Then 2020 happened and the whole year went to shit. Theaters closed, restaurants closed, everything shut down and people were out of work. Squares were left alone with nothing but their precious internet and their boredom and/or kids. Regular people lost their minds and went stir-crazy; crazier then ever.
Everything looked bleak, the world was on a flaming roller coaster ride speeding toward the gap in the loop.
But…. we had streaming services, thank you internet. We had netflix and we had hulu and all the gaggles of services fighting for you money. Finally, like the light at the end of the tunnel BILL & TED was going to have a theatrical release (yeeesh) and a home on-demand release. Rejoice! Something positive.
I waited patiently to experience what others that have seen the film before me said was, “Finally some hope in 2020 in the form of a light-hearted nostalgia trip of fun.”

I was vacationing in Los Angeles when my friend offered to play the film on a large 4k televsion. I was like, “fUCK yEah”.

Rewind : Now prior to this one of my oldest friends warned me about the film. That it wasn’t what I think it is. Of course this friend of mine is a severe critic and overly analytical of everything; he could criticize can orgasm if he felt it easily attained. He doesn’t understand what it is to just let yourself go and enjoy FUN.

The movie started and I was reintroduced to my old friends the Wyld Stallions.
And twenty minutes into the film something in my stomach started to flutter. My taste was fading for the Oreo cookies i was eating. No it wasn’t Covid. The movie just sucked.

BILL & TED FACE THE MUSIC, (aka BILL AND TED FACE THE MUSIC), from left: Alex Winter, Keanu Reeves, 2020. © Orion Pictures / Courtesy Everett Collection

Now it is in now way -shape-or-form as bad as BIRDS of Prey. That movie is complete dogshit.

Let’s take it from the top. I will not site any anti-feminist agenda here; I’m not a herb. I will only state what little I liked and what I didn’t like.

What I liked:
The wedding scene was the perfect trojan horse for an uncomfortable experience.
The future BILL & TED i liked, I liked that recurring situation and looked forward to seeing it play out with future and present versions of the Wyld Stallions dueling through time using some of the time travel tricks they learned from the previous films; NOPE never blossomed.
I did like seeing William Sadler return as Death; unfortunately the scene where they find him in hell is probably one of the most frustrating parts of the movie. I found myself tapping my foot on the ground with an impatient “Wrap it up” intention.
I did enjoy the main two actors. I was nice to see them running around in those characters again. I could see that they had fun filming this and I appreciate their passion to get this made. But, that’s all I liked bout this film.

The bad: EVerything. The moment in the garage is the starting point when I realized this film is taking itself way too seriously. The editing is okay. The cinematography is bad, the whole movie is filmed like an episode of SCRUBs; it looks like a made for TV movie and this whole thing might’ve worked or be better justified as just a one-shot NBC movie, I’m serious.
The visual effects when they rarely happen are fine…. except for the visuals of the future – what happened? The originals might be good examples of making the best out of limitation. However, this was just shiny filters of “bleh” on a contemporary self-Hi-fiving selfie.
The daughters are fine but really serve no purpose but to run around time on a side quest to distract you from the lack of main story there is here. Both actresses have been good in previous work but here are under utilized and tw0-dimensional.
Every one is back however, no one bothered to cast any of the actresses from the prior two films that played the princesses.
Rufus’ daughter was ….. the future characters were….. Things just happen in this film.
KID CUDI must be not doing much for budget fees cuz, he was the most uninteresting character in the movie. My friend even asked me, “Who is he?” and she’s worked in the music industry. Cudi is here to replace STATION. Why? I don’t know. I guess they ran out of money for a creature to be in the film.
And there is that goddamn robot of nothingness and bland impotent humor that is sent back in time to kill our heroes and then progresses into the most force-fed non-hitting punchline of the whole movie. “What am I watching?!!!!” is all I could say to myself.

The film does this n that and leaves you with more questions than Joe Biden playing despacito. Things just happen. Nothing really matters. They don’t write the song that unites humanity and saves reality
(yes, reality *retcon) instead it is their daughters that unite the random group of musicians from history and some how with some AKAI equipment orchestrate on the fly the composition that is the song. Bill&Ted don’t write the song, their daughters do. All BILL&TED do is run around through time with an infinity code and get every one in time to play along (How? I have no fucking idea. My disbelief was murdered after I saw Dave Grohl’s goofy face), BILL&TED’s only contribution is playing guitar riffs. And the song blows. In fact, that and the wedding song are the only two times you will have music. There is no soundtrack. I repeat there is no soundtrack. Remember the songs from the BILL&TED 2 soundtrack, well not here. Maybe it was a money issue, I know how shady labels are, and if that was the case I forgive them. But, you had Dave Grohl do a cameo  and you couldn’t just ask real life musicians to get together in a think tank and write an actual song for the movie.

The movie ends and I couldn’t wait to fall asleep. I couldn’t wait to return to dystopia. I couldn’t wait to jump off a balcony.

My final feeling is this – FACE THE MUSIC blows a big fat load all over your nostalgia and would’ve been better executed with Alex Winters directing and the previous creators only serving as producers. The film should’ve been a made for TV movie and they could’ve gone through some script revisions and rewrites before the cameras started rolling. I still l0ve the first two movies. I LOVE THE FIRST TWO BILL AND TED FILMS but, I can live and die without FACE the Music.

1. STAY SAFE, TALK HARD and always keep your finger on that REWIND button.Bill & Ted Face the Music is a 2020 American science fiction comedy film directed by Dean Parisot and written by Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon. It is the third film in the Bill & Ted series, and the sequel to Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey (1991). Alex Winter, Keanu Reeves, and William Sadler reprise their roles as Bill, Ted, and the Grim Reaper, respectively, while Kristen Schaal, Samara Weaving, Brigette Lundy-Paine, Anthony Carrigan, Erinn Hayes, Jayma Mays, Holland Taylor, Kid Cudi, and Jillian Bell join the cast. In the film

“Bill & Ted is an American comedy film series featuring William “Bill” S. Preston Esq. (Alex Winter) and Theodore “Ted” Logan (Keanu Reeves) as two metalhead slackers who travel through time. The first Bill & Ted film, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, was released on February 17, 1989, followed by a sequel two years later entitled Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey. A third film, Bill & Ted Face the Music, started pre-production in May 2018. In addition to the films, the franchise has seen both an animated television series (with Winter and Reeves reprising their roles) and a live-action television series in 1990 and 1992 respectively, video games, and comic books. Originally produced by Orion Pictures, the franchise ownership fell to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) following the purchase of Orion in 1997.”
– https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_%26_Ted_(franchise)

I was seven years old and one of my relatives took me to the cinema to watch the first one. The second I rented at my neighborhood video store. The late 80’s into 90s feel is immortalized in these films, the colors, the clothes, the lingo the almost Saturday morning cartoon-like depictions of a future living in world peace through rock & roll and air-guitar. By the way – Joan of Arc was really hot and lets’ not forget the medieval princess.

I remember Keanu Reeves during his press interviews for John Wick being asked about a possible B&T3 and how enthusiastic he was to discuss a possible storyline that him, Winters and the original team where throwing around about the film and how they were working on getting off the ground. His excitement became my excitement and let me say this, “I will be at the midnight showing of this on premiere night”. So far i haven’t been too disappointed and very impressed by a lot of retro sequels lately. From the AMAZING Blade Runner 2949 to the recently released first season of Cobra Kai (the first two episode review also on this site) I’m all in… All the way in.

So what do we know so far:

The Hollywood Reporter revealed the news out of Cannes today.

Currently in pre-production, Bill & Ted Face the Music will see the duo long past their days as time-traveling teenagers and now weighed down by middle age and the responsibilities of family. They’ve written thousands of tunes, but they have yet to write a good one, much less the greatest song ever written. With the fabric of time and space tearing around them, a visitor from the future warns our heroes that only their song can save life as we know it. Out of luck and fresh out of inspiration, Bill and Ted set out on a time travel adventure to seek the song that will set their world right and bring harmony in the universe as we know it. Together with the aid of their daughters, a new crop of historical figures, and some sympathetic music legends, they find much, much more than just a song.

Dean Parisot (Galaxy Quest) will direct the film from a script by original writers Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon. Of course, Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves will reprise their roles almost three decades after the original two films, and Bill and Ted’s daughters will be joining their time-traveling adventures this time around. MGM, which owns the rights to the series, will release the film in the US, while international sales are currently in the works at the Cannes Film Festival.
P.S. I’m too happy about this to edit. 🙂

LET’S DO THIS!!!!!!

A few weeks ago, after a wild summer of thinning out my Netflix queue, I noticed something strange. Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure was in the “cult” section of Netflix. Despite the fact that one could wager good money that everybody in the English-speaking world would recognize a young Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter sitting atop a high powered time travelling non-Tardis phonebooth, the film was paired with several films that have been seen by very few, including the underrated but also not-as-good sequel, Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey. Absurd run-on sentences aside, the film is one of a handful of quintessential 1980’s movies. This led to an eager mixture of surprise and joy when I discovered that they were being given a comic book continuation.

hile I did enjoy the first two issues of BOOM! Studios six-issue run of Bill & Ted’s Most Triumphant Return, written by Brian Lynch previously responsible for a number of Buffy and Angel comics, as well as the Minions screenplay, and drawn by Jerry Gaylord, I was surprised to see just how much it relied upon the lore established in Bogus Journey. The story follows the Wyld Stallyns traveling to their utopian future to meet a younger version of the Chuck De Nomolos than the one we know from the movie to try to prevent him from doing evil stuff that affects his future which affects Bill and Ted’s most righteous present. Don’t worry. We’ll run through everything on a dry erase board before the test.

In case you forgot (which you probably did), Chuck De Nomolos was the Big Bad of Bogus Journey.

The story is comparable to The Midas Flesh, an under-appreciated comic by Ryan North. It has a certain jovial glee with implying some pretty heavy (and heady) time travel themes and elements, but then waving away from them or deferring to a joke. You never get the sense that it does this in an inconsistent-story sort of way, but rather much in the way the original films play with the notions of time travel (in Excellent Adventure) or eternity and the afterlife (in Bogus Journey). The Grim Reaper returns from the latter, but has a relatively insignificant role in the plot; unlike the repeated chant of “station”, a word that can literally mean anything.

And there I go talking about the lore of Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey again. Writing about art is a funny thing.

The best part of the first two issues is easily the side story at the end of the first issue. It’s a standalone and it comes out of nowhere. It deals with Robot Bill and Robot Ted contracting a computer virus, and the notions and solutions that two young men from the late 80’s would bring to a futuristic scenario. Overall, the comic will be loved by fans of the series. The jokes land and the art is vivid. The only downside is that Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey is unfortunately required viewing material before reading.