My jaw dropped an inch when I watched Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure for the first time in more than a decade and discovered that it was set 21 years ago.
I could not have felt so instantly ancient if I had suddenly grown a beard the length of a Tom Baker scarf.
The world inhabited by the eponymous teenagers is devoid of mobile phones, iPods, Al Qaeda and Britney Spears.
It is dangerous to revisit the films which defined your first decades on earth but this bonhomie and imagination which pulses through Bill & Ted still crackles.
In fact, the zany optimism of the saga almost prefigures the euphoria kindled in the wake of Obama’s election.
The pitch of the story is simple – Ted’s father is going to send him to an Alaskan military academy if he flunks his imminent high school history presentation. This would end the dreams of rock stardom he shares with his best friend Bill.
All seems doomed until a mysterious visitor from the future gives them a time-machine in the shape of a phone box.
They jump through the centuries and collect historical figures as eclectic as Genghis Kahn, Joan of Arc and Abraham Lincoln.
Not only do the pair deliver the greatest history report conceivable, their music becomes the foundation of a utopian society which venerates Bill & Ted with the same honour today’s America gives to Lincoln.
What elevates this fundamentally daft jape beyond other low-budget adventures of the era is its wit and joie de vivre. Although the two heroes personify the “slacker” aesthetic which came of age in the grunge music culture of the 1990s, there is not an ounce of world-weariness or cynicism about them.
They are bonded by a simple belief in one creed: “Be excellent to each other.” They greet people of all time-zones with exuberance and encourage them to “Party on!”
The film refuses to portray lazy and hazy American society as either vapid or degenerate. Their dreams may not extend far beyond persuading Eddie Van Halen to join their band, but their commitment to friendship is an eternal good.
Just as Ted escapes exile to Alaska, contemporary America swerved away from sending that state’s governor to the White House at the last election.
Instead, they chose a man who exhibits the epitome of Hawaiian cool while somehow also possessing the gravitas and vision of a neo-Lincoln.
In the movie this president takes the stage and tells cheering students: “These two great gentlemen are dedicated to a proposition which was true in my time, just as it’s true today. Be excellent to each other.”
Obama this month said something strikingly similar. America is facing crises at every turn, but we will have reason to party if he can transform this time of challenge into a most excellent adventure.
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2 comments:
I'm very impressed that you managed to turn a resume of Bill & Ted into an article on Politics.
Party on Dude!
You should take a Telephone Box trip back to show it to your 13 year old self, he would have been most impressed.
This review of the film from NYT might amuse you, they didn't see the light!
The one dimly interesting thing about ''Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure'' is the way the two teen-age heroes communicate in superlatives. ''We are about to fail most egregiously,'' says Ted to Bill, or maybe it's Bill to Ted. They are also fond of odd words, such as bodacious.
Other than that, they are inconsistent ciphers. They know how to pronounce egregious but when, in their time-travel adventures, they meet Socrates, they call him ''Sock-rates.'' Freud comes out ''Frood.'' ''Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure,'' which opens today at the Criterion Center and the Plaza, is meant to be funny, but it only swells the sinus passages. It is a painfully inept comedy about two high-school pals who, via a magic telephone booth, are able to bounce in and out of great moments of history, to hobnob, in passing, with Napoleon, Joan of Arc and Abraham Lincoln, among others.
The film was directed by Stephen Herek, who made his theatrical film debut with ''Critters.'' Keanu Reeves, who plays Ted, and Alex Winter (Bill) give it the old school try. The screenplay is by Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon. It is their first.
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