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.

A most excellent weekend

I don't know for sure if it will be "excellent," but it will definitely be "Excellent!" (cue guitar sound).

Continuing a "tradition" my wife and I have only done twice before, if memory serves -- with the Godfather movies and the Girl With the Dragon Tattoo movies -- we have just begun a weekend of movies in the same trilogy, one per night. And from the poster I've included and the unmistakeable allusion in my title and opening sentence, I think you know what that is.

We've watched Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure on Friday night, and will follow that tonight with Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey before wrapping up the weekend with the brand new Bill and Ted Face the Music on Sunday night -- which is also Father's Day here in Australia.

A few differences from previous instances of these trilogy weekends, though I should say, those weekends were not the same as each other, either. In the case of the Godfather weekend, we had both already seen the first movie but not the second and third. For the Dragon weekend, we had seen none of the original Swedish versions of the films (and it was a few months before David Fincher's Hollywood version came out). In this case, we had both seen the first movie, I'd seen the second but my wife couldn't remember if she'd seen it, and of course, the third is new to us both.

Also, there will be no themed food this time, though the travel through time and throughout the world certainly would have created the opportunity had we considered it. (In the previous two instances we ate Italian food and Swedish food.)

One other difference: My wife won't actually be watching Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey with me.

She's rarely up for movies on three consecutive nights these days, and me saying the sequel was not all that was enough for her to opt out. She's happy to have me fill her in on what she missed before we both watch the new movie tomorrow night.

I hadn't seen the original Bill & Ted's since within about two years of its release, when I watched it for probably the second and final time. However, I think it was also one of those movies I probably caught parts of throughout the first half of the 1990s. Would likely have been on in the background while I was in college.

Still, having caught enough of it back then, and continuing to quote it for some years afterward, I assumed that it would mostly seem familiar to me. That was decidedly not the case when the movie started, as the entire opening credits play over what looks like a futuristic rotating diamond. Having forgotten what percentage of the film is set in the future, and that it begins with opening words by George Carlin as Rufus, I felt totally at sea during this opening -- like, did I even see this at all?

Of course, as soon as Carlin started talking, it was "Oh yeah, right." And things felt much more familiar from there. (At least to me; my wife continued to remember very little of it.)

We enjoyed watching it, laughing out loud a number of times each. One of the most consistently funny parts was the bit about Bill's new stepmother, Missy, who is only three years older than he is. "Missy ... I mean, Mom." It never got old, nor did Ted's comments like "Remember when she was a senior and we were freshmen?" and "Remember when I asked her to prom?"

Also really enjoyed the performance of Terry Callimeri as Napoleon. I remembered him being funny, but he really steals the show. In fact, all the historical figures are great, and we especially got a kick out of the bromance between So-crates and Billy the Kid.

One not so great takeaway was a moment of homophobia, but was glad to see it was only a moment, and very much in keeping with the prevailing norms of the time. Bill and Ted hug each other at one point -- I think it's when Ted is proven not to be dead because he "fell out of his armor when he hit the ground" -- and they realize what they've done and say "Fag!" to each other. Fortunately, the film moves on quickly and nothing like that happens again.

The last thing I wanted to mention was that we commented on how silly it was that the film climaxed with Bill and Ted's history presentation in front of what appeared to be the entire student body of the school. While the show they put on undoubtedly warrants that kind of audience -- and where did they get all their props and sets, by the way? -- the idea of an assembly attended by all the students to watch a history class assignment is just laughable. Given that there seemed to be at least 500 people in the audience, does that mean the whole school sat there for the entire day through 250 different presentations, assuming the two students per presentation standard set by Bill and Ted? I think not.

Enjoyable night of viewing though.

I'm not looking forward to tonight as much, but I know some people do have a fondness for Bogus Journey, and I remember at the very least that William Sadler as Death was a scene stealer.