Bill and Ted's Excelent Adventure. (U.)
Directed by Stephen Herek. 1989.
Starring Keanu Reeves, Alex Winter, Tony Camilleri, Dan Shor, Hal Landon Jr., Bernie Casey and George Carlin. Out now on 4k Ultra HD, Blu-ray, DVD, Steelbook and Digital download. 86 mins.
“Bill and Ted! Party Time! Excellent!" No, hold on, I've got that wrong, haven't I? Bill and Ted is the film that Wayne's World (and Harold and Kumar and the Dude, Where's My Car crowd) got their ideas from. In Excellent Adventure, two Californian high school students are sent off across history in a telephone box to find famous historical figures to help with their History report, which they must not fail for the future of humanity. It's like Time Bandits but in a Tardis that is as big on the inside as it is on the outside.
If we're honest Wayne's World is probably a funnier film, but that's kind of irrelevant. Bill and Ted has it laugh out loud moments but it's more in the business of making you smile. This is a film that tickles you. Few films have quite such a sunny disposition and the ones that do usually make hard work out of it.
Studiocanal is putting this out now because at some point this year a third instalment, Bill and Ted Face the Music, will arrive in cinemas. (In fact they released this now on the assumption that it would be in cinemas in early September but Warners have pulled the rug on that and it is currently absent from the release schedule.) The reunion will bring into sharp relief the career disparity of the two leads. While Keanu became an enduring, resilient and beloved movie star, Winter has mostly worked behind the camera, directing documentaries. On screen though, they are absolute equals, almost interchangeable. (Like Ant'n'Dec they are almost always posed in name order, so you know which is which.) It's their chemistry that makes the movie.
They are often described as dumb and slackers, but that doesn't quite cover it. They definitely aren't academic but they seem resourceful and engaged. The joke is that their vocab is limited to just putting "most" in front of everything but when that results in lines like "We're in danger of flunking most heinously tomorrow," or “Strange things are afoot outside the Circle K,” that has an eloquence that could come from a character in Heathers. Most of all, they seem really, incredibly decent. They treat everybody equally, are instinctively kind and open to all kinds of new ideas. They exist in some juncture between counter-culture idealism and 80's materialism but have found a very agreeable compromise between the two.
Their project is imagining what a famous historical figure would make of their home town San Dimas, California, in the late 80s. All of the figures they pick up – Lincoln, Freud, Beethoven, Socrates, etc – seem to approve thoroughly of it and have a ball in the mall. I mention this because the disc is preceded by a warning that “this film reflects historical attitudes which audiences may find outdated or offensive.” The full extent of this is them saying "fag" in a moment of homosexual panic after they hug each other in relief when Bill finds out Ted hasn't died. I think we have to ask where 2020, this freedummy age of libertarian anti-vaxxer flat-earth fake news barbarism, gets off lecturing the late 1980s on morality. It's like late 1930's Germany giving Victorian England the high horse over concentration camps in the Boer War. Knowing that a third film is on its way, you look at them back there in San Dimas and want to tell them to quit while their ahead because their future is going to be most egregious.
.
Directed by Stephen Herek. 1989.
Starring Keanu Reeves, Alex Winter, Tony Camilleri, Dan Shor, Hal Landon Jr., Bernie Casey and George Carlin. Out now on 4k Ultra HD, Blu-ray, DVD, Steelbook and Digital download. 86 mins.
“Bill and Ted! Party Time! Excellent!" No, hold on, I've got that wrong, haven't I? Bill and Ted is the film that Wayne's World (and Harold and Kumar and the Dude, Where's My Car crowd) got their ideas from. In Excellent Adventure, two Californian high school students are sent off across history in a telephone box to find famous historical figures to help with their History report, which they must not fail for the future of humanity. It's like Time Bandits but in a Tardis that is as big on the inside as it is on the outside.
If we're honest Wayne's World is probably a funnier film, but that's kind of irrelevant. Bill and Ted has it laugh out loud moments but it's more in the business of making you smile. This is a film that tickles you. Few films have quite such a sunny disposition and the ones that do usually make hard work out of it.
Studiocanal is putting this out now because at some point this year a third instalment, Bill and Ted Face the Music, will arrive in cinemas. (In fact they released this now on the assumption that it would be in cinemas in early September but Warners have pulled the rug on that and it is currently absent from the release schedule.) The reunion will bring into sharp relief the career disparity of the two leads. While Keanu became an enduring, resilient and beloved movie star, Winter has mostly worked behind the camera, directing documentaries. On screen though, they are absolute equals, almost interchangeable. (Like Ant'n'Dec they are almost always posed in name order, so you know which is which.) It's their chemistry that makes the movie.
They are often described as dumb and slackers, but that doesn't quite cover it. They definitely aren't academic but they seem resourceful and engaged. The joke is that their vocab is limited to just putting "most" in front of everything but when that results in lines like "We're in danger of flunking most heinously tomorrow," or “Strange things are afoot outside the Circle K,” that has an eloquence that could come from a character in Heathers. Most of all, they seem really, incredibly decent. They treat everybody equally, are instinctively kind and open to all kinds of new ideas. They exist in some juncture between counter-culture idealism and 80's materialism but have found a very agreeable compromise between the two.
Their project is imagining what a famous historical figure would make of their home town San Dimas, California, in the late 80s. All of the figures they pick up – Lincoln, Freud, Beethoven, Socrates, etc – seem to approve thoroughly of it and have a ball in the mall. I mention this because the disc is preceded by a warning that “this film reflects historical attitudes which audiences may find outdated or offensive.” The full extent of this is them saying "fag" in a moment of homosexual panic after they hug each other in relief when Bill finds out Ted hasn't died. I think we have to ask where 2020, this freedummy age of libertarian anti-vaxxer flat-earth fake news barbarism, gets off lecturing the late 1980s on morality. It's like late 1930's Germany giving Victorian England the high horse over concentration camps in the Boer War. Knowing that a third film is on its way, you look at them back there in San Dimas and want to tell them to quit while their ahead because their future is going to be most egregious.
.
