Worth Mentioning - The Meaning of Meaning

We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning. 

Bill and Ted, DC heroes, family horror, and ninjas.

BILL & TED FACE THE MUSIC (2020)

When they were teenagers, aspiring musicians Bill S. Preston, Esquire (Alex Winter) and Ted "Theodore" Logan (Keanu Reeves) found out that the music of their band Wyld Stallyns and their positive message ("Be excellent to each other" and "Party on, dudes") will be the basis of a utopian society in the 27th century. That information has really dragged down their lives. The sequel Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey was set five years after Bill and Ted found out how important they are to the future in Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, and at that point they were bummed that Wyld Stallyns hadn't had any success yet. But at the end of Bogus Journey, their transcendent performance and accompanying speech at a Battle of the Bands competition was broadcast all around the world, and it looked like that was the moment when their music united humanity. The end credits played over images of newspaper and magazine headlines where we saw the success Wyld Stallyns enjoyed and the positive impact their music had on the world. They had #1 hits, they played huge venues - even the Grand Canyon and Mars! They achieved world peace, eliminated smog, repurposed nukes to power their amps.

But screenwriters Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon, along with Winter and Reeves, wanted to revisit the characters, so you need to put those headlines out of mind when you watch Bill & Ted Face the Music and find that our heroes are in a major rut because they still haven't written the song that will unite the world. As described in the film, they've been "beating their heads against the wall for 25 years" trying to come up with this song, and the fact that they haven't done it yet is having a negative effect on their marriages to former medieval-era princesses Joanna (Jayma Mays) and Elizabeth (Erinn Hayes). On the same day they attend couples therapy with their wives, Bill and Ted are visited by someone from the future: Kelly (Kristen Schaal), the daughter of their old future pal Rufus. Rufus had been played by George Carlin, who passed away in 2008, but he gets a holographic tribute in this film, and his character's daughter Kelly is named after Carlin's real life daughter.

Kelly takes Bill and Ted to 2067, where her mother The Great Leader (Holland Taylor) informs them that reality as they know it will collapse at 7:17pm that evening, just 77 minutes from then, if they don't do something about it. Bill and Ted come up with a scheme to use Rufus's old telephone booth time machine to travel into their future and get the reality-saving song from their future selves. This is mind-bending, because if reality is going to fold in on itself at 7:17pm on an evening in 2020, how can Bill and Ted travel into the future and find that their future selves don't know what the song is, either? And they do this, going through multiple years and meeting multiple different, mostly unpleasant versions of themselves. If they don't have the song, how do they exist past 2020? These things are beyond me, I just have to go along for the ride.

While Bill and Ted are on their quest for the song, there's a B plot that centers on their adult daughters Billie (Brigette Lundy-Paine) and Thea (Samara Weaving), who have a plan of their own that involves using Kelly's updated time machine. We go into this movie expecting Winter and Reeves to be great as Bill and Ted, we've seen them play these characters twice before, but Lundy-Paine and Weaving have the chance to impress with their performances as these girls who are music lovers just like their dads. I was already a fan of Weaving from seeing her in things like The Babysitter, Mayhem, and Ready or Not, but this was my first time seeing Lundy-Paine, who does a great job of making it very clear that Billie is Ted's offspring.

Meanwhile, The Great Leader is thinking maybe the world will be a better place if Bill and Ted are dead, so she has sent a robot - played by Anthony Carrigan and unexpectedly named Dennis Caleb McCoy - through time to kill them. One of the most hapless and emotional robots ever created, Dennis does indeed kill several people, people we don't want to see dead. That means a trip into the afterlife is in order.

Bill and Ted's life didn't go the way I expected it to after the events of Bogus Journey, but that's okay, it didn't go the way Bill and Ted expected it to, either. Whose life does go the way they envision? I can follow Bill & Ted Face the Music down its unexpected path because Matheson and Solomon, along with director Dean Parisot, managed to deliver a really entertaining sequel that has a lot of heart. And when a movie has as much sincere heart as this film does, that goes a long way with me. The story is a fun blend of elements from both Excellent Adventure and Bogus Journey - the time travel from Excellent Adventure, and the visit to the afterlife, specifically Hell, with Bill and Ted's former bandmate Death (William Sadler) joining in at that point, being the Bogus Journey part of the mix. Since almost the entire film happens within a span of 77 minutes in Bill and Ted's lives, things move quite quickly and there are a lot of laughs and smiles along the way.

Winter, Reeves, and Sadler aren't the only returning characters. Hal Landon Jr. reprises the role of Ted's dad, and Amy Stoch is back as Missy, who used to be Ted's stepmom, and was Bill's stepmom, and before that she was the older girl in their high school that Bill and Ted both had crushes on. Now Missy is married to Ted's younger brother Deacon. It was good to see Landon and Stoch as these characters again, just as it was great to see Winter and Reeves play Bill and Ted one more time, nearly thirty years after the last time we saw them.

ZACK SNYDER'S JUSTICE LEAGUE (2021)

When Warner Bros. teamed with director Zack Snyder to build a cinematic universe that would bring the members of DC Comics' Justice League together on the big screen, Snyder was given creative control on his films. Then a problem arose: apparently WB didn't like the choices Snyder was making on Man of Steel and Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice. Which I can understand, I didn't like some of the choices he was making, either. Especially on that second movie. When Batman v. Superman was released to very poor reviews, WB tried to rein Snyder in on the follow-up film, Justice League. They demanded a running time no more than 2 hours, and hired Joss Whedon to rewrite the screenplay by Batman v. Superman's Chris Terrio and lighten up Snyder's often dour universe. But Snyder kept making choices WB didn't agree with, and when he turned in his cut of Justice League, they informed him that the film would be undergoing reshoots that Whedon would be directing. Snyder had just suffered a devastating personal tragedy, so he didn't have any energy to fight for his Justice League vision. He walked away from the project and Whedon reshot something like 75% of the movie. In 2017, the WB/Whedon version of Justice League was released to bad reviews and disappointing box office.

For years, fans held on to the hope that they might someday get to see the "Snyder cut" of Justice League... and when WB needed to draw subscribers to the new HBO Max streaming service, they realized that the Snyder cut could do that job very nicely. So Zack Snyder's Justice League finally made it out to the world through HBO Max earlier this year, and a streaming service really feels like the perfect home for this movie. Aside from the fact that a fortune was clearly put into the special effects, this doesn't feel like something that was ever intended to be a theatrical release. With a 4 hour running time, it doesn't even feel like a streaming movie, it feels like a mini-series. It's even divided into chapters that could have been released as episodes.

This was certainly never going to be able to fit into the 2 hour running time WB wanted. The title heroes - Batman (Ben Affleck), Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot), The Flash (Ezra Miller), Cyborg (Ray Fisher), and Aquaman (Jason Momoa) - only gather together for the first time 2 hours into the movie, for their first confrontation with the alien villain Steppenwolf (voiced by Ciarán Hinds). There's a sixth member of the Justice League, Superman (Henry Cavill), but he was killed at the end of Batman v. Superman and isn't resurrected until 2 and a half hours into this 4 hour epic. So at no point was this ever going to be what WB wanted. It's a wonder they ever even gave a greenlight to the script, they must have seen how thick it was.

The story involves a conqueror of worlds, Darkseid (voiced by Ray Porter) of the plantet Apokolips. Thousands of years ago, Darkseid attempted to conquer Earth using three devices called Mother Boxes, which are meant to be put together to form a Unity, at which point they will "cleanse the world with fire" and turn it into copy of Apokolips. Kind of like what the villainous Kryptonians were trying to do in Man of Steel. Darkseid was driven away by the combined forces of Old Gods, men, Atlanteans, Amazons, and guardians from space - and he left the Mother Boxes behind. When Superman died, the Mother Boxes reactivated, and now Darkseid's disgraced uncle Steppenwolf, backed up with an army of creatures called Parademons, has come to Earth to gather the Mother Boxes, conquer the planet, and prove his worth to his nephew. Unfortunately for him, the Earth has a Justice League to protect it. Or it will, if Batman can manage to gather all the heroes together and resurrect Superman with a Mother Box. (Of course he succeeds.)

I actually got some entertainment out of the theatrical cut of Justice League, in a "harmless, dumb fun" sort of way. I never thought it was good, I even described it as "rushed, awkward, and inconsequential", but I enjoyed the action. It's shocking how much more substance and depth the Snyder cut had, and WB decided to just toss it aside. With the benefit of 4 hours to work with, Snyder is able to give all of the heroes storylines, with Cyborg getting a lot more to do in this version of the film. He was "just sort of there" in the theatrical cut, but he's a major character in the Snyder cut.

While Zack Snyder's Justice League is much better than the theatrical cut, I still can't say that this was something I loved. I don't know if I'll ever devote 4 hours to watching it again, and even my first viewing I didn't get through in one sitting. I had to break the viewing up into chapters, just like Snyder breaks the movie up into chapters. I've never been enamored with Snyder's filmmaking style, and he still made decisions here that didn't sit right with me. Like when Wonder Woman saves a group of hostages from a terrorist group that have taken over a building with the intention of blowing it up. She disposes of the bomb, wipes out all but one of the terrorists, and has the drop on the final one. The guy is caught, he's reloading his gun, the fight is over. So how does Wonder Woman handle this? She hits him with a blast from her bracelets that vaporizes him and blows a whole wall out of the building. Why did she do that? Why was this property damage necessary to take out one guy who had no way out of the situation anyway? We just saw Wonder Woman cross the room at super-speed to deflect bullets away from hostages with her bracelets, we know she can reach that guy before he finishes reloading. So why blow up that wall? The only explanation is, Snyder likes to blow things up. For Wonder Woman, it was a baffling choice.

But even though I don't always like or agree with his choices, I'm glad Snyder finally got to release his cut of the movie and the fans who have been wanting to see it finally have the chance to watch it. Over and over, if they like.

LET US IN (2021)

I would say there are two ways to watch the horror film Let Us In and get the most entertainment value out of it. The first way would be to go into it the same way I did, knowing nothing about it aside from the fact that it's a horror movie with Saw icon Tobin Bell in the cast. The other way would be to would be to watch it as part of a family with young kids, if you think the kids could handle a little bit of darkness and violence. If you have a tween who isn't familiar with the horror genre yet and want to try to turn them into a monster kid, this is basically designed to be a youngster's first horror movie.

Let Us In is described as being a "family sci-fi thriller", and I didn't know it would be aiming at such a young demographic when I started watching it, so I was baffled by the mixture in tones. The lead character is Emily (Makenzie Moss), who is dealing with a "mean girls" sort of situation at school, and when there's not something horrific going on the movie has the look and tone of your average TV kids' show. The mean girls accuse Emily of being a murderer, but never mind that for a while, we need to get to scenes where she tries to fit in at a party or attempts to contact extraterrestrial lifeforms with the hi-tech set-up she and her best friend Christopher (O'Neill Monahan) have put together in his garage. Viewers who blindly go into this not knowing it's meant to be family friendly will be asking themselves "What am I watching?" repeatedly... Which is fun, in a way.

After the goofiness, darkness falls and the horror moves in. This film is built on the urban legend of "Black-Eyed Kids", which was a new one to me but has apparently been going around since the mid-'90s. On-screen text at the beginning informs us that these "paranormal creatures" that look like kids "with pale skin and black eyes" have been seen hitchhiking, panhandling, and standing on the doorsteps of residential homes. The text then tries to convince us of their existence by saying there have been "hundreds of documented cases" where individuals around the world have come into contact with these creatures. We see plenty of characters come into contact with them over the course of Let Us In, and these youths in their hoodies and sunglasses (which they occasionally wear to cover their black eyes) are not exactly terrifying - which makes them ideal villains if this is the first horror movie a kid ever watches. However, they do get a little violent from time to time. The violence is on display in their very first scene, where one of them snaps the arm of a character played by From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series' Brandon Soo Hoo in a quick cameo. Then they bash the guy's girlfriend with a pipe, and within the first 6 minutes some parents will be questioning their decision to let their kid(s) watch this.

The Black-Eyed Kids' whole thing is to approach people as a group and repeatedly ask, "Will you let us in?" When their intended victims get frustrated or scared enough to say they will let them in, things just get worse for them. Soon they have abducted multiple people from the small town Emily and Christopher live in - and when someone important to both of them goes missing, our little heroes go searching for answers. They're not as cool as the Monster Squad, but they do meet their own version of "Scary German Guy" when Tobin Bell finally enters the picture, more than halfway through the 83 minute running time, playing a fellow named Mr. Munch. Mr. Munch is there to take the story even further into bonkers territory.

It became clear to me early on that I, someone in the age range of the parents in this movie but without kids of my own, was not the intended audience for this movie. Let Us In isn't going to provide most adults with much entertainment unless they don't know what it is and can be baffled and blindsided like I was. It might work for younger viewers, but parents should be cautious about the violence of the Black-Eyed Kids scenes, which is out of place compared to the tone of everything around it.

Let Us In was directed by Craig Moss, best known for directing Danny Trejo in the Bad Ass trilogy and making parody films with ridiculous titles like The 41-Year-Old Virgin Who Knocked Up Sarah Marshall and Felt Superbad About It and 30 Nights of Paranormal Activity with the Devil Inside the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. He wrote the screenplay with J.W. Callero, and I'm assuming lead actress Makenzie Moss is his daughter. Don't fear the nepotism in this case, though, because the younger Moss (who was also given co-producer credit) does quite well in her role.

Monahan has some funny moments as Emily's pal Christopher, and Sadie Stanley also makes a positive impression as Christopher's sister Jessie. In addition to Tobin Bell, genre fans may recognize Judy Geeson as Emily's grandmother and Chris Gartin from Tremors II as Emily's dad.

The review of Let Us In originally appeared on ArrowintheHead.com

REVENGE OF THE NINJA (1983)

According to director Sam Firstenberg, Revenge of the Ninja was originally supposed to be directed by New Year's Evil's Emmett Alston, but Alston had some kind of disagreement with the producers at Cannon Films and they asked Firstenberg to step in for him. Nearly forty years down the line, maybe Firstenberg has gotten the circumstances of the Cannon Ninja movies mixed up; if that happened to Alston on Revenge of the Ninja, it would be pretty crazy, because that's the exact same thing that happened on Enter the Ninja a couple years earlier. Alston started out as the director of that film, ran into creative differences with Cannon, and producer Menahem Golan took over as director. I doubt that happened twice, but if it did I feel sorry for Alston. At least he does have some ninja movies on his filmography, so he got to shoot some martial arts action at some point.

Revenge of the Ninja is technically a sequel to Enter the Ninja, but it has absolutely nothing to do with its predecessor so I'm not sure why Cannon didn't just make it as a separate ninja movie. Enter the Ninja hero Franco Nero does not return, instead the star of the film is Sho Kosugi, who played the villain of the previous film, now playing a different character named Cho Osaki.

The story written by James R. Silke begins in Japan, where a group of ninjas slaughters nearly every member of Cho's family for reasons that aren't quite clear. Apparently this is just something that happens to the Osaki family from time to time; Cho's father and grandfather were also killed on this property years earlier. Cho and his friend Braden (Arthur Roberts), who is visiting from America, are able to kill several ninjas in retaliation, but the event is traumatizing enough that Cho agrees to move to America with his mother (Grace Oshita) and surviving infant son, where he'll partner with Braden to open a chain of Japanese art dealerships. Jump ahead a few years and we find that the art dealerships are quite successful, Cho has been training his son Kane (played by Sho Kosugi's real life son Kane Kosugi) in martial arts, and Cho and Braden have an employee named Cathy (Ashley Ferrare) who seems like she would be glad to be Kane's stepmom. Trouble enters the picture because the art dealership, unbeknownst to Cho, is actually a front for Braden's drug smuggling business. Cho's mom warned him that she didn't trust Braden!

Braden is the middle man in a set-up between a Japanese source and American buyers, a criminal organization headed up by Mario Gallo as an unpleasant man named Caifano, who is starting to get flaky about the money he owes for these drugs. So it's not too surprising when a masked ninja starts slashing their way through Caifano's organization. With dead mobsters turning up all over the city, the detective on the case - Virgil Frye as Lieutenant Dime - seeks the help of Cho and martial arts instructor Dave Hatcher (Keith Vitali). Cho is reluctant to get involved with all of this, but it's tough for him to keep his distance when his business partner is a major player in the situation. We can only watch and wonder how long it's going to take Cho to realize that Braden is a villain.

Revenge of the Ninja is a cheap and awesome Cannon classic. Firstenberg has said that if he was making an action movie that was 90 minutes long, as this one is, he wanted to make sure 45 of those minutes were devoted to action. It certainly seems like he succeeded at that, because this is packed with action scenes that are cool, sometimes amusing (Cho's elderly mother has a confrontation with the masked ninja), and always impressive in some way. Little Kane even gets a couple fight scenes! Other notable actors who get mixed up in the action include Professor Toru Tanaka, who would go on to be featured in The Running Man and The Perfect Weapon, and Don Shanks, who will always be Michael Myers from Halloween 5 to me.

In the end, all that really needs to be said about Revenge of the Ninja is that is has a masked ninja who keeps a flamethrower up his sleeve. That alone is enough to make it a must-see.