Destroy All Neighbors (2024)

Director: Josh Forbes

Cast: Jonah Ray Rodriguez, Kiran Deol, Thomas Lennon, Alex Winter

Have I Seen it Before: Two weeks into the new year, and this is the first new movie I’ve managed to see. On that metric alone, it’s an early favorite for the best movie of the year.

Did I Like It: As a horror movie, it’s ultimately too cheap and bending over backwards to find justifications for its makeup effects to really love. Going beyond that, it’s more interested in being gross before it ever tries to be gory, and it really took me to get to this film before I realized that gross without gore is just gross, and it takes more than a little bit to offset the original imbalance.

I might get to the point where I actively dislike the film when I come to the inescapable conclusion that I actively dislike all of the characters, protagonist and antagonist alike. Vlad (Winter, also co-producing) is a finely-tuned creation of irritation, but William (Rodriguez, also also co-producing*) is the same kind of deeply frustrating person that makes life and the human experience may be designed to irritate only.

All of that would be an easy way to say that I’m thoroughly displease with the film, but damned if I didn’t find myself laughing throughout. It almost, almost (but not quite) repairs my diminished first impression Shudder left on me**.

But truly, I hate the title of the film. It’s something people would come up with for a bargain basement video game in the early 2000s. Honey, I Dismembered Vlad would have worked a lot better. Almost anything. Sophie’s Choice would have been a better choice for the movie.

*If others were involved with this movie, one would be hard-pressed to deny that the film would be right at home on a newer episode Mystery Science Theater 3000.

**Honestly, the thing is buggy with a heavily diminished library. It’s as if the worst impulses of both Netflix and Paramount+ were forged into a separate streaming service.

Bill & Ted Face The Music (2020)

Director: Dean Parisot

Cast: Keanu Reeves, Alex Winter, Samara Weaving, Brigette Lundy-Paine

Have I Seen it Before: No. Haven’t seen this Bill and Ted movie before. Feels nice to type that.

Did I Like It: As I type this, it’s been about two days since I watched the movie, and I can’t quite get it out of my head. That’s a good thing.

I could talk about flaws that any film might have. Some of the jokes and plot points are telegraphed. I had a feeling that Rufus’ great prophecy would have quite a bit to do with Bill (Winter) & Ted’s (Reeves) daughters after about twenty minutes. I figured Deacon (Beck Bennett) was going to be Missy’s new spouse after I heard the casting announcement.

But it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter because the film took years to get off the ground, and I was pretty sure there for a while that it wasn’t going to happen. I love Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989) and Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey (1991), and have since they were brand new. My affection for those films only grew as I did, when it became clear that the films (and their protagonists were way smarter than they first let on. This is the only film still standing in the 2020 release slate that I was looking forward to. I’m really glad that I got to watch it.

It’s genuinely, off-the-wall funny, perhaps just as much so as its predecessors. The robot charged with assassinating the great ones (played by Anthony Carrigan) is one of the nimbler comic creations in recent memory. I’d say more, but it would be ruining most of the fun for you. To not belabor the point, I’ve just mentioned the character’s name a couple of times since seeing the movie, my wife and I break out into laughter.

But this film is of a piece with the rest other films in the series in a far more profound way. I’ve always viewed the more harebrained time travel shenanigans were a metaphor for the writing process. Forgot to introduce the trash can before you needed it to get out of trouble? Just go back and put it in. Time travel is like that, and so is writing multiple drafts of something.

Here, the forward motion of the plot solidified something I knew about the creative process but puts it into stark relief. Billie and Thea try to help their Dads by going back in time and forming the greatest band in the universe to play the song that will put the universe back on track. Where to start? Jimi Hendrix (DazMann Still). Hendrix can only be convinced if his hero, Louis Armstrong (Jeremiah Craft) is brought into the mix. Armstrong brings in Mozart (Daniel Dorr). Mozart yearns to jam with Ling Lun (Sharon Gee), who ten imagines that rhythm began and end with Grom (Patty Anne Miller). The band is formed, but the Preston/Logan scions don’t think they are the genius behind the music. But they are the ones that can bring the greatest bass player in the universe, The Grim Reaper (William Sadler). They just like what they like, and they put together what worked.

But that’s all they ever needed to do. It’s all any creative person can do, really. As somebody who’s work has been dismissed a number of times as just fan fiction, I knew that, but it was nice to hear it.

I really love this movie. It is my favorite movie of 2020. Had we gotten the pleasure of a full slate of movies this year, I imagine I would still put it at number 1.

Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey (1991)

Director: Pete Hewitt

Cast: Keanu Reeves, Alex Winter, William Sadler, George Carlin

Have I Seen It Before?: Oh, without a doubt. Come to think of it, the novelization for the film may have been the first book not exclusively marketed for children that I ever read… Not sure why I chose that moment to admit that.

Did I like it?: The filmmakers and cast themselves have decided that this was one-half of a very clever film, and another half of a film that had no idea what to do with itself other than attach itself to a delirium-fueled inside joke (Station!) between the writers.

Maybe I just saw the film for the first time when I was seven, that golden age when films are great and any kind of critical filter is a thing of diminished older beings. And when I came back to the film as I got older, I could only appreciate it more. Convention wisdom would have dictated another trip through time, hitting the exact same notes as the original Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989). One need only look to the sequels to Back to the Future (1985). To listen to the commentary on the Blu Ray, there was talk of having Bill and Ted travel through the realm of fiction to pass a troublesome literature class, which is different enough, but I am glad they avoided, for <purely selfish reasons.>

Instead, the sequel to Excellent Adventure turns out to be a fairly effective remake of Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957). What a demented, inspired choice. Honestly, between this and Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990) we got some truly next-level comedy sequels in the early 1990s. 

Complaints are scant and largely cosmetic. I only noticed on this screening that the heroes embedded homophobia is still on display (although the movie doesn’t stop all together to wallow in such a moment) and there is far too little George Carlin in the film to truly satisfy, especially since we’re not going to get him in a film any time soon. On an odd note, I’m now often struck by my theory as to how much this film might have inspired some of the design choices eighteen years later in J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek (2009). The lecture auditorium at Bill & Ted University so starkly resembles the bridge of the Enterprise from that film, whereas the brief glimpse of the lair of De Nomolos (Joss Ackland, who legend tells hated being in the movie as much as the character himself hated living the Stallyns’ future) looks like the clockwork interior of the Narada. Even the clothes worn by Rufus (Carlin) and his attempts to chase the villains back in time bring to mind Spock in that film.

Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure (1989)

Director: Stephen Herek

Cast: Keanu Reeves, Alex Winter, George Carlin, Hal Landon Jr.

Have I Seen it Before: Uhhh… Yeah. I first became interested in my wife because she randomly mentioned both this film and Back to the Future (1985) in a conversation. It lives in me.

Did I Like It: I remember my fourth grade teacher saying at one point that both this movie and the characters within it were among the dumbest she had ever seen. That statement stuck with me beyond anything else that particular educator said (including her name, now that I think about it) is both an indictment of anything that happened at an institute named after Robert E. Lee, and the fact that even at the age of 10 I so vehemently disagreed with this assessment so immediately.

The movie is not stupid. Any movie that pins a button on the uniform of Napoleon Bonaparte (Terry Camilleri) for eating ice cream and then makes him an absolute fiend for water slides is not stupid. I could keep going on this list of reasons the film itself is not stupid, when you should really go watch the film and experience it for yourself.

But Bill S. Preston, Esq. (Winter) and Ted “Theodore” Logan (Reeves) are not dumb, either. They are exceptionally bright, sort of ridiculously so, but incomplete as people. They are ignorant, but not willfully ignorant. Therein lies their charm. They learn an exceptionally large amounts of information about history in 90 minutes of runtime.

Now, there is a moment in the film that plays so sourly that one is immediately tempted to think the whole movie suffers. After thinking that Ted had died at the hand of one of their antagonists in Medieval England, the members of Wyld Stallyns are reunited and embrace. Horrified, they immiedately push away from one another and call each other fags. 

Now, unlike Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (1994) which went out of its way to predicate its entire plot on each and every character being suddenly and irreparably transphobic, this moment may not age well, but it does feel like two teenage boys of the 1980s would probably have internalize this precise measure of homophobic toxic masculinity. This alone makes their fate as the saviors of all human kind far harder to swallow then any amateurish guitar riff they might play.

They do get better, as Rufus says. We’ll all see soon enough, but even the course of this excellent adventure they have made quantum leaps forward in that regard.