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Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure
Put your brain in check and watch as the 80's teen comedy, the time travel adventure, and the fish out of water comedy combine pretty smoothly for the 1989 cult classic Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, a comic fantasy that provides a fair share of laughs before it starts to run out of gas.
The setting is the year 2688 and our film's interplanetary host, Rufus (the late George Carlin) is explaining to us how his planet was actually saved by a pair of bonehead surfer dudes who headline a band called Wyld Stallyns. Rufus then takes us back to 1988 where we meet Bill S. Esquire (Alex Winter) and Ted Theodore Logan (Keanu Reeves), best buds who think they head a band called Wyld Stallyns, even though they don't know how to play or read music. Bill and Ted are also flunking history and have been informed that if their final history project doesn't earn an A+, they will flunk history and Ted has been told by his father that if he flunks history, he will be sent to a military school in Alaska.
Since Bill and Ted must stay together in order to save is planet, Rufus travels back in time and offers Bill and Ted a time machine where they can go to any historical period bring back any real life historical figures for their report they want. Before receiving some final instructions from themselves (don't ask), Bill and Ted enter a time machine that looks like a phone booth and somehow manage to get Lincoln, Socrates, Beethoven, Sigmund Freud, Napoleon, Joan of Arc, Billy the Kid, and Genghis Khan back to San Dimas California in 1988.
Screenwriters Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon have come up with a clever story that has a little more substance to it than appears on the surface. The opening is a little mind boggling as we realize that what we are seeing is a flashback inside a flashback with the appearance of the second Bill and Ted, but once Bill and Ted are in the time machine and off to get their report subjects, the movie is a lot of fun, despite a serious overuse of the words "dude" and "excellent". Loved the way the first Bill and Ted assist the second Bill and Ted with their mission as well as the hysterical subplot of Bill's stepmom being three years older than him who Ted asked to prom.
The scenes of our heroes getting the guys out of their respective historical periods were kind of fun, but the fun of the film really comes when they return to San Dimas but the guys lose track of our historical figures and have to rescue them from the local mall and from the police (one of whom is Ted's father). I also think the historical figures are played a little too straight-faced and Bill and Ted's final report goes on a little too long.
Stephen Hereck's direction is energetic and Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves are a lot of fun as the title characters. Ironically, this film would be instrumental in making Reeves a big star while Winters' career basically went nowhere. The film was followed by an animated series in 1990, a sequel called Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey and this year, Winters and Reeves have incredibly reunited for a third film called Bill & Ted Face the Music, but I thought I better watch the first two first.
Put your brain in check and watch as the 80's teen comedy, the time travel adventure, and the fish out of water comedy combine pretty smoothly for the 1989 cult classic Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, a comic fantasy that provides a fair share of laughs before it starts to run out of gas.
The setting is the year 2688 and our film's interplanetary host, Rufus (the late George Carlin) is explaining to us how his planet was actually saved by a pair of bonehead surfer dudes who headline a band called Wyld Stallyns. Rufus then takes us back to 1988 where we meet Bill S. Esquire (Alex Winter) and Ted Theodore Logan (Keanu Reeves), best buds who think they head a band called Wyld Stallyns, even though they don't know how to play or read music. Bill and Ted are also flunking history and have been informed that if their final history project doesn't earn an A+, they will flunk history and Ted has been told by his father that if he flunks history, he will be sent to a military school in Alaska.
Since Bill and Ted must stay together in order to save is planet, Rufus travels back in time and offers Bill and Ted a time machine where they can go to any historical period bring back any real life historical figures for their report they want. Before receiving some final instructions from themselves (don't ask), Bill and Ted enter a time machine that looks like a phone booth and somehow manage to get Lincoln, Socrates, Beethoven, Sigmund Freud, Napoleon, Joan of Arc, Billy the Kid, and Genghis Khan back to San Dimas California in 1988.
Screenwriters Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon have come up with a clever story that has a little more substance to it than appears on the surface. The opening is a little mind boggling as we realize that what we are seeing is a flashback inside a flashback with the appearance of the second Bill and Ted, but once Bill and Ted are in the time machine and off to get their report subjects, the movie is a lot of fun, despite a serious overuse of the words "dude" and "excellent". Loved the way the first Bill and Ted assist the second Bill and Ted with their mission as well as the hysterical subplot of Bill's stepmom being three years older than him who Ted asked to prom.
The scenes of our heroes getting the guys out of their respective historical periods were kind of fun, but the fun of the film really comes when they return to San Dimas but the guys lose track of our historical figures and have to rescue them from the local mall and from the police (one of whom is Ted's father). I also think the historical figures are played a little too straight-faced and Bill and Ted's final report goes on a little too long.
Stephen Hereck's direction is energetic and Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves are a lot of fun as the title characters. Ironically, this film would be instrumental in making Reeves a big star while Winters' career basically went nowhere. The film was followed by an animated series in 1990, a sequel called Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey and this year, Winters and Reeves have incredibly reunited for a third film called Bill & Ted Face the Music, but I thought I better watch the first two first.