The Keanu Reeves Project - The Gift

THE GIFT (2000) - Donnie Barksdale

I've returned to the realm of movies I have actually seen before with the 2000 film, "The Gift," as I'd seen this one sometime in college.

As always, maximum spoilers ahead.

Unlike several of the last entries, "The Gift" is actually not terrible and a lot of that has to do with this amazing cast that includes:

Cate Blanchett (Two time Oscar winner as well as a number of other nominations and tons of other awards)
Greg Kinnear (Oscar and Emmy nominee)
Hillary Swank (Two Time Oscar winner)
Gary Cole (You might know him as Lumbergh from "Office Space" or I don't know, a thousand other things)
JK Simmons (Oscar Winner)
Giovanni Ribisi (Noted weirdo)
Katie Holmes (Notably topless in this movie)
And of course, our hero, Keanu Reeves

Unfortunately, all of the great performances only translate to a passable if not spectacular movie.

Cate Blanchett plays Annie, a fortune teller/psychic/person with general supernatural abilities, who lives in a small town in the south.  We know it's a small town in the south because everyone (including Keanu, who I will get to momentarily) is sporting a range of southern accents, as well as multiple shots of the Confederate flag.

Annie's husband has died prior to the events of the movie, so she makes a living giving psychic readings to the locals, including Hillary Swank who happens to be sporting the single worst haircut in any movie I've seen so far.

Business up front, party in the rear

Hillary Swank also happens to be married to Keanu Reeves as Donnie Barksdale.  Donnie is not a huge fan of the supernatural, psychics or women in general, and is apparently known as the town wife-beater.

Okay, time to take a pause to talk specifically about Keanu Reeves in this one.

First of all, I've been really hard on the guy to this point for his accent work in a bunch of movies:

"The Devil's Advocate" - just a horrible accent that constantly goes in and out.

"Dracula" - an English accent that is...it's just really bad.

"Tune in Tomorrow" - a movie I'd never like to think about again, but also sporting a really shitty southern accent that changes scene to scene.

That said, in "The Gift," his backwoods redneck accent actually works.  I don't know if he got a dialogue coach or if it was just being surrounded by a litany of other talented performers, but Keanu's accent in this one is actually good.  Finally.

Second, Keanu Reeves, much like everyone else in this movie, is excellent.  This is what particularly bothered me about the last movie I watched, "The Watcher."  In that movie he was supposed to be a terrifying serial killer but as stated previously, was about as scary as Hello Kitty.  Unlike that role, Keanu is legitimately scary in this movie as Donnie Barksdale.  He stalks Cate Blanchett, threatens her kids, beats up THREE different women in about 20 minutes of screen time, drops a handful of racial slurs, and is genuinely scary.

You'd probably pull a gun on Giovanni Ribisi too

Third, this is the first movie I can think of where Keanu is sporting a beard like the one that we've all come to know and love.

As a viewer, we hate Donnie Barksdale.  He is a bad dude and if not for his hatred of black people, might have been a great enforcer for his long-lost cousin in Baltimore.  You know, this guy:

Anyway, a little more plot synopsis so you don't actually have to go watch this movie -

Greg Kinnear is the principal at Annie's kid's elementary school and he's engaged to Katie Holmes who is basically the town hussy.  At a party one night at a country club (Cate Blanchett literally has no reason to be there so they write in a friend that dragged her along), Annie walks in on Katie Holmes having sex with Gary Cole in a coat closet and then goes off to have a nice conversation with Greg Kinnear about nothing important.

We later learn that that same night, Katie Holmes goes off and bangs Donnie Barksdale as well, and that's not even to mention the scenes of her overt flirtations with just about everyone at the party including, grossly, her own father.  So yeah, she's not the most sympathetic of characters but she also doesn't deserve to die.

Which is exactly what happens next.  Through a series of dreams and visions, Cate Blanchett eventually leads the cops to Donnie's property where Katie holmes is dredged up from the river.

There's a really shitty mini courtroom drama in the middle of the movie, where Keanu Reeves is on trial for her murder, but it's pretty obvious to anyone that's been paying any attention whatsoever that he's not the killer and that Greg Kinnear is.

There's also a subplot about Giovanni Ribisi and the sexual trauma he endured as a child, which is wrapped up when he kills his father in front of Annie by setting him on fire.

Eventually Cate Blanchett ends up at the murder scene with Greg Kinnear where "her gift" shows her exactly what happened that night and how he murdered Katie Holmes.  But, in an extremely stupid twist, she is saved from being murdered herself by Giovanni Ribisi who we find out a few minutes later is in fact dead, meaning that she was saved by his ghost.

It's really fucking stupid.

That said, this movie is certainly passable, helped in large part to the really great performances by everyone involved.  Giovanni Ribisi, who I do not generally like, is actually really good in this as the town's disturbed weirdo mechanic, and even some of the people with smaller roles like Katie Holmes and JK Simmons are also pretty good. Oh, and also there's this:

Oh, and I haven't even mentioned that this was directed by Sam Raimi, who, you know, actually makes pretty good movies.



Just a few side notes before wrapping this up:

*Out of absolutely nowhere, Chelcie Ross shows up in this movie. You're probably asking, who the hell is Chelcie Ross and what the fuck kind of name is Chelcie?  Well, he's this guy!

In case you're not already aware, that's Colonel Oates from "Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey."

*This movie featured an uncomfortable amount of violence against women, all of which is perpetrated by Keanu as Donnie Barksdale.  Well, in addition of course to the murder of Katie Holmes.  In about 20 minutes, Donnie beats up his wife, punches Cate Blanchett in the stomach (right in front of a bunch of cops no less) and punches Katie Holmes in the face in a flashback sequence.  The movie was written by Billy Bob Thornton, so I can only hope he's no harboring some deep-seeded resentment towards women.

*The town this takes place in really hates psychics.  Even after Annie's visions lead them directly to Katie  Holmes' dead body, the chief of police (JK Simmons) is so ridiculously dismissive of her abilities.  Like dude, she led you to a dead body at the bottom of a pond!

Box Office Information: $12 Million Domestic/$32 Million International for $44 Million Worldwide on a budget of $10 Million ($19 Million domestic inflation adjusted).  I think I really don't understand how movies work, how did they snag all of these stars and film this thing for $10 Million?  I guess due to the low budget it was a financial success, but $12 Million domestic is nothing to brag about.  Released near the end of 2000, this was just the 132nd highest grossing movie of 2001.

Rotten Tomatoes: 57% Critics/55% Audience.  I mean, this feels about right even though I liked it a little more than this.

IMDB: 6.6

My Movie Rating: 6.5/10.  There's a lot to like about this, namely the outstanding performances by just about everyone involved, but the story is utterly predictable and I can't express how much I hated the part where Annie is saved by a ghost at the end. 

Keanu Rating: 10/10.  Seriously, he's as good in this movie as I remembered him being.  It's incredible the night and day difference between this and "The Watcher," and I'd honestly like to see him as a villain in more movies, even though I don't think there are a lot of them left.

Up Next: Another romantic movie (I think) where he's reunited with his wife from "The Devil's Advocate," Charlize Theron.  I can't say I'm excited about it!

The Keanu Reeves Project: The Watcher

THE WATCHER (2000) - David Allen Griffin

I think I've already written this on an earlier entry but couldn't say when so I'm most likely about to repeat myself:

Coming into this entry, I thought I'd seen my fair share of Keanu Reeves movies.  He's one of my favorite people alive (actors or otherwise), and as such, I had thought I'd seen a lot of his filmography.  It turns out that I've missed a lot of these, and it is seeming more and more like there's been a reason a lot of movies are new to me.  Basically, almost every Keanu movie that I haven't seen falls on a spectrum that only ranges from "not good" to "please kill me."

2000's "The Watcher" definitely falls on the worse side of that spectrum.

I've been taking notes as I sit through all of these movies so that when I sit down to write these super popular posts I'll know what to actually write about and this is the first movie where I appear to have a theme.  That theme?

THIS.  MOVIE.  SUCKS.

No, listen to me again.  I'll use bigger letters:

THIS.  MOVIE.  REALLY.  FUCKING.  SUCKS.

Please be warned that spoilers will follow but if you had some future plans to sit down and watch "The Watcher" anyway, just have someone murder you right now with piano wire instead.

First, I want to share a few quick bits of trivia that I pulled from IMDB, and as I always like to mention, I take IMDB "trivia" with a gigantic grain of salt because I'm pretty sure that at least 50% of the things on there are completely fictional.

That said, and I find this completely believable - apparently the only reason Keanu Reeves was in this movie is because his friend/assistant forged his name on the contract.  Then, after the movie came out, Keanu refused to do any press junkets or interviews to promote the movie.  And he was the fucking star!

Think about that for a minute.  I've never heard of anything like this before.  Keanu hated this movie so much, that a) he was tricked (illegally) into being in the movie and b) did absolutely zero interviews to help promote a movie that HE STARRED IN.

Look, I'm sure plenty of movies stars have the self-awareness to know when they've made a steaming pile of shit movie, but even so, they still go out and promote the shit out of them because that's part of their job description as a MOVIE STAR.  I mean, Jesus Christ, here's a clip of Johnny Depp on Jimmy Kimmell to promote the 2015 Movie "Mortdecai." Nobody, and I mean nobody involved in this movie thought this thing was anything short of ass.  That's an industry term.

So, Keanu Reeves hated this movie so much that he basically filmed it and then pulled one of these:



So I want to just take a moment and chalk this back up to the infinite reasons that Keanu Reeves is awesome.

So..."The Watcher..."

Well, this is the first movie I've watched so far where Keanu Reeves has played "a bad guy," in this case, a serial killer named David Allen Griffin.

Wait, why does that name sound familiar?

David...

Allen...

A case of mistaken identity

No, not David Allen Grier!  David Allen Griffin!  You know, this guy!

People get us mixed up ALL the time

I honestly hope that name was supposed to be a placeholder in the script that the production team just happened to forget about prior to filming.  I mean, his full name is only used once or twice in the movie, but it's...just...bad.  It got me thinking about some of the other potential placeholder names they might have used for this movie like "Phillip Seymour Mothman," "Tommy Lee Stones," or "Neil Patrick Farris." 

So Keanu is a serial killer AKA "The Watcher" (although despite all this movies flaws, I can't remember a single instance where anyone actually refers to him as this).  He has recently followed his arch-nemesis FBI Agent Who Gives a Fuck, played here by James Spader, from LA to Chicago.  Back in LA, Spader was apparently hot on Keanu's tail before something tragic happened which we catch glimpses of throughout the movie while Spader suffers from migraines, drug withdrawals (I think?) and a general "not wanting to be in this movie" illness.  

See, "The Watcher" slowly stalks his prey, usually picking out young women who are loners and attractive, but not too attractive (Spader at one point calls the victims "Not beauty pageant contestants" or something like that at one point which is utterly hilarious).  After figuring out their routine over a matter of weeks, he stalks them or breaks into their home and strangles them to death with piano wire.

Unfortunately, Keanu phoned this movie in so hard that he comes across as menacing as Hello Kitty and it is impossible to feel anything other than contempt for this entire production.

I'm here to kill you!

Keanu starts taking pictures of future victims and mailing them to Spader, who at one point mentions that he only checks his mail every few weeks, making him a pretty shitty nemesis to have to deal with.  Generally, when your nemesis can easily be defeated by the USPS, maybe it's time to find a new foil.  Just saying.

Meanwhile, James Spader is in therapy twice a week where he goes to see Dr. Seriously Who Gives a Shit, played by Marisa Tomei, who while lovely and wonderful in many other movies, is a complete waste of time and energy in this movie.  I can't tell if they're on the verge of an inappropriate relationship or not because nobody is putting forth any effort in this thing, but she does happen to be the only person other than law enforcement to visit him in the hospital after he suffers some sort of medical emergency that causes him to pass out headfirst in the fridge.  Go ahead, take 45 seconds to watch this.  I'll wait.

We've ALL been there, buddy.

This movie really just boils down to a really basic cat and mouse "thriller" with bad performances by EVERYONE.  

The final scene features Keanu Reeves dancing to a Rob Zombie song (no, not Dragula, that is used in the opening sequence) after having kidnapped Marisa Tomei and luring Spader into an abandoned warehouse for the purpose of who actually cares.

What I imagine Marisa Tomei's interview process looked like for this

There's a big fire and Keanu dies, which is made very evident, because I'm sure Keanu came away from this saying he'd rather be dead than be in a sequel to this.

Fuck.  This.  Movie.

Some additional thoughts:

*This is one of the alternative posters for this movie that I found - I don't know about you but this looks a lot more like a certain cyberpunk movie released in 1999 than it does a very, very shitty serial killer movie that came out a year later:

This looks familiar....

*Early in the movie James Spader mentions that when The Watcher has a victim he'll violently attack her but revive her "over and over to..." and he is cut off before finishing the thought that could only have ended with a sexual assault.  However, we later learn that The Watcher doesn't actually rape his victims leading me to wonder what the end of that sentence actually was.  Bake her a cake?  Teach her to dance?  Read her bedtime stories?  We will never know.

*This movie takes place in Chicago and there's a chase scene through the streets that reminded me far too much of a chase sequence in "Chain Reaction."  This movie made me LONG for the days of "Chain Reaction."

*That's it.  That's all my sidenotes.  This movie was really fucking terrible.

Box Office Information: $29 Million Domestic, $18 Million International for a total of $47 Million Worldwide ($48 Million inflation adjusted) on a $33 Million Budget.  The fact that this movie's revenue exceeded its budget is a crime against humanity.  This was the 86th highest grossing movie of 2000.

Rotten Tomatoes: 10% Critic/$29% Audience.  That looks about right.

IMDB: 5.3.  I'm about to stop listing these, IMDB users are fucking useless.

My Movie Rating: 2.5.  This.  Movie.  Is.  So.  Fucking.  Bad.

Keanu Rating: 1.5.  I feel like it's not really his thing to phone anything in on purpose, but it is so evident how few fucks Keanu gave about this movie.  He's supposed to be this scary, menacing serial killer but he's just so smiley and goofy and stupid that it's impossible to take him seriously.  And I know he CAN play that if he wants to because the next movie on this list is one I've seen before and recall him being ACTUALLY scary.

Up Next: Well I just alluded to it, it's the 2000 movie, "The Gift."  I've seen this one once and recall very little of it other than  Katie Holmes is topless and Keanu is kind of scary.

The Keanu Reeves Project: The Replacements

THE REPLACEMENTS (2000) - Shane Falco

Just a quick note to start -

The next entry in the Keanu Reeves Project was technically a movie I'd never heard of, a small indie called "Me and Will."  Because Keanu was like 30th billed as "himself/Dogstar," I did a little research beforehand to make sure it wasn't going to be a complete waste of time.  It turns out, it would have been a COMPLETE waste of time as I found the movie available for free on Youtube and watched the first two minutes of it.  If I didn't know any better, it appears to be shot a lot like certain softcore porn movies you used to find on Cinemax at one in the morning and the fact that Traci Lords is credited in the opening doesn't help its cause.  Anyway, it turns out that Keanu's "part" in this movie is literally his real-life band Dogstar playing a song at a club.  Keanu plays bass but at no point does he speak and to be sure, I listened to a podcast about this movie and this is the only part of this movie he's in.  The fact that he's credited at all is completely misleading although I have to say, I wasn't completely turned off by the Dogstar song.  How and why Dogstar is in this movie is an unknown story, limited to the knowledge of the handful of people that made this movie as I couldn't find any information about this movie anywhere on the internet.  This reminds me a bit of an earlier entry I was forced to skip because the movie was not available anywhere on the planet except at least I know that "Me and Will" exists and definitely looked like it sucked.

DOGSTAR!

Okay, so this leads me to today's entry, the 2000 movie "The Replacements."  

Here's the thing about watching comedies from 20 or more years ago:  a lot of them don't hold up.  Perhaps it's because mainstream attitudes have changed or the jokes are topical and don't hold up, or because they really just weren't funny in the first place.  "The Replacements," while not a terrible movie, fits that bill pretty well.

Prior to my recent rewatch, I think I've only seen "The Replacements" from start to finish once, when I saw it in the theater in the summer of 2000 although I've definitely caught bits and pieces of it on TV as there was a time that it was constantly on TBS and TNT.

This movie was released in August of 2000, when I was spending my summer working at the video store, a magical place I've mentioned in at least one previous post.  The video store was a weird, weird place, mainly because we were located around the corner from a Blockbuster and that approximately 50% of our revenue came from pornography.

This is what a video store looked like!

Most of our customers at Potomac Video fit neatly into one of two categories: people that hated being emotionally assaulted by the Hellscape that was Blockbuster Video and people that rented pornography.  These two categories of people were not mutually exclusive.

While I'll save most of my Potomac Video stories for another time and place, I would like to take a moment to write about the people who rented pornography at the turn of the century.  First of all, I'm not judging these people, the year 2000 was an interesting time where porn was almost certainly available on the internet, but access to the internet was still pretty slow and who wants to try to view porn on a modem getting you 256K a second?

Of the group of people that came into my store to rent porn, they could be subcategorized into several other groups like, "Secretly Gay Married Guys," "Don't Tell My Wife I was Here Guy," "Incredibly Late Returns Guys," and my favorite "We Both Know I'm Here to Rent Porn, But I'm Gonna Put On A Show For You Anyway guys."

That last guy was the best.  During the Summer of 2000, I worked a lot of day shifts, and business was slow at that time, to say the least.  On average, I would probably get less than 10 customers in and out the door before 5PM on most days, which often allowed me to skirt the rules and toss on a PG-13 movie every now and then instead of watching "Clue" for the 300th time.  It was during those days that the "putting on a show" guys would come in.  There were only a small handful of them, but they all had the same routine:

The "Show" guy would enter my store, I'd look up and say hello to him, and both he and I knew exactly what he was there for.  But for whatever reason (I always assumed embarrassment), these dudes would always put on a show, seemingly for me and me alone, that they weren't there for the sole reason of renting porn.

They'd casually walk all around the store, picking up and putting back movies, slowly sauntering the aisles, determined to find the right movie just for them.  Then, as always, they'd make a detour over to our documentaries section.  Why documentaries?  Because the docs section happened to be right next to our "back room door" that led to the porn.

I used to love it when one of these guys would come in, spend 10 minutes browsing our new releases and head over to pick up a box over in docs about beekeeping or some shit before slinking into the back room.  I always tried to put myself in their shoes.  Maybe they really were interested in the beekeeping movie.  Maybe their thought process when they came into the store truly was something like this:

"Hey, the video store!  So many movies, so many choices!  I'm going to see what came out this week!  Hmm, this "Fight Club" movie sounds kind of interesting.  Ooh, "Mystery Men!"  I meant to see this one in theaters.  No, you know what, I think I'm in the mood for a documentary today.  What do they have on that?  Hmm, this one about starving children in Somalia looks good.  Oh fuck it, I'm just going to get porn again."

This little song and dance happened multiple times a week with four or five different guys.  I always found it hilarious, especially because nine times out of ten, we were the only two people in the store and at the end of the day, he was always going to have to interact with me anyway so what's all the show for?

Anyway, aside from the main two groups of people that came into the store we had a much smaller third group of people: video store groupies.

There weren't a lot of them, but during the summer of 2000, there were three or four different people that would just come into the store to hang out with me and my colleagues.  Using the word "colleague" to describe the other 20 year olds that I worked with sounds a little too formal but I guess that's what they were.  Most of the groupies were nice guys who just seemed bored.  But there was one in particularly whose name I've forgotten that was always a little bit odd but I feel like it actually was Bruce (a different "Bruce" than my last entry).

Without going into details because I'm already at 1000+ words without talking about this movie, Bruce was a 30 or 40 something year old guy that worked at a free clinic who may or may not have been gay and who may or may not had crushes on me and one of my co-workers at the store.

Anyway, Bruce came in one day and offered to take me and my friend at the store to see "The Replacements."  The movie was on his dime so the three of us saw it together.  I have nothing else interesting to say about this, other than that is why I saw "The Replacements" in the theater.

So..."The Replacements."  What can I say about this movie without launching into another 1000 word aside about the Washington Redskins for whom this movie was very loosely based on after the player strike in 1987?

As a very tiny bit of history, in 1987 there was an NFL players strike, and the Skins were the only team to be 3-0 with a team comprised entirely of replacement players, including a huge Monday Night Football win over the Dallas Cowboys who had about half their pro players back.  The Skins went on to win the Super Bowl that year and because the team has a long, long history of being a horrible franchise, snubbed the replacement players for over 30 years before finally giving them the Super Bowl rings they rightfully deserved.

Anyway, this was enough to inspire the movie, "The Replacements," starring Keanu Reeves and Gene Hackman.  

Do NOT confuse him with Johnny Utah

Keanu Reeves plays Shane Falco, a washed up quarterback from Ohio State (JUST LIKE JOHNNY UTAH!) who gets a second chance to play in the NFL.  To note, the league is never called the NFL because the movie didn't get the rights to it.  This is the same reason the team is called the Washington Sentinels, which is much, much better than the current name that also happens to be a racial slur.

The movie itself is pretty formulaic, except that this did (sort of) actually happen.  There are a small handful of genuinely funny moments, like a young Jon Favreau playing a deranged replacement linebacker.

I'm just not sure what this movie wanted to be - a family friendly comedy, a dramedy, an adult comedy?  So much of the humor punches down in ways that just aren't super funny in 2020 and potentially weren't that funny in 2000.  

And I have to take a minute to talk about the cheerleaders.

For some reason, not only are the players striking, but ostensibly the cheerleaders are striking too because early in the movie when the replacement players first show up to practice, the Sentinels are also having cheerleader tryouts.  Why are the cheerleaders striking?  Solidarity with the players?  We may never know.

In any case, the captain of the squad (I guess?), Annabelle, holds tryouts in one of the most cringeworthy scene of any movie I've watched for this project so far.

MAKE

IT

STOP

Seemingly, the only reason for the cheerleader side story is they needed to give Keanu a love interest, which they do with Annabelle played by Brooke Langton who I know from nothing other than this movie.  The character of Annabelle is given as much depth as a two year old's swimming pool and I almost felt bad for Brooke Langton for being given so little to work with.  She's a cheerleader and she works at a bar and she knows a lot about football, and that's enough for Shane Falco to fall in love with her.  Sure.  The entire subplot should and could have been deleted entirely.

In the end, Shane Falco leads the team to a victory that secures the Sentinels a spot in the playoffs for the pro players, hooray.

A few scattered thoughts:

*This makes the THIRD movie where Keanu plays a quarterback, joining "Point Break" and the TV movie, "The Brotherhood of Justice."  I honestly wonder how good a QB Keanu could have been.

*This is the second movie in a row with a pretty excellent soundtrack, including "Bohemian Like You" by the New Pornographers and "Unbelievable" by EMF.  I'll ignore the fact that this movie opens with the Lit song "Zip-Lock."

*Annabelle drives a lot like Keanu's friend in the much earlier film "Permanent Record."  That is to say, suicidally.  

*I don't know how many movies Gene Hackman has played a coach but that was also his role in Hoosiers.  I don't know, I find that semi-interesting.

*One of the actors in the movie plays a convict who was released from prison in order to be able to play for the team.  Not only did this actually happen in real life but that actor later killed his girlfriend and is now in prison for 40 years.  

*I caught the actor that played Stan Valchek on "The Wire" as a ref, he doesn't have any lines.

Box Office Information: $44 Million Domestic/$5 Million International for a $50 Million worldwide ($75 Million inflation adjusted domestic) on a $50 Million budget.  Well, it didn't LOSE money I guess.  It was in theaters for an average of just six weeks and was just the 56th highest grossing movie of 2000.

Rotten Tomatoes: 41% Critics/66% Audience.  This feels about right.

IMDB: 6.6

My Movie Rating: 5.5.  It's not good, it's not terrible.  I'd rather watch this again than many other movies so far and I'd say it's just slightly above average.

Keanu Rating: 7/10.  I don't have much else to say.

Up Next: "The Watcher."  I've never seen this, but I'm optimistic!

The Keanu Reeves Project: The Matrix

THE MATRIX (1999) - Neo

1999 was arguably one of the greatest years in movie history.  I was a senior in high school in the spring and a freshman in college in the fall, so I have distinct memories of watching many of these movies in theaters or pirated versions in my freshman year dorm room.  I mean just look at what came out in 1999:

*Star Wars Episode 1 (Yes, it surely sucked but I can't even describe the anticipation of this coming out)
*The Sixth Sense - unquestionably M Night Shyamalan's best movie/only good movie, which I saw in theaters prior to the ending being ruined by everyone
*Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me - A gigantic hit sequel and potentially better than the original although roughly 90% of the jokes were recycled from the first one
*Toy Story 2 - I never saw this one but another gigantic sequel
*Tarzan - A Disney release that made nearly $200 Million
*The Blair Witch Project - A movie that could only exist in a burgeoning internet world that made $140 Million on an approximately $3 budget
*American Pie - A movie that reinvented the gross-out teen comedy, which I had the fortunate time to see on opening weekend in a packed theater full of us rowdy teens
*American Beauty - Are we still allowed to like Kevin Spacey movies?
*Bowfinger - A hilarious movie (at least at the time) that flew a bit under the radar
*Three Kings - A criminally underrated movie about the first Iraq war
*Varsity Blues - One of my favorite bad movies of all time
*Fight Club - Not as good as the book but still, it was Fight Club
*Dogma - Kevin Smith's second best work after Clerks
*Saving Private Ryan - Worth watching for just the first 20 minutes alone
*Arlington Road - I don't know if this holds up but I loved this movie in 1999
*Stir of Echoes - Under the radar horror movie that further helped me out for Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon
*Being John Malkovich - One of the weirdest movies I'd ever seen to this point and one of my favorites ever
*Go - Perfectly encapsulated 1999 in 90 minutes
*Rushmore - A perfect movie and one of Wes Anderson's best
*Election - Based on the book of the same name, a great dark comedy
*A Simple Plan - Won't say anything otherwise I'll spoil the whole movie
*Office Space - A movie I probably saw dozens of times, notably because one of our dormmates always had this on his TV in a seemingly never ending 24/7 loop
*Run Lola Run - One of the first foreign language films I can remember seeing and being blown away by


And that's not even all of them!  To put it in short, 1999 was an amazing year for movies, and so the release of "The Matrix" on March 31 is just a small part of an outstanding year.

There's no point in doing a recap of this movie.  If you've been reading this blog (all six of you), you've seen the movie.  And if amazingly you're reading this blog and HAVEN'T seen this movie, what the fuck are you doing?  Go watch "The Matrix."  Like right now.

I just watched it again for the 20th or 30th time and it's still totally fucking great.  So instead of recapping, I am just going to run through my memories of seeing this for the first time, some of my favorite parts, and then getting to my scattered thoughts.

My first viewing of the Matrix was on the Saturday night of its opening weekend.  The movie had been marketed ad nauseam and so there was no way that 17 year old me wasn't going to be going to see it as early as possible.

1999 was a time before you could reserve seats online and well before assigned seating in theaters.  So when my friend (let's just call him Bruce) showed up 45 minutes late to my other friend's house to meet up before heading out, I knew we were in trouble.

Bruce was a constant source of problems and frustration in my senior year in high school, mostly automobile related, as he nearly got me killed no less than a half dozen times due to his completely incompetent driving skills.  I'll never forget the time he cut off three or four drivers in traffic once because he never checked his mirrors.  When I implored him to check his blind spot before changing lanes, he told me, completely seriously, "This car doesn't have a blind spot," in a line that made me want to never have to get into a vehicle with him again.  What a fucking idiot.

So it was on this night that Bruce's lateness was probably going to fuck us.  By the time we got to the theater, the line for tickets seemed never-ending and we were at the back of it.  At this point, it was not impossible that we'd get to the front only to find out the movie was sold out.  Fortunately, we finally got our tickets, but were some of the last people to walk into the theater, forcing us to all split up and leaving me to watch "The Matrix" for the first time in the front row, all the way to one side.  It was an incredibly shitty experience to see this movie for the first time, my neck craning up and to the right trying to see what the hell was going on.  Fucking Bruce.

I still remember some of my initial thoughts from when I saw this movie for the first time.  For instance, within the first five minutes, I knew I was in for something like I'd never seen before:

360 spin kick

Or the "bullet-time" sequence which prior to then was something that you might have only seen in video games:

"Whoa"

Or the shoot-out in the lobby, which combined with the soundtrack, is still one of my favorite action sequences of any movie, even if it doesn't come close to comparison with anything from the "John Wick" trilogy.  But for 1999, this was brilliant.

"Guns.  Lots of guns."

"The Matrix" also has some particularly stand-out performances by Carrie Ann Moss (formerly an unknown) and Hugo Weaving.  But Keanu Reeves is perfectly cast as Neo, and if not for the four months (!!) of martial arts training that he and the other stars conducted prior to filming, there's a good chance "John Wick" wouldn't exist today.  That of course isn't even to mention that "The Matrix" is where Keanu first hooked up with his body double, Chad Stahelski, who he went on to collaborate with again when Stahelski was massively promoted to directing the "John Wick" franchise.

"The Matrix" is also beautifully shot, even though the use of filters (green for the matrix, blue for the real world, and yellow for the one scene that takes place in the dojo simulation) is still a little distracting for me to watch, maybe now more than ever after having to sit through the complete waste of time that was "Little Buddha."

I know Kung Fu!

I actually only realized in reading up some trivia on the movie that this was just the second movie directed by the Wachowski's.  It sort of blows my mind that the two of them were given a gigantic budget after having only directed "Bound," and written "Assassins."  And it's funny because whenever I hear about the Wachowski's, I always think about how prolific I feel like they are, even though their entire careers are almost completely "Matrix" related.  But hey, if you can make over a billion dollars on a movie franchise, I guess you've done pretty well for yourself even if you're also associated with "Jupiter Ascending."

Anyway, "The Matrix" is fucking awesome and still one of my favorite movies, Keanu and otherwise.  I continue to look at this as a rare science fiction movie that holds up, in the same vein that many people (myself included) feel about "Terminator 2" and "Blade Runner."  

Some further scattered thoughts:

*Hey, the "real world" of "The Matrix" is starting to look moderately more appealing than the real world of 2020.  Sure, we're all slaves to highly intelligent AI, but at least those of us that are set free get to eat slop and hang out with Carrie Ann Moss and Keanu Reeves.  

*I used to LOVE the soundtrack to this movie, featuring songs like "Dragula," by Rob Zombie, "Wake Up," by Rage Against the Machine, "Du Hast" by Rammstein and more.  I used to drive around with this on all the time.

*The actor that plays Mouse looks a lot like young Pete Davidson

I'd write a Pete Davidson quote, but I don't know any

*The very long list of actors who were either considered or offered the roles of Trinity, Neo, and Morpheus is bonkers and I am not going to bother to list them all here.  So I'll just say this, can you even fucking imagine what this movie would have looked like with THIS guy playing Neo?

No seriously, David Schwimmer as Neo??

For the record, the only place I read that David Schwimmer was in consideration is IMDB, so I am going to take that with a grain of salt because even this is too hard to believe. 

Box Office Information: $173 Million Domestic/$292 Million International for $465 Million Worldwide on a $65 million budget.  $307 Million domestic inflation adjusted.  Yeah, I'd say this was a success, and that's even before the two and soon to be three sequels.  "The Matrix" is also the 289th all time domestic movie and the 28th highest domestic box office for an R rated movie.  It also had an average theater run of over three months per theater, which is pretty impressive.

Rotten Tomatoes: 88% Critics/85% Audience.  I'm a little surprised this isn't over 90% on both accounts.  I suppose you could get a little nit-picky about some plot logic and I actually read one of the only negative critic reviews because I was curious.  That particular writer didn't like the movie because it "borrowed" from a lot of other films, thought it was too violent, and didn't love Keanu's casting, among other things.  She also suggested that the 1998 movie "Dark City," is a better movie.  It's funny because these two movies are often compared and I also watched "Dark City" for the first time in 20 years before rewatching "The Matrix."  While "Dark City" is a really good movie, I don't think it is nearly as great as "The Matrix."

IMDB: 8.7

My Movie Rating: 9.5/10.  I'm only docking it a half point for some of the plot logic that doesn't always make sense, but who really cares.  

Keanu Rating: 9/10.  He's really good in this, and you have to admire the dude (and the rest of the cast) to the work they put into making this.  

Up Next:  Well, it's one of two things depending on my mood.  Officially, the next movie is some obscure independent movie called "Me and Will," but because I'm pretty sure he's barely in it, I might skip it and head straight to "The Replacements."

The Keanu Reeves Project - The Devil's Advocate

The Devil's Advocate (1997) - Kevin Lomax

So this post was supposed to be the 1997 movie, "The Last Time I Committed Suicide."  Here's the thing - I've been in a real recent slump here in terms of the last several movies I've slogged through.  Here's a quick look back:

"Feeling Minnesota" made me feel like jumping off a building.  "Chain Reaction" was basically a direct rip-off on "The Fugitive" and while it was better than I'd expected, it was still not very good.  "A Walk in the Clouds" was half decent but certainly not my cup of tea, and "Johnny Mnemonic" was astoundingly terrible.

So up next was yet another movie I know nothing about and I thought to myself, you know, I just don't have it in me.  I don't want to spend $2 to stream what is probably another shitty movie.  I mean, there are ZERO critical reviews on Rotten Tomatoes and the movie grossed $46,000 at the box office on a $4 Million budget.  That's about all I need to know.  2020 is pretty bleak right now and the last thing I need in my life at this exact moment is another super shitty Keanu Reeves movie.  So, as much as I know all five of my readers will be upset, I am officially skipping "The Last Time I Committed Suicide" and moving directly to a different super shitty Keanu Reeves movie, "The Devil's Advocate."

I have only seen this movie once in my life, sometime around 2000 or 2001 when I was working a summer job at a video store, where my main responsibilities were changing movie posters, determining what the best PG rated movies were that I could broadcast on the in-store televisions (the answer of course, is "Clue), and watching with great intent variety of men who would come in to my store with the sole purpose of renting pornography, which must have accounted for at least 50% of our business.  But that's a story for another time.

The best perk of working at the video store was all the free rentals I wanted, which is why I went through a period of watching all sorts of random shit and it was during this time I figured, what the hell, let's try "The Devil's Advocate."

So while I didn't remember much about this movie, the one thing I did remember was the big "twist," Al Pacino is the devil!

Here's the thing about that...well, actually, take two minutes and watch the trailer:

And here's the poster:

So, unless you are a total fucking moron, you go into the movie already knowing the big reveal.  Having watched it again last night it dawned on me that had this been named something else, had a far less revealing trailer, didn't have the tag line "He's about to lose his soul," and was just a tad more subtle, it COULD have been a decent movie.

But there's zero subtlety and by the time we find out what we've already known since minute zero, I just couldn't give a shit.  This movie absolutely bangs you over the head with knowledge that Al Pacino is satan.  His fucking name is JOHN MILTON, but if your knowledge of Paradise Lost is limited or non-existent, don't worry, there are multiple other times we are clued in as to what's going on here. 

The movie opens with Keanu Reeves as Kevin Lomax, in a Florida courtroom defending a pedophile teacher, played by Chris Bauer, best known for his role as Frank Sabotka on "The Wire."  There's absolutely no reason for this to take place in Gainesville other than to justify Keanu Reeves doing yet another atrocious accent.  Keanu, I love you, but please STOP taking roles that require accent work.

Stay off the docks.

Despite realizing the guilt of his client, Kevin Lomax is the world's greatest attorney and gets him acquitted.  Shortly thereafter, he's recruited to this giant law firm in New York, run by Al Pacino as John Milton, who also happens to be the devil.

From here, the movie plods along until the "reveal," with several subplots I couldn't care about, including Keanu having to defend a voodoo practicing Delroy Lindo from animal abuse charges and taking a case defending Coach from a triple homicide.  Oh, and noted pedophile Jeffrey Jones is also in this.

A right wing asshole and a real life pedophile walk into a bar...

By the way, this gives me an excuse to include one of my all-time favorite clips of Craig T. Nelson explaining how capitalism works, not recognizing the hilarious irony in his statement:

I should also note, that Craig T. Nelson at least appears to be a stand-in for Donald Trump, so that's a lot of fun right about now.

What I imagine Trump Tower looks like.  Classy.

Also, Keanu's wife Mary Ann, played by Charlize Theron, smells something fishy early on, has a mental breakdown after being raped (off-screen) by the devil, and eventually kills herself.  

"You look...lovely?"

Yeah.

Again, all of this could be way more interesting if this movie gave a shit about a slow reveal rather than throwing everything in your face early and often.

After Mary Ann loses her shit, Keanu goes to Al Pacino's home/office to confront him (he lives in one giant room with no furniture), where everything we've known this entire time is revealed in a THIRTY MINUTE monologue by Al Pacino.  It.  Is.  Interminable.  

The only thing revealed during his diatribe that we didn't already know is that Keanu is actually Al Pacino's son and Pacino wants Keanu to bang his half-sister so together they can create the anti-christ.  Rather than accept this as his fate, Keanu shoots himself in the head and Al Pacino has a hilarious meltdown.

LET IT END!

But, instead of this movie simply ENDING, Keanu wakes up back in the courtroom from the beginning of the movie, where he walks away from his pedophile client.  A court reporter from the start of the movie morphs into Al Pacino, who breaks the fourth wall and says some nonsense about free will, implying that Keanu is in some sort of time loop until he agrees to the devil's plan.

It is all VERY stupid and yes, I hate this movie too.  So glad I skipped "The Last Time I Committed Suicide" for this...

Some scattered thoughts:

*This might be Keanu's worst accent work to date.  It's really, really bad, and completely unnecessary.  There's literally no reason he's from Gainesville, Florida when he could be from LITERALLY ANYWHERE and not have to do accent work.  He's got this cutesy nickname for his wife, which he shouts multiple times in the movie, simply shortening Mary Ann to Mar (which he pronounces "mare."). I literally had no idea what he was saying every time he called her Mar and what's funny is that I was watching this with captions on and every time he said her name, the captions didn't even bother to transcribe it.  

*Al Pacino says some ridiculous shit in this.  My favorite is probably, "I'm the hand up Mona Lisa's skirt - they never see me coming!" 

*The second movie in a row featuring Delroy Lindo.  His part in this is wholly unnecessary, as is much of this movie.

*Charlize Theron is the only part of this movie that isn't completely awful.  

Box Office information: $61 Million Domestic ($121 Million adjusted)/$92 Million International, $153 Million worldwide on a $56 Million budget and the 30th highest grossing movie of 1997.  A moderate success.  It's also the 1,384th highest domestic movie of all time and the 267th all time most worldwide box office. 

Rotten Tomatoes: 67% Critical, 80% Audience.  TOO HIGH.

IMDB: 7.5

My Movie Rating: 4/10.  As I've already noted multiple times, this movie could have been significantly better with some tweaks, specifically not banging you over the head letting you know that Al Pacino is the devil.  And if we are SUPPOSED to know that within the first five minutes (if you somehow avoided the trailer, the poster, and the name of the movie), then what is the point of this?

Keanu Rating: 3.5/10.  It's mostly the accent work, but he's also just not very good in this.

Up next: Could it be....yes, The Matrix!  This is the first movie since I rewatched "Speed" that I'm actually excited about.

The Keanu Reeves Project - Feeling Minnesota

Feeling Minnesota (1996) - Jjaks Clayton

I'm just going to get this out of the way off the top: this movie really sucked.  I mean, it really, really sucked.  I had felt tortured by earlier movies like "Even Cowgirls Get The Blues," and the atrocious TV movie "Babes in Toyland," but this was abysmal on different levels. 

I went into this one with an open mind as I do with all the movies I know little to nothing about, and had thought to myself it's Keanu and Cameron Diaz, can't be that bad, can it?

Yes, it can.

I like Cameron Diaz.  Aside from being a total smoke show (especially in this movie), I think she's a pretty funny comedic actress.  She's obviously great in "There's Something About Mary," but has also done some other really quality work, like her roles in "Being John Malkovich" and what I used to think was a very underrated dark comedy, "Very Bad Things."

But unlike those movies, she and everyone else involved in "Feeling Minnesota" are completely wasted.  Was this a drama?  A comedy?  A dark comedy?  A romantic dark comedy?  A romantic dark dramedy?  The trailer, which I watched afterwards to try to gain some clarity made it clear that this is at the very least, supposed to be funny.  Funny it was not, but I can certainly determine that it was a complete waste of time.

As usual, maximum spoilers ahead.

"Feeling Minnesota" at first feels like a shitty knock off of a one of my favorite movies, "True Romance," then tosses in a a little "Dumb and Dumber," "Gone Girl," adds a splash of Dan Akroyd and calls it a day.

The movie opens with a montage of two brothers in the 70s, one of whom is a gigantic bully to the other before we flash forward to present day Minnesota where Freddie, played by Cameron Diaz, is wearing a wedding dress and running along some train tracks trying to escape a car full of goons, led by Red played by Delroy Lindo. They eventually catch up to her and he menacingly tells her that yes, she is getting married today.  She doesn't seem too happy about it.

Is he a pimp?  A drug dealer?  A humble arcade operator?  We will never know.  Or care.

The movie never bothers to really explain what their relationship is, except that Freddie owes Red money.  The movie also never bothers to explain what Red actually does other than that he's a generic criminal.  Don't worry, none of this particularly matters just like everything else in this.

Due to her debt, Red forces Freddie to get married to his shady accountant  Sam, played here by the Vince D'Onofrio, a man I've long reviled since he scene chewing role in "Law and Order: Criminal Intent."  Apparently Sam is the one that noticed/found/made up that Freddie is in debt $10,000 and so Red's reward is to....give her to him?  Sure.

Same tuxedo as a much, much, much funnier movie

At the wedding, Sam's younger brother Jjaks (played by our hero Keanu Reeves) arrives uninvited and without a gift to boot.  Freddie, pissed off that she's marrying a man she doesn't want to marry, immediately hits it off with Jjaks.  We never learn what Freddie and Sam's relationship was prior to the wedding, or even if they knew each other because this movie cares little for exposition, logic, or humor. 

As a quick aside, we later learn that his name is Jjaks due to a misspelling on his birth certificate.  This is...supposed to be funny?  HA FUCKING HA.

I will say this, they make a nice looking couple.

After sharing a beer and a short conversation, Freddie bring Jjaks into the house and they have sex in a dirty bathroom, and for the first time I can remember in this project so far, we get to witness Keanu's "O-Face," which made me feel ashamed and embarrassed even though I was watching this by myself.

If things go right, I'll be showing her my "O-Face."

Later at the reception, Jjaks is admonished by his mother for coming without a gift, Jjaks does the natural thing and steals a car and robs a gas station because sure, that makes sense.  He returns to the party and at the shock of him attempting to own his mother with the gift he bought with the stolen cash, she drops dead of a heart attack.

It was at this point that I started contemplating slashing my wrists rather than keep watching.

From here, a number of very stupid fucking things happen and yet nothing happens at all.  Jjacks and Freddie decide to run away to Vegas together, except they have no money so they return home with the intention of stealing cash from Sam that he had tucked away.  Unfortunately for them, Sam already spent all of his money (which we later find out was stolen from Red) on a down payment for a house just outside of Vegas.

I wish this was over

There's a big fight and Sam bites part of Jjacks' ear off, which is only important because it allows Keanu Reeves to fashion a bandage with a torn off shirt sleeve but ends up looking like a stupid Karate Kid.

Wax off

So Sam, naturally, is pissed off.  His younger brother stole his wife and attempted to take his money as well.  So he tracks down Freddie, has her drive them to an alley, and shoots her dead.  Sam then takes her lifeless body back to the hotel room where Jjacks and her are staying and attempts to frame Jjacks for her murder by leaving the murder weapon in the room and Freddie in the tub.

Bath time

Jjacks is passed out from his fight with his older brother and when he wakes up he finds Freddie dead and a gun on the nightstand, and it isn't until near the end of the movie that we are supposed to know that he thought he had killed Freddie during his blackout and not that he was being setup for a murder.  None of it makes any sense and I want to die.

A bunch more stupid shit happens at this point and if I continue to go beat by beat I'll be here all night.  So I'll cut to the chase a bit -

It turns out that Freddie, despite being shot in the side at point blank range, IS NOT actually dead.  There are so many problems logically here that I cannot begin to list them all but needless to say, it's all very fucking predictable yet asinine.  There are a handful of a comedy of errors (light on the comedy but big on the errors) including an extortion plot gone wrong, a ricochet'd bullet nearly killing Sam, and a perplexing "twist" where Dan Akroyd as a dirty cop kills Sam and attempts to steal a bunch of money.  If I'd only hung myself in minute 20 I wouldn't have to know any of this.

How everyone watching this movie feels

I can't stress enough: this movie really fucking sucks.

In the end, Freddie is able to flee (alone) to Vegas.  Jjacks hitches a ride there, to find her living her dream as a Vegas showgirl, they reunite and live happily ever after.  Which is good for them because everyone that made it this far in the movie has probably killed themself.

It's hard to believe that this movie came out the same year as "Fargo," a movie that despite its name also mostly takes place in Minnesota and is infinitely better.

Wow, this was truly a piece of shit, and I'm a little surprised I am still alive to be writing this post.

Some stray thoughts on this one:

*Early in the movie there is a scene where Sam rapes Freddie, although the movie doesn't seem to really understand the implications of what's happening.  We only really get the audio of Cameron Diaz saying things like "Stop, you're hurting me," and "No."  I had a lot of problems with this, particularly because the soundtrack during this scene is a weird adult contemporary song that made me realize that the filmmaker either didn't understand the implications of what was happening here or worse, didn't care.  Again, this movie is...a comedy?

*I am honestly incredulous at the lack of exposition and defiance of logic in this movie.  The audience is never told any number of things that would matter but probably not make this movie any better anyway, such as: what was Freddie and Sam's relationship prior to the wedding, how does Red make money, what is Dan Akroyd's relationship with Red, how does a comatose woman who has been shot not bleed out and die on the side of the road, why did Jjacks think he killed Freddie particularly when a gun shows up in a hotel room that wasn't there before, and who thought making this movie was a good idea?

*Aside from Dan Akroyd, NOBODY in this movie even bothers to attempt to do a Minnesotan accent.  Perhaps this was for the best, particularly as I've already noted in previous posts that Keanu is not a guy known for his accent work.

*Hey, Courtney Love is in this as a waitress at the diner next to the motel and she's not bad in it.  There's absolutely nothing about this character that required this to be Courtney Love, but fuck it, like the rest of this movie, who cares?

I am doll parts

*John Caroll Lynch, who you may or may not recognize, has a small role as a cop in this and he ALSO appears in Fargo, and I think that's a very minor but fun piece of trivia.

This guy

*This movie has the fucking gall to end on a cover of the wonderful Johnny Cash song, Ring of Fire.  I don't know why this angered me as much as it did but this was infuriating.  

Box Office information: $3 Million Domestic ($6.4 Million adjusted), Under $1 Million international, $3.7 Million worldwide.  I was unable to find the budget but based on the actors in this alone, I have to imagine this lost a lot of money.

Rotten Tomatoes: 14% Critics (only 21 reviews), 27% audience.  Those both sound about right.  And interestingly enough, Siskel and Ebert gave it....two thumbs up?  Yes, they sure did.  When all is said and done and I compile my rankings of all these movies, I might have to revise it to put this at the bottom, although "Even Cowgirls Get the Blues" was probably a more painful watch. 

IMDB: 5.4

My Movie Rating: 3/10.  This.  Movie.  Sucks.  

Keanu Rating: 5/10.  The one and only thing I will give this movie credit for is that the performances in it aren't especially bad.  It was just the writing, editing, directing, and everything else.  Keanu Reeves mostly slept walked his way through this, maybe because of how little he had to go with.   

Next: "The Last Time I Committed Suicide."  I have no idea what this is either but I thought about suicide during the 90 minutes of "Feeling Minnesota" and it can't be much worse.