Embrace the bogus

Welcome to night #2 of our Bill & Ted's weekend ... or really, morning #2 after night #2.

And yes, I can say "our" as my wife surprised me by watching most of Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey, even though she had planned not to. At first she said she was just going to watch ten or 15 minutes of it, then she stayed for the whole first hour. Why she didn't just finish the viewing at that point is beyond me. I will never understand the viewing habits of other people.

She did, though, realize very close to the start that she had already seen it. So I guess it's slightly less weird that a person would bail on a second viewing of something they'd already seen than their first viewing ... though my wife would do that too. Maybe I'm the weird one for insisting I watch things to their completion, even repeat viewings. Who knows.

At first I was shaking my head at Bogus Journey, getting a painful reminder of what I found so disappointing about this film, but partway through I had a bit of a revelation. When I started likening this movie to the sequel to The Wizard of Oz, it gave me a whole new perspective on it.

The original Wizard of Oz is, of course, a mostly bright and sunny movie -- I'm talking about its tone here, though most of the scenes do take place during the day. Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure has the same feel to it.

But I felt an immediate sense of revulsion back in the 1980s when I first saw a trailer for Return to Oz, the sequel (of sorts) released some 45 years after the original. The movie may not have had a significantly higher percentage of scenes set at night -- not that the trailer could really show me this anyway -- but the sunny demeanor of the original seemed to be entirely absent from this movie. It felt garish and twisted, as if entirely missing the point of what an Oz movie was supposed to be.

I finally saw Return to Oz about five years ago and by this point, I could fully enjoy its garishness and its twistedness. Yes, there's some nightmare imagery in that movie, but instead of being repulsed by it, I found it a brave and surprising departure from The Wizard of Oz.

Such is now my impression of Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey. It's never going to surpass Excellent Adventure in terms of my affections, but it's a lot closer to the original than I ever would have guessed.

Yeah this movie is garish and darker, but that's okay. You get that sense right from the start, in that grotesque scene where the robot Bill and Ted peel away their faces to reveal their robot underparts to a horrified room full of future hostages to the villain, played by Joss Ackland. (And when I saw him, I immediately thought of his role in Lethal Weapon 2 -- "Diplomatic immunity!" "It's been revoked.")

That spirit continues, of course, when Bill and Ted are killed -- pushed off a cliff by their evil doppelgangers -- and make a trip through all sorts of existential afterlifes. Or should that be afterlives? There is plenty of garish imagery to accompany this, with both objective and subjective visions of hell. The first comes complete with an image of the literal hell, including a horned incarnation of the devil. But then you also have a personal hell for each lead, as Bill relives a nightmare moment where he was being kissed by his ancient and physically unpleasant grandmother (also played by Alex Winter) and Ted is chased by a malevolent Easter Bunny.

In addition to being bothered by the darker tone, when I first saw this movie, I considered this a decidedly different way of forcing us to suspend disbelief than the original. See if you go with me on this. While you can argue that time travel is "realistic," in that many films have put forward the single belief-suspending notion that time travel is possible and then followed some fairly clearly delineated rules from there, all this afterlife stuff is patently "unrealistic" and breaks the rules originally established by the series.

This time, though, I just went with it. Ultimately, what happens in a Bill & Ted movie is just a way of seeing how these two Southern California slackers will react to different stimuli. It's all just a way for us to enjoy their clearly delineated personalities -- the only rules that really matter.

I think the Return to Oz comparison was ultimately inspired by the eventual use of practical creature effects in the form of the character Station. This was one part of the movie I decidedly did not remember, and if you didn't remember Station either, here he/she/it/they are:

I think I ultimately don't consider Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey the type of movie that should feature characters like this, but like I said, this time I just went with it.

Making that easier is the fact that I was laughing a lot more than I expected to. As just one example, Winter has a couple hilarious line readings in a row when the afterlife version of the military school drill sergeant, played by Chelcie Ross, is tormenting them. First he's trying to figure out how to salute the character, and he says "Sir! Dude! Yes! Sir! Sir! Dude!" Then after being given their punishment, he says to Ted "Dude, I don't think there's any way I can do infinity push ups."

In fact, one of my more interesting takeaways of watching this movie was a reminder that Alex Winter was always the more interesting of these two performers for me. Given the career Keanu Reeves has had, it was easy to forget the kind of promise Winter showed. In fact, even now, I appreciate him in these movies a lot more than I appreciate Reeves. His charisma shines through more, while Reeves gets a bit lost in the fact that his hair is covering his eyes most of the time -- kind of like a dog whose eyes you can't see. You can't really connect with someone's charisma if you can't see their eyes.

I have to wonder how much time Winter spends wondering why he didn't have a career like Reeves did. It could easily embitter a person, and probably has, though seeing them on Stephen Colbert the other night, it seems that they retain a very strong personal fondness for one another, even going out for meals together and such (during non-pandemic times of course). It probably benefits him to remain friendly with Reeves, and maybe Reeves doesn't give a person a choice by just being a good guy you couldn't resent. But if I were Winter, I'd probably be resentful as hell.

It's interesting to me that I'm going on at much greater length about the movie I don't like as much than I did about the original, but clearly this has been the greater "discovery" of the two for me this time. But I can't leave off my discussion without referencing the scene I remembered best from the first time around, when William Sadler's Death -- just as great as I remembered -- plays a variety of games against Bill and Ted.

The sequence is played perfectly. It starts with the ridiculousness of playing Battleship, as the sides exchange shots and Sadler either delights in a hit on his opponent's ship or curdles as his battleship is sunk. Then, once he extracts a "best of three" scenario upon losing, it's on to the equally absurd botched finale of a game of Clue, in which Death guesses the wrong murder suspect when he accuses Colonel Mustard. "Plum, I said Plum!" he says, rattled, and then changes the terms to best three out of five. We only see the final losing moments of a game of electronic football, and then it's on to the coup de grace -- a game of Twister between Bill and Death. The tension builds as we see Death contorting to place his foot on a color far out of his range, and as he falls, it's a great release of comedic energy.

Having had two really fun viewing nights in a row, I am primed and ready for Bill & Ted Face the Music.

Another world, another time ...

It seems I'm learning all the time lately that bits of my favorite songs originated in movies.

First it was the bit from THX 1138 in the opening moments of Nine Inch Nails' "Mr. Self Destruct," as discussed here, and now it's the opening lines of The Crystal Method's "Trip Like I Do," which it shares with the opening lines of The Dark Crystal.

I actually need to reverse the order there. I found out about the Dark Crystal "Trip Like I Do" connection a couple months back when I listened to a pair of episodes of The Next Picture Show podcast, which compared Crystal with last year's Kubo and the Two Strings. In the Crystal-centric of the two episodes they played that opening narration, a familiar passage from my numerous times listening to "Trip Like I Do" over the years. I'd still only seen The Dark Crystal once, back when it first came out -- or at the very least, I saw it twice then and not since. Let's just say I saw it only once. I might logically have concluded from the name of the band and the reference to crystals in that opening monologue that the two were connected, but I guess I just didn't think much about it.

Last night I finally sat down for my second viewing of The Dark Crystal, satisfying an appetite first whetted when I heard the podcast, and made possible by a library rental. (Took me a while to get around to it, though -- the movie is due back today, which is why I watched it last night.)

I expected The Dark Crystal to engage and kind of horrify me, but look very dated. The reverse was actually true. I thought the puppetry and general look of the film held up better than I expected, and I was a bit bored. At the very least, not as captivated by the story as I expected to be.

But let's touch back to that horrifying part. There are a couple of things in this film that are pretty disturbing, like the way the Skeksis (Skekses?) use the crystal to drain the life force out of the Podlings, making them stare at it Clockwork Orange-style. I guess it would be more disturbing if they then killed and discarded them, but like a number of oppressed creatures in this film, the entranced zombie Podlings do get their life forces back at the end. (And the dog Fizzgig survives getting kicked down one of those bottomless pits of fire, it was nice to see.)

When I was a kid I was always more disturbed by the Skekses (let's go with that as the plural), and I'd actually kind of forgotten the beetle-looking Garthim. I enjoyed their creature design but they didn't really scare me, possibly because I was comparing them to two similar monstrosities from the same time period -- those tall, robed skeletal things from Time Bandits and the Wheelers from Return to Oz.

That probably makes a good transition. This is an appropriate time to have watched The Dark Crystal because it comes on the heels of three related first-time viewings in 2016: Labyrinth, Return to Oz and Legend. Those movies came out in 1986 (the first) and 1985 (the second two), which made them a few years later than Crystal. But clearly mid-80s fantasy has been interesting me lately.

Yet more interesting is how I'm rating them. You'd figure that the one I saw at the time would hold a sentimental sway over me while the three newcomers would be the ones that couldn't make much an impression on me 30 years after their creation. The reverse seems to be true. If I had to rank those four I would rank Labyrinth first, Return to Oz and Legend second and third in whatever order (I'm having a hard time choosing as I sit here) and then The Dark Crystal last. So that means the two Jim Henson films bookend the others. It could be a straight-up matter of their narrative quality, or it could just be that the other three movies make for an interesting first-time discovery for a man in his 40s, a man inclined toward nostalgia, as I suppose we all are lately.

The last Dark Crystal-related thought to cram in here is that this story holds a unique position in my personal history in a way I will tell you about right now.

When I was a kid I owned the novelization of The Dark Crystal, and not long after seeing it I undertook the task of reading it. But I didn't get very far.

To this day I will always remember the opening lines of this novelization, which were:

"It was Jen. Jen alone."

For some reason, these five words represented such a peculiarly uninviting opening to a book that I just put it down right then and there and never resumed. So to this date, the novelization of The Dark Crystal remains the fewest amount of words I've read in a book that I abandoned. (Followed closely by Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, about a minute of which I listened to on audio book before deciding that it wasn't for me.)

Okay, I'll see you "another time ..."

I finally saw: Return to Oz

I was too young to know the word "blasphemous" in 1985.

But if I'd known it, the 11-year-old me would have certainly produced it upon seeing the trailers for Return to Oz, from which I ran screaming -- metaphorically, at least.

I could think of no more definite way to curdle the joy of the classic 1939 film than this grim and despairing sequel, 46 years later, populated with weird and frightening characters.

It turns out, from finally watching it, that my initial impression of Return to Oz was 100% accurate. However, I'm now less certain that this is a bad thing.

After finally watching Return to Oz, I can say with 100% certainty that it was conceived as a horror movie. Whether this was the right thing to unleash upon us is a different question. But what I once viewed as a colossal failure of tone is now more appropriately seen as a nightmare aimed at children.

The reason I even decided to overcome my apprehensions and give it a chance was that I'd heard some podcasters recently talk about how secretly awesome it was. Could all that twisted material and bad hoodoo actually be great? And what were these "Wheelers" that they were praising in particular?

So when I saw it in the kids section at the library -- the kids section -- I decided to give it a whirl.

If you are like me and ran screaming from this movie, I can tell you that it picks up a couple months after Dorothy's initial return from Oz. Turns out Dorothy -- now inexplicably about eight years old and played by Fairuza Balk -- did not live happily ever after. In fact, instead of resuming her life as a normal and compliant Kansas farm girl, she just wants to tell everyone about this magical place she visited. These being sensible Kansans in the year 1899, they don't want to hear any guff about a magical land with ruby slippers and emerald cities. But instead of benevolently humoring her, Aunt Em and Uncle Henry decide to take her to a doctor in an eerie hospital -- someone who plans to submit her to what appears to be electroshock therapy.

Dorothy, I don't think we're in The Wizard of Oz anymore.

If you told me this were the same hospital they used in Jacob's Ladder, I would believe you. Fortunately, with the assistance of a (possibly imaginary) fellow patient, Dorothy escapes during a perfectly timed power outage that struck just as they were about to power on the equipment. The two girls rush down to a nearby river and plunge in, the sinister hospital administrator hot on their heels. Dorothy grabs on to a crib that washes along in the river and awakens in what she soon determines to be Oz. Oh, and instead of Toto -- who does make an appearance earlier on -- she's got a chicken from her farm with her. A chicken that now can talk.

But it's not the Oz she remembers -- the yellow brick road has been reduced to rubble, as has the Emerald City. Most of its buildings are still standing, but all of its citizens have been turned to stone. Except for the Scarecrow, who was left as king -- and who may be key to the salvation of the city, if he can be found. As Dorothy collects companions -- a mechanical man named Tik Tok, who looks like a bronze and rotund version of the Pringles guy; an early draft of the character that became Jack Skellington, called Jack Pumpkinhead; and the trophy head of a moose that had been killed on a hunting expedition, which flies around a demented version of Santa's sleigh comprised of a couch and some other odds and ends, and goes by the name "Gump" -- she starts to figure out what has happened to her beloved Oz.

Hint: It involves these guys.

If that's not horrifying enough, let's pull out so you can get a better view.

Yep. That's a deranged man wearing a mask helmet with wheels for hands and feet.

"Jesus Christ," I said aloud upon encountering my first Wheeler.

As if these monstrosities -- this film's version of flying monkeys -- were not bad enough, we're just getting started. Dorothy then encounters a wicked princess who keeps a hall of disembodied heads, which belonged to Emerald City citizens whose bodies still remain frozen in stone, and which she switches out with her own depending on her whims. Eventually, she also comes face to face with an evil creature made of rock called the Nome King. The Nome King has rock minions whose faces appear in whatever rocks are near Dorothy, and report back on her progress. He has magic powers and can turn people into "trinkets." *shiver*

For about the first 20 minutes of Return to Oz you're thinking -- if you're sensible -- "My goodness, this is just awful." It does indeed seem to be a catastrophic misunderstanding of what made The Wizard of Oz a classic. Even Auntie Em and Uncle Henry are unmoved by the prospect of submitting their niece to a regimen of suspicious medical experiments involving electricity. Then there are just the things that seem careless, like the fact that the cheery score is out of sync with a drab setting that owes more to the depictions of Victorian England on film than American frontier movies -- and not the cheery versions of Victorian England, but the realistic ones, like Roman Polanski's Tess.

But once she actually goes back to Oz you're thinking -- if you're sensible -- "This is no accident." It may have been an accident on the studio's part that the creators of this content got away with what they got away with, but those creators did not miscalculate. They made exactly the movie they intended to make. Taking their lead from the Grimm theory that fairytales are terrifying, they made a terrifying expedition into Oz, one that owes more to something like Alice in Wonderland (underscored by the aging down of Dorothy) than Victor Fleming's interpretation of L. Frank Baum's material.

Indeed, as much as we may credit (blame?) this film's screenwriters for their strange creations, most of them are taken from Baum's book Ozma of Oz. That's at least where Tik Tok, the Wheelers, the Nome King, the evil princess and the Deadly Desert come from (did I mention there's a desert which turns you into sand if you touch it? That happens to one poor Wheeler), though it would appear that Jack Pumpkinhead and Gump may be original creations. (Adding to the creepiness -- Pumpkinhead is a bit touched in the head. He's always worried about his head rotting, and he keeps asking Dorothy if she's his mother.) Wait, no -- they're from another of Baum's books, The Marvelous Land of Oz.

Most of what's creepiest about this movie works. Some of it doesn't. The quality of the visual effects/costumes/etc. varies at about the same extent. So while most lovers of rule-breaking cinema and anomalous oddities will be won over by Return to Oz, there are the parts of it that just seem sloppy and bad-weird as opposed to good-weird.

Still, I was ready to hate this and I so didn't. In fact, I'm looking forward to my next viewing.

A return to Return to Oz, as it were.