Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure

Two high school friends must pass their final history assignment or face the end of their dreams of forming a rock band.

I saw this movie aged nine on its original release and thoroughly enjoyed it. I think my mind was blown by how cool it made the subject of history seem and how harmlessly likeable the main protagonists were. Unlike me, my parents, who are Baby-Boomer generation, sat through it with me and did not appreciate Bill and Ted's dumb valleys, surfer dude, stoner-like personalities. Much to their distain I rewatched it more than once.

I watched it yesterday, aged forty with my four yearly daughter and appreciate how it might have come across to my mother at the time. However, the key to enjoying it as an adult is not taking it the slightest bit seriously. The dumbness of the main characters is part of what makes them so charming and the concept that a future of civilisation will be based on a Californian teenage sub-culture is a joke you just have to buy into and enjoy.

The basic plot structure is solid and it uses all its silliness in a clever way with the time-travel sci-fi moments. I love the little details like the stolen car-keys and Ted forgetting to wind his watch.

Some jokes hit the mark more now than they did for me as a child, particularly some of the innuendo involving Bill's stepmom and Bill's confirmation to Sigmund Freud of his 'minor oedipal complex'. Ironically, looking back at this time-travel themed movie is like taking a journey back to the 1980s with it's fashion, music and shopping-mall culture.

Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter are perfect as characters who are essentially two halves of the same brain. George Carlin is to coin a phrase 'excellent' as their guardian angel type friend from the future. Also, the visual effects during the time-travel sequences stand up reasonably well by today's standards.

I took a lot of entertainment from it as child and my daughter stuck with it till the end.

For me it is a 7.5/10 but I round upwards.

Any idiot can sit down and spend four or seven years of his life writing out his "masterpiece." You do some research, you do some hard work, you get a little help from friends and family, and you get it done. But, it takes a true writing genius (or geniuses, in this case) to create something as original as "Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure." The ingenuity of the movie can even be seen in its delightful tagline: "History is about to be re-written by two guys who can't spell." This tagline is both simple and clever, while being both corny and slightly comical. Like "Real Genius," this film utilizes ideas from both the highest form of screenwriting while still delving into the lowest common denominator, somehow doing both at the same time. For instance, to perfectly grasp the concept of Bill and Ted's "lingo," one would truly have to stoop to the lowest rung of the intelligence level. But, with such ingenius ideas as having Bill and Ted meet each other in the beginning of the film, then later finding themselves, allowing the audience to gain insight on what happened in the past is just a stroke of cinematic brilliance. And the running gag about "when the Mongols conquered China" was one of the many cherries on the cake. Even some of the background comments (after being told he's "too tall, man" making the phone booth even more crowded, Lincoln responds: "That's how I'm built.") Any movie where Genghis Kahn is tempted to come into a phone booth by a Twinkie has to be something special. If only production companies and filmmakers would take a chance on something as original as a time travelling phone booth carrying two idiots on the course to better the future, the public could finally go back to watching movies in theaters again.

June 8, 2002 was an 80's renaissance for me. Playing an emulated ColecoVision on my PC, listening to Huey Lewis, Prince, and Men At Work, watching the A-Team on TNN, and seeing this film from 1989. I still enjoy the decade of feathered mullets, jerri-curled hair, acid-washed jeans, skinny ties, dominant pop music, and terrible fashions. The 90's will never have that to live down (except terrible fashions, but not as bad).

When Bill And Ted's Excellent Adventure became the surprise hit of 1989, it made a star of everyone's favorite Lebanese-Canadian-U.S. rock 'n rolling actor, Keanu Reeves, who is one of the top stars at the box office today and one of the few likeable people in Tinseltown. It seems that he still carries a bit of Theodore "Ted" Logan in all his movies.

He and Alex Winter (an indie film dynamo) play Bill and Ted, a couple of 80's California dudes who want to start their own rock band (Wyld Stallyons). However, both are flunking in high school and will be expelled unless they get an A+ in history. To make matters worse, Ted will be sent to the military by his father, therefore squashing their dreams of rock stardom. Enter Rufus (George Carlin), a man from the future who plays Clarence to the boys George (shades of It's A Wonderful Life) who gives them a telephone booth. With it, they decide to use it to collect great historical figures and bring them to San Dimas, California to show them how mankind has evolved.

Surprisingly, the film holds up today. Bill and Ted are truly likeable boneheads and both Reeves and Winter deliver fine performances. Carlin is funny in his appearances, showing that he doesn't need trash-talk to be entertaining. The dialogue is truly amusing, probably because no one talks like that any more. The only weakness is that it's an 80's film, so if you didn't grow up in that era, you might not understand why there's music playing throughout the film, or why everyone looks and dresses so weird (yes, that's how everyone looked in the 1980's). The DVD version is quite nice, but it only has a trailer as a bonus. Still, a must watch, and much better than all the copycat films (including the horrible Dude, Where's My Car?). Party On!

Despite the success of such films as "Speed" and "The Matrix" trilogy, to a lot of people, Keanu Reeves will ALWAYS be Ted, the taller, darker half of the Bill & Ted duo. And it would seem that Ted, of all Reeves many characters, is possibly the only one where he really seemed to have put himself into the role and felt like a natural.

One of the great dopey dude slacker classics, the title characters Bill (Alex Winter) and Ted (the aforementioned Reeves) are a pair of aspiring musicians, the Wild Stallions, who are in danger of being both separated if Ted can't pull up a good enough grade (which = military school) and flunking history class in general. But since they are destined to be "the 2 Great Ones" who's music will unite the Earth and even alien races together in universal harmony, the most excellent dude Rufus (George Carlin) shows up and gives them a time traveling phone booth to help them pass their history class by bringing back real historical figures like Billy the Kid, Abraham Lincoln, Napoleon, Joan of Ark and what not. Now all they have to do is keep them from getting separated and jailed before they have to pass history! Along the way, Bill & Ted also fall in love with two sexy virgin princesses from the medieval circa.

Yeah it's not great cinema, but it's a fun romp of slacker dude madness thanks to the energy and enthusiasm of Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves as the title characters.

Followed by "Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey".

If you weren't around in '89, when this became a surprise cultural phenomenon, well, you kinda had to be there. Looking back with critical eyes, it's a rather thin, desperately low-budget production that doesn't probe beyond the superficial layer and constantly winks and nudges the audience to ensure they know when to laugh. Yet, recognizing all that, I found myself wrapped up in its oddly naive warmth and charismatic magnetism. The jokes and gags are hammy and contrived, but I still snickered. The most memorable lines are clumsy and blunt, but I gladly recited them (surprising myself, as I hadn't seen the film in twenty-plus years). Bill and Ted themselves are the narrowest of stereotypes, basically the male equivalent of Frank Zappa's valley girls, yet I felt a rich tingle of satisfaction when they saved their academic careers. It's one of those films that defies logic, succeeding in spite of itself, and there's something of value in that.