The Keanu Reeves Project - Much Ado About Nothing

MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING (1993) - Don John

Ok, it took nearly twenty blog posts in this journey but I finally did it, I cheated.

Look, I've sat through a wide range of Keanu Reeves movies so far.  Some of them were new to me and downright mediocre to terrible like "My Own Private Idaho," and "The Prince of Pennsylvania."  Others were new to me and relatively enjoyable if not "good" like "The Night Before" and "Permanent Record."  And then of course there is the third category of movies I've seen dozens if not more times like "Point Break," and both "Bill and Ted" movies.  My emotions have ranged all the way from completely bored to utterly excited.

But if there's one thing I just cannot stand, other than the sound of children singing, it's the works of William Shakespeare. 

I fucking hate Shakespeare.

Fuck you

My hatred for all things Shakespeare started in 1999 during my final semester of high school.  I was never a great student and spent the majority of high school cruising through as best as I can, never particularly challenging myself in nearly anything because, you know, laziness.  I did graduate high school with a 3.5 average but that was mainly due to the fact that I never took the hardest classes available to me because that would have probably required studying and or paying attention in class which greatly interfered with my video games and not talking talking to girls habits.  

It's for this reason that I opted for mainly honor's classes rather than anything with the letters "AP" in front of them, which is how I found myself in my senior year of high school reading Hamlet instead of stuff by Chaucer or whatever the fuck they were doing over in AP English.  

I had two different English teachers in my senior year.  My teacher in the fall was an older man whose name I cannot remember, but he was approaching retirement and had all but given up on teaching, which was basically perfect for a student like me.  I feel like we did a lot more movie watching in his class than actual reading or discussing of literature and the only thing I can really remember of the fall semester was reading and then watching "The Natural," which from what I remember was a pretty decent book and not a bad Robert Redford movie.

However, come fall I wound up in the classroom of a different teacher, the notorious Dr. Viccellio, or Dr. Vick for short.  Dr. Vick had gotten her PhD in English from somewhere or another. and was downright fanatical about Shakespeare.

I don't know what the curriculum was actually supposed to be back in the spring of 1999 for seniors because the only thing Dr. Vick's classes were doing was reading Hamlet.  From what I remember, I would talk to my friends in other classes who had moved on to other books while Dr. Vick's three honor's English classes did nothing but this fucking play for an entire semester.

We would literally dissect every single fucking line from that motherfucking play.  We would read it, aloud, every day for three months, never getting through more than a handful of pages at a time.  

What does Shakespeare mean when he writes, "Where hath thine gone, Horatio?"

Uh, bitch, he means "where did you go Horatio?"

It was interminable.  And whenever a question came around to me, my answers were never good enough for her.  

"No, Jordan, what is Shakespeare really saying here?"

I.  DON'T.  CARE.  

Look, I think Dr. Vick was a perfectly capable teacher and I'm sure she was far less obnoxious in her other classes.  She even taught a few AP classes that some of my friends were in, and somehow they managed to breeze through Hamlet over the course of a few weeks, so clearly Dr. Vick wasn't some sort of incompetent maniac, but for whatever reason she shoved this goddamn play down our throats so far that I was going home every day ready to take a gigantic Shakespearean shit.  

Once we were done reading that fucking play we split into groups and all had to perform scenes from it.  

With each passing day I hated Hamlet and in turn Shakespeare more and more.  By the time I had finally graduated and escaped 12th grade English it was an inevitability that I wanted nothing to do with William Shakespeare ever again.

Even this guy isn't redeeming Shakespeare for me

So, when the film version of "Much Ado About Nothing," showed up on Keanu Reeves filmography as my next film I was....unhappy.  Not unhappy in the way that I felt going into "My Own Private Idaho" because of my dislike of Gus Van Sant, but a different kind of unhappy.  12 grade English unhappy.

So it is with my great disappointment that I have to announce that I did not make it all the way through this movie.  I tried.  I really did.  

The movie itself is shot well and features an absolutely star studded cast including Denzel Washington, Emma Thompson, Keanu Reeves and a very young Kate Beckinsale among others.  But, Shakespearean english makes my ears bleed.  I was doing my best to follow along with the plot and try to give a shit if only for the sake of this project.  But I couldn't do it.  Once I realized how unimportant Keanu Reeves was in this movie as some sort of emo villain I decided to just turn it off and never come back to it.  This was somewhere around the 45 minute mark of about a 100 minute long movie, so I made it just about halfway through.

I'm sorry.  I know all three of the people who read this blog had higher hopes for me.  I mean, I even sat through the two and a half hour long TV movie "Babes in Toyland," and I wanted to throw myself out the window for the entire duration of that one and yet, I just can't do Shakespeare.  It's where I draw the line.  

And with that, I have failed in this project, at least to some degree.  I hope this is the only movie I don't end up making it through because the point of this project is to watch everything he's in minus voiceovers and brief cameos.  I'm sorry.

Box Office Mojo Information: $36 million on a $8 million budget.   70th highest grossest movie of 1993.  

Rotten Tomatoes: 90% Critics, 86% Audience.  As mentioned above, I'm sure if you don't hate Shakespeare in the way I do, this is a perfectly fine film.  That said, fuck William Shakespeare.  

IMDB: 7.3

My Movie Rating: N/A.  Not fair for me to rank a movie I couldn't finish.  On its merits, I'm sure it is a perfectly fine film, but my judgment is far too clouded to give it a rating.

Keanu Rating: N/A.  Part of me wants to give him a 1 but that's not really fair either.

Up next: the 1993 movie, "Even Cowgirls Get the Blues."  Oh, well fuck me, right?  This is another Gus Van Sant movie?  I thought I was done with this guy!  I'll get through it, I promise.