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Kristen Schaal

Bill and Ted Face the Music

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Bill and Ted Face the Music

Gather round for the latter-day tales of the Two Great Ones, Bill S. Preston, Esq. and Ted “Theodore” Logan, aka Wyld Stallyns. As we all know, these prophets saved our society from being totally bogus and instead insured our most excellent future.

Ok, we probably don’t all know that.

In fact, there’s a pretty good chance that if you’re under the age of about thirty, you had never heard of these two sweet-natured lunkheads and the perplexing cult status of the late 80s/early 90s movies that featured them: Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure and Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey.

As someone on the margins of Bill and Ted fandom – I watched both the earlier films around the time of their original release (when I was twelve or so) and liked them, but I didn’t think about them much after that – I was more bemused than anything else when I heard about this newest sequel, Bill and Ted Face the Music.

After revisiting the first two entries in preparation for the new Bill and Ted, I found them both as affable and goofy as I had remembered. They’re the movie equivalent of junk food, to be sure, but guileless and silly enough to be harmless – except for those few dated homophobic slurs that are played for laughs.

I can happily report that Bill and Ted Face the Music is in the exact same vein as its predecessors.

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A Walk in the Woods

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A Walk in the Woods

A Walk in the Woods is a rare example of when it’s ok to judge a movie by its poster. Just look at it. Some marketing underling clearly Photoshopped stars Robert Redford and Nick Nolte onto the edge of a cliff. Redford holds his arm up in what should represent exasperation, but his stance, coupled with the expression on his face, screams artificiality; every part of his body looks manipulated to produce an effect. Ditto Nolte’s posture of reluctant explanation. The whole thing looks flat, both photographically and thematically. The image is a perfect metaphor for the film. A Walk in the Woods is a superficial, monotonous mess.

Critical and financial hits like Into the Wild127 Hours, and Wild explore the theme of the human struggle against nature, and harken back to the popular German “mountain films” of the 1920s and 30s. Because the genre is experiencing success, it’s time for some poorly made knock-offs. A Walk in the Woods is one of these. The movie is based on the bestseller of the same name by travel writer Bill Bryson. The plan to make the book into a movie began in 1998, but the project continually hit roadblocks until these other films paved the way for its production.

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