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Spoilers Bill and Ted Face the Music: Review and Discussion

And why did everyone automatically go to hell anyway? In the second film, didn't B&T go down because Missy's seance group cast them out?

Also, they make a joke about why a robot would go to hell, but no one bats an eye at the police truck. ;)
 
I wondered about the police truck myself, maybe something about Dennis' ray just sends whatever it destroys directly to Hell.
 
A robot that has a "send you to hell" laser?

See, that's the kind of goofiness I would have loved!
 
So Ted's Father was killed in 2025... Then taken from Hell with the rest of the group and they went back to 2020. So is there two of them in 2020 now?

Heck, that would've been 2060-whatever Hell meaning the girls and their group and Ted's father had been there for decades and Death time traveled them back to 2020 from that future Hell.

(Yeah, yeah, no reason to think time is the same there.)
 
RLM's "Half in the Bag" reviews the movie.

(Positive review, FWIW.)

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90 min movie, 40 min review

I'm not knocking it and I enjoy some of these takes but sometimes it's funny how much time can be spent after-the-fact or instead of just watching it.
 
Saw it last night. I think it'd rate it exactly as I did the last Jay and Bob movie. As a film on its own, it's pretty awful but works perfectly well as a "love letter to the fans," to borrow from the cliché bin. Sadler stole the show and I liked the daughters. Everything else was just fine.
 
Yes Sadler was great! Alex Winter did an amazing job playing Bill again. He did not skip a beat. Though the film was very predictable and a lot of cheesy moments but it was to be expected. A fun movie, definitely not a Chris Nolan but pretty entertaining when you know the characters.
 
Saw it last night. I think it'd rate it exactly as I did the last Jay and Bob movie. As a film on its own, it's pretty awful but works perfectly well as a "love letter to the fans," to borrow from the cliché bin. Sadler stole the show and I liked the daughters. Everything else was just fine.
That's not a bad comparison. I liked Dennis and Billie quite a bit and it was good seeing everyone, just sometimes you can't go back home, not completely anyway.
 
Hope it's okay to bump this rather than starting a new thread. I finally saw the movie, after rewatching the first two yesterday. I liked it a lot. It wasn't perfect, and it had plenty about it that wouldn't hold up to analysis, but hey, the same went for the first two, so it was a satisfactory continuation. Mainly it was fun to revisit Bill & Ted again and get another taste of the silly reality and worldview they inhabit, and in that respect it felt authentic.

Bill & Ted felt true to themselves, though I'm not sure Reeves quite managed to recapture the character; there were times when it felt more like I was watching Keanu Reeves doing an impression of Ted than actually watching Ted, if you get what I mean. The daughters were fun, though, and Brigette Lundy-Paine did an even better job channeling Ted than Reeves did. I love the contrast -- Bill & Ted were these well-meaning doofuses who loved music but didn't really have any skill or training to back it up, but Thea & Billie were like the most educated musical scholars ever.

I felt the "song" at the end was a bit of a copout, but I guess nothing could really have lived up to the hype. It was a nice idea as far as it went.

The one thing I could've done without was bringing back Missy. She was always problematical, a sexist joke of a "slut" character who was strongly implied to have slept with her teachers, and having her marry her former stepson is just creepy. The one thing mildly amusing about it is the way it reverses the original joke of this girl barely out of high school marrying men old enough to be her father. But that joke was creepy to begin with, and turning it around doesn't help.

And speaking of which, I guess I get them recasting the princesses when they have a bigger role this time (and they recast them both in the second film too), but they cast actresses who are maybe a decade younger than their predecessors. It's a little incongruous.
 
Hope it's okay to bump this rather than starting a new thread. I finally saw the movie, after rewatching the first two yesterday. I liked it a lot. It wasn't perfect, and it had plenty about it that wouldn't hold up to analysis, but hey, the same went for the first two, so it was a satisfactory continuation. Mainly it was fun to revisit Bill & Ted again and get another taste of the silly reality and worldview they inhabit, and in that respect it felt authentic.

Bill & Ted felt true to themselves, though I'm not sure Reeves quite managed to recapture the character; there were times when it felt more like I was watching Keanu Reeves doing an impression of Ted than actually watching Ted, if you get what I mean. The daughters were fun, though, and Brigette Lundy-Paine did an even better job channeling Ted than Reeves did. I love the contrast -- Bill & Ted were these well-meaning doofuses who loved music but didn't really have any skill or training to back it up, but Thea & Billie were like the most educated musical scholars ever.

I felt the "song" at the end was a bit of a copout, but I guess nothing could really have lived up to the hype. It was a nice idea as far as it went.

The one thing I could've done without was bringing back Missy. She was always problematical, a sexist joke of a "slut" character who was strongly implied to have slept with her teachers, and having her marry her former stepson is just creepy. The one thing mildly amusing about it is the way it reverses the original joke of this girl barely out of high school marrying men old enough to be her father. But that joke was creepy to begin with, and turning it around doesn't help.

And speaking of which, I guess I get them recasting the princesses when they have a bigger role this time (and they recast them both in the second film too), but they cast actresses who are maybe a decade younger than their predecessors. It's a little incongruous.

They really should have cast actresses for the princes who were the right/same age as Bill and Ted instead with going with the young ones. Doing such a thing just played too much into the Hollywood notion of middle-aged actresses not being able to get any meaningful roles outside of playing grandmothers and stuff like that.

I didn't really like how the song that would change the world came out, the way it was played, "across all time" and with Bill and Ted not really being the performers in it and more their daughters. It just didn't really seem to fit with how everything was set up in the first movie and continued in the second one (ignoring the montage at the end.) I dunno, I guess at the same time I always thought it wasn't that their music in the time it was played changed everything, created world peace and all of that but it just did after the centuries of cultural integration. It's not like when Beethoven, Bach and all of the greats from that eras of centuries ago played people thought their music was astounding stuff that would change the way people would think, feel, behave and actually be able to influence moods and settings. It became that after centuries of use.

That's how I sort of thought about the Wyld Stalyons music, in the time it was played it was not much more than "good" heavy metal music that maybe at most appealed to wider audiences than just those who listened to that genre of music. But no one took it as ground-breaking stuff that changed the world. Just centuries later it became that.

The third movie was decent enough and fun, but some parts of it didn't make sense.

(So... Ted's dad was resurrected into the future.... And the SWAT van died and was resurrected too?)

Eh, again, fun, but I prefer not to think about it too much. Honestly, I think only the first movie is "worth it" as I kind of don't really care much for Bogus Journey either.
 
I didn't really like how the song that would change the world came out, the way it was played, "across all time" and with Bill and Ted not really being the performers in it and more their daughters. It just didn't really seem to fit with how everything was set up in the first movie and continued in the second one (ignoring the montage at the end.)

Well, to be precise, Bill & Ted were the lead performers, but it was Thea & Billie who created the song. The daughters were portrayed more as the writers/directors who figured out what the others should play.

I liked the twist that it was Thea and Billie. I mean, if the third movie had been made 20-25 years ago, maybe it would've worked for Bill & Ted to be the ones, but doing it now, a generation later, it's more fitting that they're passing the torch. And it still works in spirit, because the reason Thea & Billie had the musical insights to bring this band and this song together is because they lived their whole lives learning from their fathers, absorbing their spirit and their lessons and mastering the music better than Bill & Ted themselves could. So it's still their legacy, the result of their efforts, just not in as direct a way. And even in a more appropriate way, perhaps, because Bill & Ted's quest was never about their own glory or egos, it was about giving something most excellent to others.


I dunno, I guess at the same time I always thought it wasn't that their music in the time it was played changed everything, created world peace and all of that but it just did after the centuries of cultural integration. It's not like when Beethoven, Bach and all of the greats from that eras of centuries ago played people thought their music was astounding stuff that would change the way people would think, feel, behave and actually be able to influence moods and settings. It became that after centuries of use.

Sure, it's a retcon, but it had to be. If they'd stuck to the original continuity, then we would've been in a time when Wyld Stallyns had already saved the world, everything would be perfect, and there'd be no story. Sometimes sequels have to rewrite the continuity to be made at all -- like, say, every one of the original Planet of the Apes sequels.

Besides, it's not like the first two films held up to logical analysis either. They were just jamming around for fun, and so was this. The nonsense of it all is largely the point. It made me laugh as much as the first two films did, and that's enough.

Still, I was a little let down by the depiction of Hell, which was more traditional and less creative than Bogus Journey's version. It looked like the sort of thing that would have been on B&T's album covers.
 
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