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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