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Thursday, Sept
10, 2020 Shelton-Mason County Journal - Page A-25
s a member of Generation X, it’s perhaps a
Agubious point of pride for me to point out that
11 three of pop culture’s greatest metalhead
comedic duos are among my generational contem-
poraries, but it’s legitimately heartening to realize
that William “Bill” S. Preston Esq. and “Ted” Theo—
dore Logan are among the most
enduring, precisely because they
are also the most kind. .
Mike Judge’s Beavis and Butt-
head made their debut in a couple
of animated shorts that aired in
the fall‘of-1992 as part of MTV’s
“Liquid Television,” just as I was
starting my senior year of high
school.
And the characters of Wayne
By KIRK
BOXLEITNER Campbell and Garth Algar ap-
peared in “Saturday Night Live’s”
first “Wayne’s World” skit just
as “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure” was hitting
theaters. In fact, “Bill &_Ted’s Excellent Adven- .
ture” premiered Friday, Feb. 17, 1989, while Mike
Myers and Dana Carvey first welcomed vieWers to
“Wayne’s World” the next day. While Beavis and
Butt-head entertain through the chaos they cause
with their malicious idiocy, and Wayne and Garth
deftly mix meta-fictional mass-media commentary
with post-adolescent crudity, what stands out about
Bill and Ted is they’re good guys with good hearts,
even as their intellectual simplicity frustrates their
elders.-
EXCELLENT ADVENTURE ,
A big part of what made “Bill & Ted’s Excellent
Adventure” such an enduring movie was how it
extended the “Chosen One” trope to the point of ab-
surdity, that two dimwitted, teenage would-be rock-
and-rollers would somehow manage to make music
that would unite all life in peace and align the cos-
mos, even though they don’t even know how to play
’ their instruments when we firstmeet them.
“Excellent Adventure” also played with the para—
doxes that time travel would hypothetically make
possible, aided by throwing a phone booth full of
history’s most notable figures into San Dimas, Cali-
fornia, in 1988. The mayhem at the mall montage ‘ '
now comes across like a time capsule of America in
the ’80s.
The original film’s distributor went bankrupt
before the film was released, so the critical and
commercial success of “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Ad-
venture” caught people off—guard. .Co-writers Chris
Matheson and Ed Solomon weren’t about to waste
the opportunity to follow up on it, which they did
two years later with “Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey.”
BOGUS JOURNEY
Whereas “Excellent Adventure” benefited from.
a winnowed-down premise — the songs of a pair of
Mlill
, was“; “we”! M
www.5heltoncinemas.com
TEN ET (PG-13)
alongside Tim Burton’s 1988 “Beetlejuice,” and the
‘ Week of 9/11-17
REGULAR FIRST ADMISSION
NIGHTLY 6:00 RM.
Week Of '9/1 1 -17 on screen-2 h
FIRST RUN ADMISSION
Bill Ted Face the Music (Pen 3)
RNI'GHTLY 6:30 P.M.
aspiring rockers will save the world and create a
utopian future, but only if they can collect enough
celebrities from the past to pass their high school
history report “Bogus Journey” was more sprawl- ‘
ing and less disciplined. Bill and Ted are killed, sent
to hell, ascend to heaven, and came back to life in
time to play the concert that would get them noticed
by the world.
Not every running joke landed, and the change in
aesthetic from the muted chrome future envisioned
by the late 1980s to the screaming neon future en-
visioned by the early 19905 was jarring, but “Bogus
Journey” offeredone of the most innovative depic-
tions of the afterlife ever put to screen, ranking right
franchise gained one of its greatest characters, as '3
William Sadler stepped into the heavy black robes
of a Grim Reaper who was hilariously influenced by .
Ingmar Bergman’s 1957 film “The Seventh Seal.”
So, Bill and Ted had two well-regarded films, and
that would have been that, if not for Keanu Reeves.
NEO JOHN WICK
While the acting career of Alex “Bill” Winter
found greater success as a director of documentaries.
Reeves went from Ted directly to “Point Break” with
Patrick Swayze in 1991, “Bram Stoker’s Dracula”
with Francis Ford Coppola in 1992, “Speed” in 1994,
“The Devil’s Advocate” with Al Pacino and Charlize
Theron in 1997, and the big one, “The Matrix” with
the Wachowskis in 1999.
Reeves has played Neo and John Wick in three
box office blockbusters each, and he’s gained recog-
nition as one of the nicest humans in Hollywood this
side of Tom Hanks.
While their career paths diverged, Reeves, Win—
ter, Matheson and Solomon all remained friends,
and after so many years playing hard-boiled hitmen
and stone-faced martial artists, Reeves admitted
how much he missed the total absence of cynicism in
Bill and Ted.
Which leads us to “Bill & Ted Face the Music,”
now playing at the Shelton Cinemas.
KY1"!
PNVE'N,
’THEATER
Keanu Reeves and
Alex Winter return
to the big screen in
“Bill and Ted Face the
Music,” playing now
at Shelton Cinemas.
Courtesy photo
FACE THE MUSIC
Since their 1991 concert, Bill and Ted have failed
to follow up their big ‘hit with the one song that
they’d been told would save the future, and while
they’ve retained their boyish enthusiasm, even two
dudes who remain a bit slow on the uptake have
grown mature enough to realize it might be time to
make some concessions to adulthood.
'While the opening of “Face the Music” briskly
brings uslup to speed on all that’s happened to our
heroicduo since the closing credits of “Bogus Jour-
' ney,” and yields the inevitable payoff to the character
are of Missy (Amy Stoch), former classmate-turned-
Stepmom of both boys, it’s also deeply haunting to see
Bill and Ted, their faces careworn with the real-life
passage of nearly 30 years, solemnly weighing their
responsibilities as husbands and fathers.
I can’t be the only Gen-Xer to watch that scene
and feel the resonance of having been told you would
change the World, only to reach middle age and
see HEROES, page A410
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