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Greetings, Frotcast faithful. Sick-skel and G-Bert (aka Vince Mancini and Matt Lieb) return this week to discuss the latest Bill & Ted movie, Bill & Ted Face The Music. To this reviewer’s mind, the best thing about the original Bill & Ted was the implication (tongue-in-cheek, I believe) that a shopping mall in San Dimas, California was the culmination of human achievement up until that point. In Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, all the great men and women of history travel through time to marvel at various aspects of the San Dimas mall circa 1989. That’s a funny idea!
Meanwhile, the most interesting thing about a Bill & Ted installment in 2020 is the realization that virtually all of the cultural touchstones of the original — Val-speak, glam metal, two-hand tapping guitar licks, the suburbs of LA as a center for culture, shopping malls — have since turned out to be, to varying degrees, dead ends. Bill & Ted are almost a perfect anachronism. Rather than take on any of that, Bill & Ted Face The Music basically says “hey, what if 50-year-old Bill and Ted were exactly like teenage Bill and Ted? And also they had teenage daughters who were exactly (inexplicably) like 1989 Bill and Ted? And one of them wore a rashguard that looks like a Crown Royal sack?”
That… seems like a missed opportunity? Which is why part of me hates it. And yet it turns out to be a reasonably tolerable movie. Why? We answer that question and more, including our favorite Chadwick Boseman movies, on this week’s Frotcast. You’ll definitely want to check this one out, and as always, we bid you a most heartfelt “no refunds.”
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