Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure: Second thoughts

Really starting to notice a burn in my left leg, so I'm glad surgery's coming up. On the bright side, the god-burrito was fantastic and I'll have to post a picture later. Thing was utterly ridiculous.

Speaking of things that were utterly ridiculous and consumed voraciously, I just watched a really stupid fun movie, folks! :D

 First of all, kudos to the two lead actors. It must be hard to keep a straight face and deliver such completely inane lines in so completely earnest a manner. These two somehow developed mannerisms, particularly this weird kind of body language where they feel the need to frame the space around them with their arms, that create or suggest being raised in an absolutely surreal culture of personal expression that's part interpretive dance, part elaborate vocabulary and 100% basic, fundamental yay/boo. They dress strangely, they talk like they always aced the bonus word on the English test but never actually learned anything in school, they're in a two-man band that can't actually play music, and they're just so... happy about it all. I said The Big Lebowski was zen, but here I've got two characters who effectively ARE future-Buddhas of a sort - their music has ended all wars and set the standard for human civilization 700 years in the future.

Which is very very stupid.

But that's the joy of this movie. It never wants to be smart, never purports to be anything more than a sendup of stories like Back to the Future and shades of an old movie called It's A Wonderful Life, which is about a guy getting to see the impact his life has on the world. Hell of a sendup of the same theme to put history in the hands of their homework.

I feel like some of the actual adventure portion of the adventure got lost in the drive for either brevity or reining in costs, which is too bad; they collect a lot of characters who could have offered them interesting side treks and adventures, but the only two to really get explored at all are So Crates and Billy the Kid. Everyone else gets 15 seconds of spotlight, although to be fair, one of those nearly killed me from laughing so hard.

There's quite obviously nothing deeper to analyze in this movie because it aspires to shallowness in a way that those fatuous Kardashin people only wish they could manage. It exists on a whole new level of shallow, reveling in being an earnest, completely frank festival of questionable slang and the extremely questionable intellects of the thoroughly simple but always pleasant protagonists. It's the open-faced sandwich of filmmaking - you can see all the ingredients laid out on top, nothing to cover them up or absorb any of the flavor away from what's presented. Which is probably why it's so much fun. :D

Anyway, once more I find myself saying a movie is not great, because of course this movie is not great. To aspire to greatness would be to lessen this film as an experience, because it's just big dumb silly fun and neither Bill nor Ted would find it most excellent to be any other way. So I leave you with the sage words of the Great Ones themselves as I move on to new things:

PARTY ON, FOLKS! :D