Alex Winter

  • Bill & Ted Face the Music (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Netflix Streaming, November 2021) Bringing back a movie franchise after a decades-long hiatus is always a risky prospect, no matter how many commercial imperatives and fannish demands justify it. Bill and Ted being such a creation of their circa-1990 era, bringing them back nearly thirty years later -in an environment saturated with nostalgia—seemed wrong. But Bill & Ted Face the Music isn’t like most thirty-year-later remakes — perhaps the single key difference being that the core creative team behind the franchise is also back: crucially screenwriters Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon (who became a celebrity screenwriter in the meantime), but also Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves in the two lead roles. This probably explains why the film is so comfortable taking the story thirty years later, with our visibly aged protagonists having daughters and struggling with a life that has not lived up to their youthful expectations. When further time-travelling shenanigans suggest that the fate of the universe rests on a crucial music performance, it’s off to the races in recapturing the charm of the earlier films. It, surprisingly, generally works: There’s a certain wit to the script, some funny takes on time-travel elements, and the two leads recapture their performances with some gusto. Better yet, the film’s secret weapons are Samara Weaving and Brigette Lundy-Paine as Bill and Ted’s daughters, each of them clearly taking after their fathers. Lundy-Paine is particularly amusing channelling Reeves’ specific tics as Ted. The rest of Bill & Ted Face the Music has ups and downs: recruiting past musicians is a good idea, as are the visits to increasingly older and more desperate version of themselves, but some of the other material is more laborious — a subplot involving a terminator robot with serious self-esteem issues sputters as often as it works. Fortunately, it does build to a rather nice conclusion that wraps up Bill and Ted’s story while opening the door just widely enough for the next generation to take over. Not that they have to — sequels aren’t mandatory, after all.

  • Freaked (1993)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, August 2021) As someone with a specific affection for spoof comedies that lean into absurdity, I have to admit that Freaked was a discovery — it’s a horror comedy that doesn’t have a single qualm about going for big dumb jokes, and it completely flew under my radar. Sure, the production values are on the lower-end of things (makeup budget excepted), and that was never intended to be a production with class — but the tone is often very close to some of the spoof comedies of the 1980s, even if writers/directors Tom Stern and Alex Winter don’t quite manage the same attempt-to-hit joke ratio. Wonderfully weird, it opens with a framing device in which a backlit “disfigured” former child star recounts to a TV show hostess how he got involved in a body-mangling freak show in South America, a situation that shifts into fighting corporate malfeasance by the time the climax rolls around. It’s all weird and unabashedly designed for laughs — there’s scarcely a joke left on the table, especially if you don’t mind the deliberately gross makeup effects used through much of the film. Freaked is not a great movie by any means, but it’s a nice surprise: the film’s production history shows that its budget was abruptly cut toward the end of the shooting by new executives, and that shows most in the lack of polish in the post-production areas. Still, Freaked was never going to be much more than a niche comedy for horror fans and it’s perhaps better than it has remained an underrated curiosity.