A Review Too Far - 090315

This week our Cinema Geeks review the indie classic, Swingers, move on to 1989's Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, and finish up with out in theaters now, We Are Your Friends.

First up, Swingers tells the tale of a struggling actor in Los Angeles who is trying to get over his breakup with his girlfriend back on the East Coast the only way he knows how, but hanging out with friends and slowly wading back into the dating pool. This film launched the careers of writer/star Jon Favreau and co-star Vince Vaughn, but definitely shows its seams when it comes to budget, direction, and cinematography.

Moving on, Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure tells the tale of two surfer dude would-be rockers who are failing history and are about to get a helpful leg up on their final oral report from an unlikely source, a hip time-traveler from the future who tells them they are too important to future generations to not end up as rock stars thanks to a little setback like bad grades. With a silly script and convenient plot devices, Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves take George Carlin up on his offer of a dimension-sliding phone booth and proceed to kidnap famous figures in history in order to get first-hand knowledge of the past and how they impacted it.

And, finally, We Are Your Friends is a genre mashup of music, coming of age, and prosaic message movies in which a young DJ struggles with his potential, a love triangle, and outgrowing his friends, all to the tunes of Electronic Dance Music... or EDM. Set in the financially depressed San Fernando Valley, Zac Efron leads this cast of mostly unknowns in a tale of hedonism, music, purpose, modern sexuality and drug culture.