Welcome

Welcome to my ever-evolving blog. It started out as a blog on Beachbody workouts and products, mainly when I was a Beachbody coach. I no longer coach, not because I don't believe in Beachbody's programs (I subscribe to Beachbody on Demand and use their workouts every day), I am just not a salesperson and hated that aspect of it. I am more than willing to answer questions about my experiences with their products and the various workouts, and I feel freer to do so without the appearance of giving a biased review of something.

I have also started adding reviews for various things I have purchased like movies, books, CDs, and other products. This was brought about by a fight with Amazon in which all of my reviews were removed over a completely bullshit allegation that I posted a review that violated their terms of service. After going back and forth with the morons in the community-reviews department (even after they admitted that my posts did not violate their guidelines) they restored my account (which took them six months to do), but I have been posting my reviews on my blog to have them preserved in case something like that happens again. And here, I will post uncensored reviews so I will swear from time to time and post reviews that may be longer than Amazon's character limit. Everything I post here on any topic or product is my personal opinion, and I take no compensation for any product reviews I post. I am a member of Amazon's vine program and because I get those products for free, I keep those reviews on Amazon only, but everything I have purchased with my own money, whether from Amazon or some other store/website/outlet, I will post here.  

I also plan to do some longer blog posts on various topics, such as how to learn physics, how to get through calculus, and longer reviews of workout programs as I do them. Basically, whatever strikes me as interesting at the time.  As you can see if you navigate around the blog, I had many years in between postings. During that time I was going back to school to get an engineering degree, and learning material that I avoided my first time through college was a different experience and one that gave me a lot of insight into how to do well in those classes, which I will try to impart here for those who are looking to get a science or engineering degree. 

Thursday, August 1, 2024

Blu-Ray/Movie Collection Review: Bill & Ted Face the Music/Bill &Ted's Bogus Journey/Bill &Ted's Excellent Adventure

 


This set contains the three Bill & Ted films, or as some may call them, Keanu Reeves' other, other trilogy, on three separate Blu-Ray discs. It contains all three movies, 1989's Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, 1991's Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey, and 2020's Bill and Ted Face the Music. All three movies starred Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter. The first two movies also starred George Carlin, and he appeared posthumously in the third film as a hologram. The franchise also featured recognizable actors such as William Sadler, Pam Grier, Holland Taylor, and Jayma Mays.

I will spend most of the review on the third and newest film, Bill & Ted Face the Music since the other two have been out long enough that most people who would get this have probably seen them multiple times. But, as a short synopsis, the first movie, Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, was a late 1980s movie about two high-school slackers who could not play any instruments yet had a band whose music was fated to unite the world and become the philosophy that future civilizations relied on. It was also the movie that would make Keanu Reeves a household name and cause nearly everyone to question his casting in The Matrix about a decade later. Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey was the sequel that followed a couple of years later, that had an almost Terminator-like theme where evil robot versions of Bill and Ted were sent back to kill them and destroy their lives to keep them from having any influence on the future. The third movie, released in 2020, revealed that the duo, now in their 50s with daughters of their own, had yet to write the song that would unite the world, which put the future of all civilization at stake. That is about all you need to know about the plots of each movie.

The movies definitely fall within the realm of tongue-in-cheek comedy, with some deeper themes of family and friendship (especially in the third movie) weaved in. They are meant to be a kind of "stupid funny" and you can tell that the writers and the actors took their work seriously, nobody seemed to take themselves too seriously, which made all the movies work, despite all the movies having a different feel and tone from each other.

Each of the discs has an assortment of extras, including theatrical trailers for the first two movies, two different commentary tracks for the second movie, as well as a retrospective on the second movie that was filmed around the time that the third movie was being made. For the original movie, there was also (I kid you not) an air guitar tutorial/featurette, and for the most recent movie, the main bonus feature was a 45-minute portion of the virtual comic-con panel hosted by Kevin Smith, including the writers, producer, director, as well as Keanu, Alex Winters, Samara Weaving, Brigette Lundy-Paine, and William Sadler.

Overall, the movies are all very good if you take them for what they are. They are not meant to be Academy Award-winning movies, just fun, fairly innocent, tongue-in-cheek comedies. I like that the third movie was able to get many of the serving original cast members from the first two movies back together and even found a way to provide a posthumous George Carlin cameo. I know that there are some people who thought making the third film without Carlin would never work, but in reality, he had a pretty small role in the first movie and even less of a role in the second movie (which really amounted to an extended cameo), so while he was a fun character from the original movies, he was not so integral to the story that they could not make a third movie without him. And, I think that the new cast members who were brought in did a good job with their parts, even those who were playing parts that were recast. For those of us who grew up in the 1980s, the first movie especially will cause a bit of a nostalgia trip and the third movie provides a fitting end to the story. It is definitely worth the pickup for those who still get movies on physical discs.

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