"Bill & Ted Face the Music"

When I was a kid, Bill & Ted was one of those things that I was aware of without having ever seen. All I really knew was that "Bill & Ted" was a comedy film about two guys who travelled through time in a phone booth, like Doctor Who (and when I was a kid I didn't know much about Doctor Who either). I also knew that they said "excellent" a lot, which resulted in them kind of morphing into a blob in my mind with Wayne and Garth from Wayne's World (which I've still never properly watched). In my Twenties, I watched Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey at a movie night, but not having seen the first one I wasn't really into it. Since then, my biggest exposure to Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure was because I'm interested in the history of the Napoleonic Wars; clips of Napoleon from Excellent Adventure get used as GIFs a lot when people are making jokes about that era online. That was pretty much it. So a few months ago, when I friend of mine said "Check out the trailer for the new Bill & Ted film!" I was like "Uh... okay."

The trailer seemed amusing enough, so when it came time that Bill & Ted Face the Music was actually going to be released in theatres (pandemics notwithstanding), I thought "I'd better actually watch Excellent Adventure, and rewatch Bogus Journey." So I did. And those two films, as I expected/remembered, were amusing, light pieces of comedy which benefit from a spirit of fun; things happen in these films because they're funny, without much effort being needed for explanation. Thus Billy the Kid can become friends with Socrates, who can only speak Classical Greek (so no one can understand what he's saying, and he can't understand them) and Napoleon, accidentally displaced from 1805 to 1989, is perfectly happy to eat ice cream, go tenpin bowling, and hog the slides at a water park.

In many respects, I actually found Bogus Journey to be a good deal better than Excellent Adventure, not only because it's more visually interesting and creatively shot and directed, probably due to a higher budget, but also because of William Sadler's amusing turn as Death, which works very well with the cheerful, likeable performances of the young Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves, back when both of their careers were quite different. Based on the trailers, I figured that Face the Music was probably going to be more or less a trip down memory lane of the comedy concepts of the original film, just with the addition of Bill and Ted being middle aged and having daughters. I wasn't really expecting anything new.

And, for better or worse, that's what Face the Music is. The plot is essentially the same as both of the originals, except instead of having to pass their history assignment or play in the Battle of the Bands, Bill and Ted have to compose and perform "the song to unite the world". They travel through time and the afterlife in pursuit of this goal. They're hunted at one point by a killer robot sent from the future. Meanwhile, their daughters, Thea and Billie, have a mini Excellent Adventure and Bogus Journey of their own, assembling historical musicians and inadvertently making a detour to hell. In the end they reunite (including with Death) and play the song at just the right moment. And all, as expected, is well.

Bill & Ted isn't the kind of film series that you criticise from a story or character standpoint: Bill and Ted are silly and so are their adventures. Really, the issues with Face the Music come largely from a production perspective, although I will say that, writing wise, it would have been nice if writers Solomon and Matheson (creators and original performers of the characters) could have done something new. Production-wise, though, I thought the film was visually a bit cold, not only in the way it's shot but also in terms of effects. There's something too clean about modern lenses and digital recording that especially makes flat wide shots look like something from marketing material rather than cinema. Similarly, the use of modern CGI tends to be quite sterile and lacking in grit; I would have rather have seen more of Bill and Ted's own homes and environments different to the polished CGI-enhanced future and hell locations.

That aside, Bill & Ted Face the Music is fine. It's reasonably funny, quite funny in parts, and the premise of the two leads trying to hunt down the future song from various older versions of themselves is entertaining. I actually wish that this had been used to a greater extent; perhaps the best, most Bill-&-Ted-esque moment in the film is when the two, desperate to ensure that their hostile future selves won't know what they're up to, put buckets on their heads and fall out a window in order to deliberately give their future selves unclear memories of the past. Most of the best moments come from these interactions with various future selves and how they try to trick each other, and I think more of this wouldn't have gone astray. As a number of people have stated, Alex Winter seems more familiar as Bill than Reeves, with his latter-day John Wick-esque action man persona, not seeming as comfortable as Ted; he just feels a little bit too sad, although he gets some funny moments arguing with his future self.

The other major aspect of the film involves the daughters, Thea and Billie, and while this is enjoyable in itself, in many respects the two characters are more sweet and likeable than they are laugh-out-loud funny, and I think it's a shame they weren't afforded more moments to be outright humorous. Every Bill & Ted film now has its cutaway story, the role occupied by Napoleon's hijinks in the first film and by Evil Robot Bill and Ted in the second, so it feels appropriate to do something similar here, and using the time machine for actual musical purposes makes sense, although with Mozart showing up in this one after Bach in Bogus Journey and Beethoven in Excellent Adventure I think they've run the full gamut of well-known Early Modern German musicians. It's nice that Bill and Ted discover that their daughters can lead the composition of the "song to unite the world", and the film benefits from a heartwarming and positive ending. And that's not hugely different from the originals, so, again, it's appropriate, although as I say it's more "nice" than particularly funny. Probably my only complaint is that I wish there had been a little more William Sadler as Death. It was nice for Ted's dad to show up once again.

I don't know how I've managed to write over one thousand words on Bill & Ted Face the Music, but there you go. It's a silly, sometimes funny, sometimes just "nice" film with some strong performances and some iffy visual qualities. That's about all it needed to be. Was it everything a third Bill & Ted film could have been? I don't even know if that's a meaningful question. I think it lived up to the existing standard of the original films. Surely for a sequel made nearly thirty years later that more or less constitutes success. We wouldn't necessarily suffer from more films which showed the potential for people to like each other and get along. Who knows? Maybe this will turn out to be timely and after everything people have gone through lately they might start seeing things more like the Prestons and Logans. Maybe we really have seen a little glimpse of the future. Maybe.

The Dreamlike, and "I'm Thinking of Ending Things"

SPOILERS for various things follow.

When, as I do, one watches a lot of weird horror films and a lot of David Lynch films, one becomes acclimatised to certain things. I'm always looking for the Weird Itch to be scratched, and lately I've only really been able to do so through literature, namely the weird fiction of Thomas Ligotti and Jon Padgett, and to a certain extent the postmodern oddness of Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49. So when I heard of the new Netflix release I'm Thinking of Ending Things described as functioning on "dream logic", I was immediately intrigued.

Those who've watched I'm Thinking of Ending Things know what happens in it, and those who haven't probably are best served by not reading any kind of plot summary, so I'll refrain from including one. Suffice to say it's unsettling and dreamlike, a narrative of eerie delusion not unlike the works of Lynch. However, the film it most reminded me of was 2017's Ghost Stories (not to be confused with A Ghost Story), in that a disturbing sequence of events is ultimately revealed to be an elaborate morbid reverie on the part of a comatose or dying person, a tradition dating back through things like Jacob's Ladder to the classic Ambrose Bierce short story "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" and probably beyond.

I'm Thinking of Ending Things was almost everything I wanted it to be: intentionally disjointed, dreamlike, discomforting, a musing on the collapsing of identity and reality, as well as being stylish and powerfully-acted — right up until the end. To me, the final sequences somewhat damaged the ambiguity of everything that came before, as it becomes wholly apparent that the protagonist is actually a figment of another character's imagination, and that said character appears to have been living out either an elaborate fantasy throughout his life or just as he dies.

Such narrative conceits are entirely valid. There's nothing wrong with them, even if, considering the examples I've listed above, they're a little tired. Apparently the novel on which this is based makes this concept even more obvious, although I haven't read it. I'm generally reluctant to watch films based on novels without having read the novel first, but I felt like seizing the moment. In any event, they can make for quite moving ruminations on the nature of regret, self-loathing, and the fragility of a sense of self and presence in the world in the space of our short lives.

However, I can't help but feel that Dreamlikes, as I'm terming them, of this stripe, exist in a certain degree of contradiction with their presentation. The Dreamlike tends to be crafted from a consistent set of elements: a shifting sense of time, place and character, the intrusion of otherwise unconnected elements from waking life, the expression of a world which seems to only exist in the immediacy of experience, flowing into a new shape from moment to moment.

There is a reason why Lynch is a master of the Dreamlike, and why many other usages of the mode fall short: they never fully engage with this sense of immediacy. In so many Dreamlikes, things are symbolic, they are clues, they are hints to some terrible secret lurking just below the surface which, when pieced together, demonstrate to us the tragedy of human experience. And yet this in itself provides a somewhat comfortable narrative in which things ultimately make sense: the ghost our hero saw is actually the living person in the waking world trying to revive them, the rambunctious friend is actually a projection of suppressed elements of their own personality, and so on. Note the amusing parody of the conclusion of A Beautiful Mind at the end of I'm Thinking of Ending Things.

What a more Lynchian Dreamlike achieves is the much more unsettling and yet more accurate representation that, in dreams, things largely do not make sense. The "story" of a dream may have a certain direction, but is accompanied by or even assembled from largely disconnected and even random elements floating upon the surface of, or nested deep within, our minds ("We are like the spider. We weave our life and then move along it."). And this is, in many respects, a more powerful reflection of reality, because, in many respects, reality does not make sense either.

Just as the dream assembles itself without our control (putting lucid dreaming aisde) from the countless images firing in our resting brains, life is pieced together through the interaction of an external world over which we, as beings with agency, have no external control, and an internal world, the organic jumble of lenses, sensory, psychological, cultural, biological, etc., through which we experience it. In most Dreamlikes, things ultimately come together: there is a stabilisation. But in reality, as in dreams, there is only constant transformation; Jon Padgett's narrator in his short story "Origami Dreams" observes that even death "is only a transition into yet another borrowed reality." This is why the ending of the third season of Twin Peaks has, to my mind, more allure than any narrative revealing a protagonist's dying or deluded imaginings (as another example of the latter, consider also Shutter Island), in that it evokes what I see as the true impact of the Dreamlike in general.

None of this is to say that I'm Thinking of Ending Things is not worth anyone's time. It's certainly worth watching for its own merits and arguments about loneliness, anxiety and fantasy. Ghost Stories, incidentally, is worth it for similar reasons. And I will also say that its use of the Dreamlike is effective in rendering a representation of the constantly rearranged, borderline delirious quality of deeply-involved fantasies and delusions. But things do ultimately settle into a state of equilibrium. I just wish that writers and directors utilising what I have here termed "the Dreamlike" were more willing to engage with what I see as the power it possesses that I feel only Lynch has truly tapped into in the cinematic field. Almost all of the Dreamlikes I've seen have used the mode to produce evocative, through-provoking, unsettling and challenging works, but the mode has the potential to go even further. There is always the inherent opportunity to exceed presenting difficult interpretations of reality, in order to query the notion of interpretability itself.