Floor it! – Keanu Reeves’ Slow Hurry into Magnificence

Since the honorable Mr. Reeves is taking the Internet by what appears not a mere storm, but a hurricane, and the moment just a couple of weeks ago, when he replied to an overwhelmed fan’s breathless declaration with an even more breathtaking response has gone viral, I think just the one piece on the man about the John Wick franchise found below is simply not enough.

Now I know every girl in town likes to think she is Keanu Reeves’ number one fan, and I am entering the competition at an awkward stage, right in between the aftershocks of the huge blow that was the Cyberpunk 2077 press conference, the release of Toy Story 4, John Wick 3 playing in theaters, and the success of Netflix’s Always Be My Maybe, but here goes anyway.

The title of this story is a bit misleading, since ever since Keanu Reeves started getting bigger roles on screen he has been showered with attention. Though not always complementary on his acting skills - I myself remember a huge cover story in Suosikki magazine with the headline “They Kicked Me Out of Acting School in A Heart Beat!” - but always recognizing his beauty that indeed does not resemble anything else in this world, that he works very hard and puts himself out there, and the fact that he is a good man, an attribute they don’t just throw around there in the Movie Business.

He has been, for all the above-mentioned reasons, a hot conversation topic at my workplace, with Hanks and Swinton gushing over the Cyberpunk 2077 news – although maybe Hanks might not describe himself as gushing, though he is exited, but Swinton sure would – and after my dive into the John Wick franchise the week before last, I managed to persuade even Roberts to give it a go, luring her in with the fact that it includes dogs. To give you some indication about how unprecedented her watching the first movie at all was, let’s just say her favorite film is Lasse Hallström’s Hachiko. So, pretty unprecedented. She did admit to having fast-forwarded the more gory scenes, and after I told her that the American Staffordshire Terrier that enters the picture at the end will be sticking by, she just said: “Do you promise?”

After a lively debate with Swinton on Midsummer Night’s Eve on which is worse, Bram Stoker’s Dracula or The Devil’s Advocate, I started thinking about my own path with Keanu through the years, leading up to the moment where we were bickering over him like any old married couple while Swinton was installing fresh protection on my laptop and I was chopping onions and pouring Cava into glasses.

My story with Keanu begins with Paula Abdul, the same as, I should imagine, many other girls’, raised with an MTV logo revolving in their eyes. I was then a girl of thirteen, the most dangerous age for a girl to be, not a woman yet for many years, but thinking all those dangerous teenage thoughts without the body in bloom, luckily, nor the brain. But the hormones, whoa! I was into Paula Abdul then, and had badgered my parents into buying me her debut album Forever Your Girl. Never one to throw things away, I still have the cassette tape somewhere, along with Spellbound, its successor. I believe it was Rush Rush that came out as the first single from the new album, and if the young Keanu Reeves playing the love interest in the music video from that hit song is the only lasting impact Ms. Abdul has made in the entertainment industry – and of course it isn’t, check out her dance moves! Even Michael Jackson was impressed enough to ask her to teach him! – then I salute you, Paula, for your excellent taste.

I simply had to have that record. I remember all but fuming with unidentifiable feelings as I bought it; it felt like I was buying Keanu Reeves in a cassette form, and rubbing it the right way when I was home alone, he might perhaps magically appear and do my bidding – whatever that was, since I was still years from losing my virginity and don’t think that was exactly what I was thinking anyway, just a bunch of soulful gazing into my eyes, kissing me on the mouth, running his hands all over my body, telling me I was beautiful, perhaps watching Rebel without A Cause with me. Oh, youth and innocence!

Moving right along, of course Keanu Reeves was far from nobody by the time he was involved in Rush Rush. I kind of recognized him from somewhere, but it wasn’t until later when I re-watched for instance Dangerous Liaisons, that I really got it was the same man. I had completely missed the Bill and Ted boat, and after the whole soulful-gazing thing into his eyes through a bunch of totally different movies and connections, I would never accept Keanu as the idiotic stoner kid from that franchise. By the time Bill and Ted 2 came out in home video, I was working my first summer at a video rental, and certainly remember how popular it was. I still couldn’t abide my beautiful Keanu being involved in that garbage, so as an act of faith, and what I considered to be pure civil disobedience, I never watched it, even though I was allowed to take home as many movies during working there as I wanted. And, not to mention, now all the hubbub with Bill and Ted 3? Don’t do it man, I mean it! I can’t even talk about it.

The second thing from that time to join the dots from me to Keanu Reeves was River Phoenix. I adored him. I still love him with all the ferocity of a pubescent girl, and have fond memories of watching Jimmy Reardon, endlessly, at my friend Marina’s place, or Dog Fight, or the first fifteen minutes of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, or even I Love You to Death, and there, my friends, is also Keanu. But back then it was all about the gorgeous pizza dude with the intense eyes and the hair.

I learnt from Suosikki magazine that he and Keanu were friends in real life and liked to hang out, but it always felt like someone was reporting from another planet, that what happened back there in the center of universe, what I considered the United States to be then, happened on a plane so removed from my ordinary country life it was like it wasn’t even true, like it was all just tales of imagination, as if it had happened a long time ago, or perhaps hadn’t happened yet. It was star-studded, glamorous, otherworldly.

Then River Phoenix suddenly died. When it happened and the magazine, along with every other magazine in the world, ran the transcribed emergency call made by his brother Joaquin as part of a huge story about the horrible events that night, I cried, even while simultaneously thinking it was monstrous to leak such private horror out to the world. Yet, I couldn’t not read it when it was right there.

My Own Private Idaho, his and Keanu’s second acting collaboration, was hard to come by, and it was a few years later when I finally saw it for the first time. By then, River was no longer, so watching the movie made me horribly sad, and since then I have always associated My Own Private Idaho with his death, even though it was far from being his last film. But it was the last one I ever saw that I hadn’t seen before, and thus it started to signify a kind of a bitter swansong of River Phoenix for me, and I remember the waterworks starting at the end that just would not end, so I have only watched it a couple of times in my life.

I went to see both Dracula and Speed with my best friend Madeleine who was another fellow Keanu enthusiast. Dracula was rated R because of explicit sex and violence, and being tall for my age, I was right there in the audience at fourteen.

This brings me back to my argument with Swinton the other day, and I must say, thinking of Dracula my mind always goes first to the scene where Lucy sleepwalks into the garden and Mina spies her being ravaged by the villain in a monstrous werewolf form. So, obviously, hence my life-long affinity for werewolf movies just kidding[1], what I meant was that I didn’t even care that Keanu seems now, to the eye of a sensible grownup movie watcher, to be basically coasting through his scenes. It was him, and that was all there was to it. For years I had trouble ridding myself from the imagery of Gary Oldman in all the vampire paraphernalia, and because the whole movie is such a loving vehicle for him, so much so that everyone else seems out of place somehow, I will always consider Oldman the best and only Dracula there is. The schmuck they cast as Dracula in Buffy? Don’t make me laugh. In my book, even Christopher Lee and Bela Lugosi need to step aside, magnificent as though they are. Gary Oldman made his version such a feverish, carnal, absolute geyser of undying love you had no choice but to accept it if you were fourteen and already in heat over Jonathan Harker. This admission even if the Internet Vampire Police will come get me now and lynch me good and proper for worshiping false gods.

Speed, one of the best action movies in history, was, until I actually saw it in cinema, a mixed bag for me and Madeleine. We were so concerned over Keanu’s hair we debated long and hard whether to spend our hard-earned allowances to seeing his poor head all exposed like that.

We needn’t have worried. I have told this to lots of people when discussing Speed, and now I’m telling you: after coming out of the cinema - it was summer, the sidewalks were scorching, Madeleine and I had gone to an afternoon showing to watch it - we looked at each other, burst into delighted giggles, and I never remember which one of us uttered the words, but they were ones I’ll always cherish and remember: “Hair or no hair, he is gorgeous!” I think we went for sodas afterwards, just to replay the story over and over, and one moment in particular: as Jack is about to disappear under the bus on the improvised bomb-diffusing board on wheels, he looks straight into Annie’s eyes. They lock eyes for a brief moment, and then he is gone, disappeared under the vehicle. Now that’s the stuff of Movie Gods. Yes, the bus needs to keep above fifty or all hell breaks loose, but that small moment amid the explosions and close calls and urgent charging is pure cinematic brilliance. Just thinking about it now gives me goosebumps.

By then, the Keanu Reeves business was starting to snowball into an avalanche. I watched Point Break for the first time many years after its release, released the same year by the way as my once beloved Rush Rush music video, and though I have grown to consider it to be one of his finest films, and another one of the finest action movies in the world in general - which makes a total of two in the All-Time Top Five of Action that has Keanu Reeves as the lead actor, not too shabby, not too shabby at all, my man - at the time I first watched it, it pretty much drowned under all the exquisite noise and walls of sound made by the world-wide mass hysteria that was, and surrounded, The Matrix.

Everyone who was the right age in 1999 has their own Matrix story, and so do I. I mean: The Matrix. It was revolutionary. It was beyond anything. It was barely comprehensible in all its green-tinted, ominous cool and being the ultimate parable for Plato’s Theory of Ideas and action and bouncing off the walls and just plain beautiful craftsmanship.

I went to see it for the first time after a long night of frolicking about town the way young adults do. It was once again summer, and for whatever reason, they were showing it in the smallest theater in town that day. I was standing in what appeared to be a never-ending line with my best friend Alessandro, sweating and hung over. After what seemed like an hour of waiting, we were finally at the booth, and the lady behind the plexiglass told us there were exactly two empty seats available for the showing. First row, left of center. Not right in the farthest corner, but nowhere near the middle section, either. We took them.

At the time I was having my brain blown off by the opening scene I couldn’t be sure if it was the short night’s sleep and the seats being basically inside the picture and the fact that my brain was fried enough as it was that made me react so strongly to the film. We floated out of the theater onto the cooling sidewalk. It was eleven o’clock at night in mid-July, and we were almost unable to speak. We just walked around for an hour, telling each other what a film, and by the time I got home I had already decided to go watch it again as soon as possible. I saw it four times that summer in the cinema, and then at least fourteen times right after the home video came out. I bought the soundtrack album, and although not all of it was to my specific taste, I did jam to Rage Against the Machine and Propellerheads like the best of them before my shift at the Stars Hollow Video began.

I just spoke to Alessandro on the phone the other day and told him I was writing about that day and asked if he remembered it. He did.

What I found interesting while debating Keanu Reeves with Swinton, in addition to us being on the opposite ends of the Dracula/Devil’s Advocate spectrum, was that while my story begins innocently enough with a teenage fantasy, her first, or at least one of the first encounters with our pal Keanu was the quietly disturbing and anything but fantasy-inducing cult film River’s Edge. I myself didn’t see it until she lent it to me, and declaring it so deranged, sad, and upsetting that I would never ever want to watch it again, I proceeded to do just that. Of course, the themes of the film resonate differently now that we are adults and living in the troubled times that we are: we both agreed that as kids we often filter out some of the more adult stuff or things we don’t necessarily have the tools yet to understand on a larger scale. Still, she did admit to having had, for a good long while, a psychological cut from watching it as a teen and having the same initial reaction to it as I had. We then proceeded to discuss how the movie, sadly, portrayed such jaded, emotionally damaged characters devoid of empathy it could easily have been made only last year. Which, I think, makes it even more disturbing and disquieting to watch.

Even there, though, Keanu’s character acts as the moral compass in the ocean of apathy, a role very much like many other major leading roles he will be forever remembered by. He has played his share of bad men, killers, and psychopaths, most notably, I think, in the previously discussed John Wick franchise, but also in The Gift, Sam Raimi’s underestimated study of the supernatural in a small-town grudge-holding setting; it succeeds in creating such a sinister mood I always need to recheck the windows and doors after watching it. The crazed confrontation of Reeves’ redneck spousal abuser Donnie and Giovanni Ribisi’s emotionally disturbed Buddy is a scene well worth watching over and over. Ribisi takes the cake there, but our pal Keanu does come off as truly terrifying, disgusting, and an amoral monster, which in itself is a rare enough feat.

Though not perhaps the world’s most versatile actor, Keanu has, I believe, convinced the jury enough that hopefully they will leave him alone. He is a killer instrument in the action movie genre, and the fact the he loves to do small roles and indie movies in between just makes us love him even more. If I am not mistaken, he took the small part of the doctor in Something’s Gotta Give just to be able to work with Diane Keaton and Jack Nicholson, and if you ask me, that pretty much sums up why anyone would want to be in the movie business in the first place. There are the numerous rumors about his enormous voluntary pay cuts so that big names such as Gene Hackman could be signed on. Now that is pure love for the medium, and until lately, with the gender equality claims a lot of actors are doing, I had seldom, if ever, heard of such selflessness on that scale; usually it is more along the lines of “more money for us both”, not “less for me, more for them” in that industry.

On my daily walks, I often come across this boy of fourteen or maybe fifteen at most. This week alone I have seen him every day as I have been slouching towards home from the Pyynikki woods. He bikes past me with the extremely common I Couldn’t Care Less -sneer assembled on his young, lovely face most teenagers resort to while in the presence of adults. He wears a worn-out tee-shirt with the sleeves cut off, blue jeans cutoffs, and his long, curly hair is bleached in the summer sun. He looks like a mix between Dustin in Stranger Things and a young surfer not unlike perhaps a young Patrick Swayze or James Le Gros on his way to ride some waves.

Every time I see him, I think of Point Break, and how the film, despite being a timeless classic for the annals of movie history, depicts a certain moment in time in a recognizable and very real way. The lingo, the wardrobe, even Anthony Kiedis’ short appearance all tell us something about the time when it was filmed, and it is an interesting counterpoint to another modern classic shot about a year later in the Pacific Northwest, also starring James Le Gros: Singles.

So, as this young surfer grunge teen appears in my vision on his bike, I always have this ridiculous urge to yell something silly like “Totally radical, dude!” when he passes me. Then I am instantly, and most thankfully, reminded of the hilarious gonzo journalism outlet on social media I stumbled on a few years ago that one time had this bogus headline that led to no actual story that I could find, but which always makes me laugh whenever I think about it, and it went like this: Radical! – Meet the One Man Who Still Uses the Word ‘Radical’!

I know my insane urge to bother the boy minding his own business isn’t really all Keanu Reeves’ fault. But part of it is. Had he not been involved in some of the century’s most important and pivotal movies, I may have never seen them, given the fact that my decision-making process for the longest time revolved around whether the beautiful man was starring in them or not, and therefore would be in possession of significantly less movie-savvy than I am today.

So, talking about breathtaking men, I understand there is another petition circling the Internet right now besides the “You’re breathtaking!” petition of the Cyberpunk 2077 community. It is one for declaring Keanu Reeves Time Magazine’s Person of the Year. Now, where exactly is this petition and how fast can I sign it?

Picture of a twenty-one-year-old Matrix fan hanging with Keanu Reeves

at a Halloween party manipulated with PhotoLab.

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[1] Or am I?