FOR THOSE WHO CAME IN LATE: I love Bill and Ted. Their eternal optimism and singular desire to hang out and have fun while uniting all of mankind through music and friendship is Pure and Beautiful. I grew up watching EXCELLENT ADVENTURE and BOGUS JOURNEY, and it really did imbue me with a secret mantra that still lives inside my heart. OK?

You’ve got two best friends who time travel and take important figures from all of history in order to pass a final exam so that they can graduate from high school and eventually go on to create music that serves as the cornerstone to an egalitarian paradise hundreds of years in the future. Along the way, they meet and befriend Joan of Arc, Abraham Lincoln, Napoleon, Sigmund Freud, Socrates, and so on, as well as two princesses from medieval England who they bring back to 1989 Southern California. In the sequel, some evil dude from the future sends two evil Bill and Ted robots to the present era to murder their human counterparts, effectively rewriting history so that their music does not fulfill the prophesy foretold in the previous film. The robots succeed, Bill and Ted are murdered, and they end up going to Hell and meeting Satan, and then challenge the Grim Reaper to a series of games so that they can go back to Earth to stop the robots from ruining their lives. The Grim Reaper accompanies them to Heaven where, after speaking to God, they recruit a genius alien inventor who agrees to help them create good robots to kill the evil robots. Listen, it’s inspired stuff. It is fearlessly cool. I wish I could write something even a tenth as good as this.

AND SO IT WAS that after many years of following the troubled development of the third film, my brother McCune and I sat down on a Thursday afternoon a few weeks ago, popped a couple of gummies, and chilled the heck out with BILL & TED FACE THE MUSIC. Somehow they got this thing made, and we were front row on day one for it. We were both hootin and hollerin the entire time. I’m not going to review it, because come on. All I want to say is that it is every bit as good as the two that came before, and it somehow feels wholly impervious to the godless avalanche of complete dogshit that movie studios have been poisoning the world with in the interim. It is a movie from a different era without it being a parody of itself or some sort of nostalgia trip. There is nothing cynical about it. Holistically it retains the same purity as before. It’s a story about two best friends who want to fulfill their destiny of helping all humans live in perfect harmony. Man! This is absolutely the sort of wholesomeness that the world needs right now. The message is real.

What I’m saying is: it ruled. Go watch it!!