Movie Review: Bill & Ted Face the Music (PG13 – 91 minutes)

 

Bill and Ted debuted in 1989 with their Bogus Journey following up in 1991. The story was fairly straightforward: two slackers are visited by a man from the future who tells them they need to pass their history test because in the future their band will write a song that saves the world. If they fail the history test, Ted’s father will send him to military school, breaking up the band, thus depriving the world of the song.  Together, they use a time machine phone booth to travel through time, collecting historical folks to bring them forward to San Dimas, California to participate in their history report.

As insane as that sounds, the movie is plenty of silly fun with some scene-stealing turns from Genghis Khan, Billy the Kid, Socrates, Joan of Arc (who is not Noah’s wife), Sigmund Freud, Beethoven, Abraham Lincoln, and of course, Napoleon. The sequel followed the two as they got killed and had to beat Death at a series of games in order to come back and save their wives and existences. William Sadler’s Death steals every scene he’s in. 

Now, it’s 30 years later, Bill and Ted are middle aged with slacker teenage daughters and have still not written the song.  They are visited again from the future and informed if the song is not written by that evening, space time collapses into itself.  Having spent the last 30 years trying, Bill and Ted instead time hop to the future to check in with their future selves periodically to take the song after they’ve written it. In the meantime, their daughters go back in time to build the ultimate band to perform said song.

The movie is plenty of silly and really is bolstered by the perfect chemistry between Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves. They genuinely love each other, and that certainly comes across. Face the Music is directed by Dean Parisot, who also directed Galaxy Quest and RED 2 along with multiple TV episodes. The writers, Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon came up with this story nearly ten years ago. It has taken this long to get everything aligned perfectly.  It may not work on every level, but if you have a special place in your heart for the first one, this one feels like a warm hug.

Alex and Keanu have remained friends, helping each other out in various projects and in general hanging out.  The idea that Bill and Ted are still together, still struggling as a band, and live next door to one another makes sense – even to the point that they go to couples counseling together with their wives.  They are fun to watch together, and I enjoyed how much fun they are having playing different future versions of themselves.

Samara Weaving and Brigette Lundy-Paine join as Thea and Billie – the daughters of the pair, they essentially do impressions of Bill and Ted from the first movie, which works just fine here. 

William Sadler again steals some scenes as Death and Kristen Schaal plays the daughter of Rufus who provides the guidelines of this adventure to the guys.

Erinn Hayes and Jayma Mays take over playing the princesses in this version, and while still in love with Bill and Ted, they are beginning to grow tired of the general lack of progress they’ve made.

Hal Landon Jr. returns as Chief Logan, Ted’s still angry dad and Amy Stock returns as Missy a character who started as Bill’s step mom, then became Ted’s stepmom and now in this one is marrying Beck Bennett’s Deacon, Ted’s little brother.  Kid Cudi shows up as Kid Cudi, which is very entertaining. 

The standout for me was Anthony Carrigan as Dennis Caleb McCoy.  At first I feared the character would be very irritating, but the more he said, the more I loved him, and he ended up being one of my favorite parts of the flick.

Overall, the movie is not perfect, but it is plenty of silly fun, which honestly – we all need right now.  I do wish there was a little more of the girls pulling famous musicians from history. They only grab a couple and they don’t get a ton to do. To better parallel the original, I do wish those musicians had at least one scene showing them interacting and getting to know one another. As it is, I do enjoy the bits of Jimi Hendrix and Louis Armstrong and Mozart, I just want more.

6 out of 10 – not totally excellent, but certainly not bogus.

Movie Review: Project Power (R – 113 minutes)

 

It will be interesting to see if Netflix maintains the level of new releases it has currently been providing once movie theaters get back to full business.  Project power was a big Netflix release this past weekend but may not have gathered much steam in theaters had it been released there.

Project Power follows the storylines for three separate characters as they converge in New Orleans.  Robin is a young girl struggling through high school with dreams of becoming a rapper – literally.  She has a daydream about rapping her science teacher into his place. Her mother has diabetes and they do not have health insurance. To help make ends meet, she joins her cousin in dealing a new drug that has just hit the streets.  Frank is a New Orleans police officer getting more and more frustrated at the police department’s inability to stop the spread of this new drug. He’s so frustrated that he’s resorted to using the drug to stop those who are dealing it while his captain has to deal with some suspicious government types.  Art is a veteran who has just arrived in New Orleans, following the drug, determined to stop it and find something taken from him.

The drug is called Power – and it gives the user superpowers for 5 minutes. The catch is, you have no idea what power you could get, and there is a chance it simply makes you explode.  It could give you super-strength or bulletproof skin. However, you could get a Morlock-type power and have to move to the sewers for five minutes. The movie half-attempts to explain the science. Essentially the drug is spliced DNA from a lot of different animals, and what we consider ‘powers’ are all features from the animal world. This movie started slow for me, but once it got going, I enjoyed it. I appreciated the three separate characters each with fairly developed stories and the way they came together.  It’s fascinating to judge a movie during a pandemic because I feel like I may not have enjoyed this as much if I saw it in the theater in between standard summer blockbusters. Watching it on Netflix seems a better fit for this tight little action flick.

The movie is directed by the team of Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman who are responsible for Catfish and Paranormal Activities 3 and 4, as well as the thriller Nerve.  The story here is interesting, and the action is good.  It does feel like a small, almost independent action movie, if that makes any sense.

Jamie Foxx is good as Art, attempting to give him layers and hiding his true motive until the middle of the movie.  Foxx is certainly watchable, and while subdued here, a good lead.  He does seem to be taking this a little more seriously than necessary and the movie may have benefitted from taking itself less seriously across the board.

Joseph Gordon Levitt is always interesting, and I still wish he would play Terry McGinnis to a Michael Keaton Bruce Wayne. Here, he’s desperate and determined, but never slides into villain mode.  His is the one character I could have used a little more from. Perhaps Frank and Art are thinking about teaming up for a sequel to continue chasing Power dealers across the country. I’m not sure we need that.

Dominique Fishback plays Robin who begins as irritating as any precocious high schooler in an action movie, but eventually won me over by being more capable and level-headed in almost every situation than her two adult sidekicks. 

Rodrigo Santoro plays a dealer named Biggie who shows up to flood New Orleans with the new drug. He seemed to be having a really good time being over-the-top bad guy. Courtney B. Vance plays JGL’s boss, and Machine Gun Kelly shows up as Robin’s no-good cousin Newt.  I am not familiar with Machine Gun Kelly, and Danny Glover had to help me google him to find out that he’s apparently a rapper.

Overall, I was surprised by how much I ended up enjoying this flick. It could have used a little more fun and less grittiness and while it seems to set itself up for a sequel, I think this would be best served as a one-off: short and interesting, with a well-crafted story and interesting action set pieces.  

6 out of 10.

Also - this movie reminded me of this video...

Movie Review: Palm Springs (R – 90 minutes)

 

This week in lockdown I watched an offering on Hulu.

Palm Springs is a romantic comedy with a twist. It definitely has an independent movie feel, if that makes sense.  It follows the story of Nyles and Sarah who meet at Sarah’s younger sister’s wedding.  Sarah is the maid of honor and Nyles is dating another bridesmaid named Misty.  Over the course of the day of the wedding and reception, and during interactions with an entire host of crazy characters, Nyles and Sarah have a conversation or two that leads to more.

If you have managed to not hear anything else about this movie, that’s fantastic. To say anything else is to get into spoilers that ruin the watching of this movie. I saw Andy Samberg on Seth Myers and he essentially told the whole plot of the movie, which is a shame, because I think I would have enjoyed it a great deal more if I did not know anything about it. 

The movie is directed by Max Barbakow and is charming and sweet alternating with acerbic and zany.  If you are a fan of Samberg, this is in your wheelhouse.  He gives Nyles a fun sensibility despite unusual circumstances. Despite that sense of fun, as the movie goes on, there are layers to Nyles that appear once he realizes how affected he is by Sarah. Milioti manages to do the same to Sarah. She starts out bitter and angry, stays that way for a bit, but then commits herself to the situation and ends up the hero of the piece. 

J.K. Simmons has some fun bits that feel a bit like himself.  Peter Gallagher, Camila Mendes, Tyler Hoechlin, Chris Pang, and Jacqueline Obradors all play wedding party members/attendees to varying levels of crazy. 

June Squibb is in this movie as Sarah’s grandmother and she has one line that left me wishing her character had a larger scene of either explanation or interaction.  Perhaps it is better with the just the one, it gives her quite a bit of mystery.

Overall, the movie is very good and definitely worth the watch. I Hope you get to see it before you hear anything about it.  Also – if you can explain the dinosaurs to me, please do.

6 out of 10.