feels like it is both of those films at the same time. Like Excellent Adventure, there’s a team that’s being put together in order to help Bill & Ted on their mission. Here, it’s a band instead of a group of people for a history report, but the basic joke is the same. Bogus Journey was far more free-wheeling, sending the guys on a journey through the afterlife and through a surreal landscape where they confronted their own fears, eventually picking up Death (Bill Sadler) as a hilarious scene-stealing third wheel. This movie definitely leans into some of that loose and silly surrealism, and Death makes a welcome and wonderful return. Fans should feel comforted by the way it feels like both films wrapped together, while they should also enjoy some of the smart and fresh choices made here as well.

One of the tricks of pulling off a great sequel is playing against expectations while satisfying expectations at the same time, and Face The Music threads that needle ably. Yes, you’ll find out what Missy’s up to now and how she’s related to Bill and/or Ted at this point. Yes, you’ll see Ted’s dad again. Yes, you’re going to get some kind of a nod to Rufus. Yes, there are all these things that you should expect, and you’ll get them in some form, but the film makes some wonderful choices that I didn’t see coming. Not only is Sadler great, but prepare to fall in love with a murderous android played by Barry’s Anthony Carrigan, one of the weirdest characters of the year.

Despite that last sentence, one of the unexpected pleasures here is that there’s no bad guy. Not in the way you’d expect. And Bill & Ted genuinely love each other, so there’s no artificial conflict designed to drive them apart. This is just two old friends who have been connected for so long that they’re terrified of who they are apart, struggling to figure things out. Another choice I love deeply is the way they write Thea and Billie. There’s nothing in this movie about love interests or anything even remotely along those lines. They’re allowed to simply exist as these two goofy characters in their own right. Both Weaving and Lundy-Paine have clearly studied Winter and Reeves, but they’re not doing impressions of them. Instead, they really do feel like they’ve just soaked it up from being around them.

It would be difficult not to, since by this point, Winter and Reeves have Bill and Ted down to a fine art, and they pick up here like they’ve been playing these characters the entire time. It might be easy in a more conventional Hollywood sequel for Reeves to overpower the endeavor since he’s the bigger star of the two of them, but that’s not what the Bill & Ted movies are all about. They’re equals, two halves of the same brain, and the film doesn’t treat either of them as lesser or the straight man. They both carry this thing, and it works because of the trust they have in one another as performers. Things get pretty weird for Bill & Ted this time around and no matter what variations we get on that original recipe, Winter and Reeves both seem up for it, pushing each other to increasingly-silly places, but it doesn’t feel like the underlying message here is silly at all.

How many of us are who we though we would be when we were 20? How many of us have done everything we wanted to do? I have been reading work of mine from 15 or 20 years ago this week as part of something I’m working on, and it’s stuff I haven’t read in that whole time, and it’s been strange. I am not the person who wrote those words. I haven’t been in a long time. But here I am, still living the life based on the choices made by that person, and those aren’t the choices I’d make now. While the first two films are genuinely charming and funny, this is the first of the movies that feels like there is a larger thematic weight, and part of that is just because time has passed and there is real history here now. Something that seems cute when you’re a teenager, like embracing “Party on, dudes!” as your personal philosophy, seems far less cute when you’re closing in on 50.

One of the tricks to these legacy sequels is finding a way to organically make the handoff between generations, and there’s no more natural way to do than the one they do here. Our children bear the weight of our triumphs and our failures in equal measure, and so often, we look at our kids as a way of making right those things we got wrong in ourselves. Whoever my own children become, I know that they will do so in no small part because of what I’ve passed along to them. I hope I have given them the things they need, emotionally and otherwise, but we won’t know until they’re actually out in the world. It’s terrifying, but it’s also enormously rewarding. Seeing the people they’ve already become, even as teenagers, I see so many great and interesting things that surprise me that I am confident that they are going to be better men than I am, and there is nothing more I could ask of them. That’s a very real undercurrent in this film, and I found it genuinely moving by the time things wrapped up.

One of the things you can’t help doing at the start of the film is looking at Winter and Reeves and thinking about how different they look. It’s been almost 30 years since they last played these characters. Winter has become a strong documentarian, with recent films like The Panama Papers and Showbiz Kids demonstrating just how smart and empathetic a filmmaker he is. Reeves has embraced his own iconic status and is arguably a bigger movie star now than he ever has been before. They leave all that at the door, though, and they just slip right back into being Bill and Ted. I’m surprised by how easily they still wear the skins of these two delightful goofballs, and by how little they had to adjust the characters to make them work in 2020. Bill and Ted remain driven by positivity and love and a desire to do good by others, and the very real love between Winter and Reeves is palpable in every scene of the film, right down to the post-credits bonus. I love how game they both are for the crazy prosthetic make-up, and I really love the way they both seem up for whatever joke or idea is asked of them.

Maybe it’s a response to the world around us or maybe it’s because of my age, but I find that I am increasingly interested in storytelling that finds ways to emphasize kindness and empathy, and I am impressed by how sincere the final sequences of Bill & Ted Face The Music are. This is a film that knows how big an ask “unite the world” really is, and how often we see saving the world represented as blowing up some glowing doodad on the roof. As silly as it is on the surface, this film genuinely understands that there are still things that unite us, and music and joy are powerful things. Considering what a wall to wall dumpster fire 2020 has been overall, having a new Bill & Ted film that not only honors the original movies but actually expands on them in a way that feels urgent and even necessary.

Remember, the Friday Free-For-All is a chance for you to sound off on anything. Keep it civil, but otherwise, let’s hear what’s on your mind. What are you watching this weekend? Are you excited to have movies in theaters again? I’m genuinely curious to see where you guys are will all of this, so let me know!

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Image courtesy of MGM/Orion