Win: A Blu-ray Copy of Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure Sweeptakes

From: RogueLife LLC

Enter by: November 20, 2012

One of the many, many exceedingly clever points of Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure is the conceit that the San Dimas dimwits end up creating music of such cosmic profundity and beauty that it aligns the entire universe, spreading enlightenment across the space and time in a new age of wonders.  As a sequel slowly but surely comes together twenty-one years after Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey, we've been wondering just what the status of Wyld Stallyns' messianic music will be in Bill & Ted 3 (that's the clever title we've given it for the time being).

It's been the subject of discussion for years now, but it appears that Bill S. Preston, esq. and Ted Theodore Logan may very well ride again.  Last we heard about a hopeful second sequel to the perennially underestimated, certifiably wonderful Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, a screenplay was being locked down by the original writers.  In a development that suggests Bill & Ted 3 is gaining some momentum, the sequel now has a director on board.

The Blu-ray and DVD release of My Week With Marilyn has us ruminating a bit.  When you think of a "blonde bombshell," with all connotations of physical idealization and centerfold lasciviousness, you immediately picture Marilyn Monroe.  In her Oscar-nominated performance Michelle Williams portrays Monroe a person of complexity, not separating her from her timeless sex-symbol status, but instead contextualing her sexuality as place as just one element both her public and private personas. 

It's a performance and a representation that calls for a different notion of the blonde bombshell, one not quite so exclusively dependent on physical perfection.

We might have simply trotted out a list of every gorgeous, captivating blonde from Brigitte Bardot to Adrianne Palicki.  Indeed we could've, but for this Rogue 10, we have instead focused on fictional characters who aren't bombshells because they're blonde, but are noteworthy bombshells who happen to be blonde.  These are blonde bombshells who do more than simply stun you with stupendous glamor and gorgeousness, they stop you dead with something special.

The workings of the human mind are endlessly complex, and our emotions are often befuddling not just to others, but to ourselves.  Many people gain a greater understanding of themselves, their pasts, and their place in the world with the help of therapists, those laudable doctors who endeavor to diminish the suffering we so often inflict upon ourselves.  Therapy is an easy means of conveying a character's problems onscreen, so often, cinematic psychiatrists often exist as spouters of convenient, character-establishing dialogue.

Not so in A Dangerous Method, the new film from auteur David Cronenberg, the director behind A History of Violence, The Fly, Dead Ringers, Eastern Promises, and Videodrome.  In the film, Viggo Mortensen plays none other than Sigmund Freud, with Michael Fassbender as his protege-turned-rival Carl Jung.  The story explores how the rift between these two peers, caused principally by Jung's passionate affair with Sabina Spielrein, a patient played by Keira Knightley, contributed directly to the creation of psychoanalysis as we know it today.

With A Dangerous Method in limited release and currently providing a dense, layered meditation on these two great intellectuals, we here at IAR decided to create a Rogue 10 list in the film's honor, one that identifies those cinematic shrinks who, like Mortensen's Freud and Fassbender's Jung, stand out from the crowd as titans of intellectual medicine in the movies.  So here, for your list-loving enjoyment, are ten cinematic therapists for the ages.

Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure is one of my favorite movies of all time and a rare 1980's property for which a contemporary sequel could potentially be most triumphant.  That doesn't mean I'm demanding another round, but the confident lunacy of the first sequel, Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey, gives the impression that the characters and their universe are flexible enough to justify a return, even two decades later.  Keanu Reeves, who played Ted 'Theodore' Logan to Alex Winter's Bill S. Preston, Esq. in the previous films, reveals some story details on the possible third film and says he's supposed to receive a screenplay in six weeks.