The Keanu Reeves Project - A Walk In The Clouds

A Walk in the Clouds (1995) - Paul Sutton

Sorry for the brief delay in the Keanu Reeves Project.  I've finally gotten around to watching Ozark and have been plowing through it the last several days instead of watching my Keanu movies.  And because this project is NOT about Ozark, I won't write my feelings on that particular show, because you're not here for Ozark thoughts, you're here for my posts about Keanu Reeves movies!  

I think part of the delay in the project is that after my last post on Johnny Mnemonic, a movie I loved for all the wrong reasons, I saw that the next movie up on the list was "A Walk in the Clouds," a movie I didn't know anything about but surmised was a romance with Keanu as the lead, something I didn't have optimistic feelings about.  

It's not to say I'm against romance movies or love stories.  In fact, some of my favorite movies can be classified as love stories, such as "The Last of the Mohicans," and "True Romance."  For some reason I'll never understand, I used to love "Wicker Park," a movie so stupid that if anyone had a cell phone it could have been five minutes long.

So it's not that it was a romance that turned me off before watching "A Walk in the Clouds," I think it's more of Keanu Reeves starring as a romantic lead.  I don't know, I'm just not into it.  In fact, I would say that "A Walk in the Clouds" is the first of several Keanu Reeves movies I haven't gotten to yet where he plays a lead in a romance.  Sure, there were "romance" aspects in other movies so far but no movies with a true romantic theme.  

So while I know I've got more to come like "Hardball" and "The Lake House," "A Walk in the Clouds" is the first real romance movie so far in this project.  So after plowing through the first two seasons of "Ozark," I finally got around to watching it and came away feeling a bit unjustified in my total aversion to watching it.  

So Keanu Reeves co-stars as Paul Sutton where he's just gotten back home to San Francisco after fighting in World War 2 where he returns to his wife, played by Debra Messing (in her film debut) who didn't even bother reading the letters he sent every day to her.  We can't really blame her too much as we find out they had barely known each other prior to getting married and they don't seem to have much in common or that much of an attachment to one another.  So yeah, we already know where this is going.

I'd probably marry her too if I was off to face near certain death

Paul is a chocolate salesman, a profession that apparently existed in 1945, and he immediately hits the road for....door to door chocolate sales I guess?  Anyway, he's headed up to Sacramento by train where he has a chance meeting with a young Mexican American woman named Victoria, played by Aitana Sanchez-Gijon, a woman I don't know from anything other than this movie. Victoria is headed home from graduate school to visit her very wealthy family, as they run a vineyard in Napa Valley.

After ending up stuck on the side of the road with her, Paul learns that she's gotten pregnant from one of her professors (now out of the picture) and her father is basically going to kill her when he finds out about everything.  Paul, being the genuinely nicest guy in the world with no ill intentions offers to go home with her, pretend to be her husband, and then ditch out the next day to take the fall as the world's biggest asshole so Victoria can have her father think she's kept her honor to the family.  Okay, sure, I'll buy it for the sake of this movie.  

Well, a lot of this movie is pretty formulaic from here - one day turns into several days, they fall in love, the end.

Sure, a few other things happen here and there.  Victoria's grandfather, Don Pedro (played by Anthony Quinn), imparts his old man wisdom on Paul, Victoria's father goes from hating Paul to loving Paul, and an entire orchard burns down.

Now, I have to admit something at this point.  I consider myself well versed in very few subjects.  I can barely read or write anymore as evidenced by this blog.  But one thing I am pretty knowledgable about is movies.  So I felt a little stupid not really knowing who Anthony Quinn was prior to doing a little research before writing this entry.  I knew the name but probably couldn't have named any movie he had been in.  Well, Anthony Quinn was fucking prolific in the 50's and 60's, with roles in classics (that I've also never seen) like "Zorba the Greek," and "Lawrence of Arabia."  Oh, and he also won two Oscars.  Anyway, I'm really only pointing this out because he was probably the best part of "A Walk in the Clouds," and I wish he had more screen time.

A good chunk of the movie focuses on Paul and how he becomes part of the family in a very short time, despite Victoria's father's initial (and rightful) distrust of the entire situation.  But the grandfather sees the pair falling in love even before they do and sort of tries to steer them together as well.  I really thought Anthony Quinn was excellent in this, but I guess that's what you get when you cast a two time Oscar winner.

Brandy and singing in the wine cellar with Anthony Quinn and Keanu Reeves

One thing I found a little troublesome with the movie in general was the portrayal of Victoria's family.  I'm certainly not an expert but everything about them seemed a lot more Italian than Mexican, from their accents to their music to the very odd scene where everyone mashes grapes together that looked like a cut scene from "The Godfather."  In fact, a handful of the actors that played the family had Italian heritage but anyway, what do I know?

A second aspect of the movie that I didn't care much for was that Paul has a number of flashbacks to the war through a handful of dream sequences.  His dreams change through the movie as he gets closer to Victoria and her family, but the war's affect on him is never explored or discussed so the dream sequences seem completely unnecessary and out of place.  

Overall, the movie was totally fine but unmemorable and I doubt I'll ever watch it again but am not angry that I spend an hour and a half watching it.  

A few scattered thoughts:

*I really liked Debra Messing in this as well, even though Keanu catches her cheating on him, she never really comes off as "bad" in this, which is maybe why Keanu is able to break it off with her leaving everyone happy.  I think the movie navigated their marriage in an interesting way and could have been a lot deeper if Keanu had to struggle with leaving her for Victoria.

*Maybe my next career will be door to door chocolate salesman.  Do you think we're going to still have chocolate when the dust settles on 2020?  

*Um, the Zucker Brothers produced this movie.  What.  The.  Fuck?  The Zucker Brothers.  Who made Airplane and Top Secret!  I'd kinda like to see "A Walk in the Clouds" reimagined as a spoof.

*I read Roger Ebert's review of this from 1995 and he was over-the-top effusive in his praise, giving it a full 4/4 stars.  Yo dude, this movie is NOT that good.  

Box Office Mojo: $50 Million ($104 Million adjusted) on a $20 Million budget.  The 29th highest grossing movie of 1995.  A box office success, I have no recollection of this movie being as popular as it apparently was.  It's also the 1,758th highest grossing movie of all time, so there's that.

Rotten Tomatoes: 44% Critics/75% Audience.  Interesting numbers.  I could see the critics disliking it based on how formulaic it was, but I think that number is a little low while the audience also seems a little high to me.

My Movie Rating: I wish I was giving half points because I want to give it a 5.5, but I haven't been doing that yet so I won't start now.  I'm going to round down on this to a 5, because while it was a perfectly fine movie, nothing stands out and I doubt I'll ever watch it again.

Keanu Rating: 7/10.  Again, I don't love Keanu as a romantic lead, I see him as either too silly or too John Wick for this.  But he gets the job done here and was perfectly acceptable.  

Next: The 1996 movie "Chain Reaction."  I'm a little excited because this is another one I've never seen and know very little about other than I think it's also supposed to be Johnny Mnemonic level bad.

The Keanu Reeves Project - Johnny Mnemonic

JOHNNY MNEMONIC (1995) - Johnny

I'm just going to get this out of the way on the top because I don't think I've mentioned it yet in this series:

I love bad movies.

I know, this isn't trendy anymore.  It certainly doesn't make me unique and it definitely doesn't make me cool.  But I have loved bad movies for a long, long time.  

My love of bad movies started in my sophomore year of college, when I caught the 1986 movie "Cobra" airing on TV.  As soon as Stallone mumbled out the epic line, "You are a disease, I'm the cure," I was hooked.  How had I never seen this movie before?  And how did Sylvester Stallone continue to work after it was released? 

Have you seen "Cobra?"  It's a revelation.  It might be the best bad movie ever made.

In short, Stallone, as the titular renegade cop "Cobra," is barely able to mumble out his lines as he hunts a gigantic criminal gang responsible for a slew of murders in the city despite the other cops thinking it's just one serial killer and not, you know, hundreds of people.  The writing is terrible, the acting is worse, the plot holes are infinite and at the end of the day, "Cobra" is simply an awesomely terrible movie that I would be happy to watch on an infinite loop until the end of time.  

Mumble mumble mumble mumble

I hosted my very first ever "Bad Movie Marathon"  in my friend's dorm room shortly after my accidental viewing of "Cobra."  A group of about a dozen of my friends watched it along with several other godawful movies, like "Drop Dead Fred," which is apparently a very controversial movie even though there really is no debate - it's terrible.  Come at me.

The first ever Bad Movie Marathon was a gigantic success (if you call a dozen people sitting around a college dorm room making fun of old, bad movies a success) and I went on to host 15 or 20 more bad movie marathons since then.  We've watched some really hilariously bad movies like "Cool as Ice," "Road House," and "Stone Cold" from the latest quarantined marathon a few weeks ago.  

But we've also watched some really terrible movies that have absolutely no entertainment value or redeeming qualities that nearly cost me a handful of friendships like "Spice World," "Birdemic," and "Jack Frost 2."  I certainly know the difference between a "good" bad movie and a movie that has no entertainment value whatsoever, unintentionally comedic or otherwise.

NEVER watch this movie.

Over time, I realized that loving bad movies was a bit of a hobby for a much larger group of people that extended far beyond my friend group.  Podcasts like the incredibly popular "How Did This Get Made?" and "We Hate Movies," (who previously covered Johnny Mnemonic) started to crop up, along with countless others that don't have the name recognition or popularity.  In fact, several Youtube channels discussing and reviewing bad movies have become immensely popular and I've realized that there's a significantly larger community of bad movie lovers exists nationwide.  

I don't get mad when I'm forced to sit through a bad movie, so long as it's entertaining.  Hell, I'm the guy that actively sits through old Lifetime movies in search of unintentional comedic value.  So far during this project, I've certainly sat through some BAD movies but none of which had the comedic value I want in a bad movie.  There's a big difference between just plain bad or boring and awesomely bad.  There was nothing funny about "Even Cowgirls Get the Blues" or "Bram Stoker's Dracula."  "Little Buddha," and "My Own Private Idaho" were just really fucking boring.  So far, there really haven't been any "good" bad movies in my journey through Keanu Reeves filmography. 

Which leads me to today's movie: Johnny Mnemonic.

And wow.  I LOVED this movie.  And certainly not because it was good.

I went into this one with almost no knowledge other than that it was supposed to be "bad." And boy did it not disappoint.  

Thankfully, "Johnny Mnemonic" is not just bad but it is hilariously terrible and I'm going to come out of this one with a strong recommendation to bad movie lovers around the world.

What I really loved about "Johnny Mnemonic" is that it starts bad and stays bad throughout.  There were multiple times where I laughed out loud at how ridiculous it was, whether it was something from the storyline or the acting or the constant scenes of what "the internet" had turned into in the year 2021.  

The movie opens up with one of the longest scrolls I can ever remember seeing in any movie.  One of my general rules of thumb is that the longer an opening scroll or intro narration the worse the movie is.  You shouldn't have to give me three minutes of background in order to understand what is happening in your movie.  There are of course exceptions to this rule, "Star Wars" comes to mind immediately but the scroll in Johnny Mnemonic opens the movie and lasts for an eternity.

It goes

On and on....

And on and on...

And on...and on...and on...

We learn that it's the year 2021 and the corporations rule everything and there's a new pandemic affecting society.  I mean, it's completely preposterous...

Okay, but aside from the fact that part was totally accurate, there are other key pieces of information we learn heading into the movie.  For example, the Yakuza are basically the hired thugs of big corporations and data carrying couriers called Mnemonics are trusted to transmit important information that's held in hard drives in their brains.   
Sure.

So, here's a quick synopsis of the plot:

Keanu Reeves plays Johnny (no last name), a mnemonic courier who is hired for one last mission so he can finally earn enough money to restore the childhood memories he has lost over time due to all the other data stored in his head.  He takes a very dangerous mission to deliver 320GB of data stored in his head (despite his maximum capacity of 160GB) to an unknown person in the "Free City" of Newark, New Jersey. The data ends up being the cure to the NAS epidemic and as such, Keanu is chased by the Yakuza, by the original owner of the data, Pharmacom, and by a hired bounty hunter known as the Street Preacher in an absolutely bananas performance of Dolph Lundgren.

Yakuza baddie.  This guy is over-the-top hilariously bad.

And yes, it's funny that he's only carrying 320GB of data but I'll give the movie a pass for that.  Back in 1995, 320GB was probably the biggest number they could think of.  I don't even know if the word "terabyte" existed then.

The bigger question is why in this future society there isn't a more secure way of transmitting "large" amounts of data without a human courier.  I mean, these guys never heard of an FTP?  It seems a bit absurd to think that in this future society the most secure way to transmit data would be through a human carrier, particularly when there's a pandemic as well as the Yakuza killing everyone on behalf of big corporations.  

Meanwhile, a slew of recognizable faces show up throughout to either help or impede our hero:

Hey, here's Henry Rollins as "Spider," a "brain mechanic" who specializes in body modifications.  Spider gets annoyed when he meets Johnny and learns that Johnny doesn't have a last name.  Dude, your name is Spider, you don't have a foot to stand on here.  

CAUSE I'M A LIAR

Hey, here's Dina Meyer as Jane, an aging (?) bodyguard who also suffers from NAS who is hired by Keanu to help him make his delivery.

Hey, here's Udo Kier as Ralphie, Johnny's special agent who gets him missions and also turns on him early in the film.  For those keeping track, this makes the THIRD movie so far that Udo Kier has shown up in.  I had previously referred to him as the weird German guy from the Van Sant movies, but now I know better that he's actually pretty prolific.

"Oh, hello Johnny."

Wait, look over there!  Is that....Ice T as J-Bone?  It sure is!  He's the leader of the rebel force, the Low-Teks, who basically look like they fell off the back of a truck full of extras from "Mad Max."  He's got an anarchy symbol tattoo on his face and much like the rest of the low-teks, lines drawn through the rest of him.  

"Hey Johnny, do you know the benefits of Car Shield?"

And is that....could it be....is that fucking legendary actor of Japanese action movies Takeshi Kitano AKA Beat Takeshi as the head of Pharmacom?  What the fuck are you doing in this movie?

That you're in the wrong movie

There are simply too many absurd things in this movie to describe them all, so how about a quick smattering of some of my favorites?

First and foremost, EVERYONE in this movie is terrible, Keanu Reeves included.  It's almost as if the entire cast had their brains implanted with a "forget how to act" system update.  Even Beat Takeshi, who is a goddamn legend is TERRIBLE in this.  But, it's not entirely their fault as the writing in this is really, really bad.  I know I might not be one to talk given the quality of this blog but this movie has dialogue like "I want you to do something for me."  "Do?" "Say bye."

Beat Takeshi in Takeshi's Castle AKA MXC.  Better than Johnny Mnemonic

There is so much "future speak" gobbledy gook in this movie that I lost track.  Apparently, all of the technology is what caused the NAS epidemic in nearly half the population.  Sounds a bit like the 5G conspiracy theories to me....

One of my favorite scenes is when Johnny and Jane break into a computer store, which is actually called "Crazy Bob's Computer Shop," and Johnny has to "hack" into the internet, which really is a series of tubes.

Here are some of the items he needs in order to do this:

*A Sino Logic 60, 

*A pair of SoGo 7 Data Gloves

*A GPL Stealth Module

*A Thompson Eye Phone (no, not an iPhone, this movie did not predict nearly anything)

Even stupider than this looks

There are multiple scenes of Johnny inside of the Internet, which really just looks like very bad 90's CGI reminiscent of "The Lawnmower Man," including a far too long final sequence where he's battling a computer virus....

Oh, and about NAS...

NAS is this virus going around that's affecting nearly half the population but as far as we can see, NAS really just causes people to have vaguely annoying tremors (called the "black shakes") every once in a while.  It doesn't even seem that debilitating.  

Dolph Lundgren is FUCKING HILARIOUS as the Street Preacher, a hired mercenary to help stop Johnny even though the entire Yakuza is already after him.  Dolph Lundgren utters out a handful of lines like "Come to Jesus," while trying to kill everyone in his path.  

Cyber Jesus

And it would be a shame if I didn't mention the single worst monologue in any movie from this project so far.  You just need to watch this for yourself.  If I ever start acting again, this is what I'm showing up in auditions to perform.  

And lastly, near the end of the movie we find out that all of humanity's hopes rely on...wait for it...a cybernetic dolphin.  I wish I was joking.

Jones - the psychic cybernetic dolphin here to save humanity

This movie is fucking terrible in all of the best ways.  I can't recommend it more.

Just a few quick side notes:

*This was directed by Robert Longo, his first and LAST feature film.  Yes, Johnny Mnemonic appears to have killed this man's career.

*I don't know how much more Udo Kier I can take.  Why does he keep showing up?

*Apparently Keanu Reeves turned down Val Kilmer's role in "Heat" to star in "Johnny Mnemonic."  Whoops.

*It's shocking to me that after starring in this absolute dud of a movie that Keanu Reeves was not only offered but accepted the role of Neo in "The Matrix" only four years later.  Clearly, the quality of these two movies is enormous and it's crazy to think that they were made less than five years apart from one another.  

Box Office Mojo Information: $19 million  on a $40 million budget (inflation adjusted to $39.8 Million).  Yikes.  Somehow still the 86th highest grossing movie of 1995.

Rotten Tomatoes: 13% Critics, 31% Audience - This sounds about right.  I have to imagine those positive audience scores are ironic.

IMDB: 5.7 - this is far too high.

My Movie Rating: This is tough.  From an honest standpoint this gets a 2/10.  It's atrocious.  I mean, I can't express enough how bad this movie is.  However, from a bad movie perspective it gets a full 10/10.  Highly entertaining, would absolutely watch again as a Bad Movie Marathon choice.  

Keanu Rating: 1/10.  Did you watch that monologue I embedded above?  He's just so bad in this, but so is everyone else.  I don't know how much fault is his, the writing is abysmal.  I'm surprised this only killed the director's career.

Up next: The 1995 movie "A Walk in the Clouds."  I don't know what this is but it sounds like a romance movie.  I'm going in with an open mind.

The Keanu Reeves Project - Speed

SPEED (1994) - Jack Traven

Well buckle up, strap in, hold on tight, and get ready for the thrill-ride that is the 1994 action thriller, "Speed."

This is one of the Keanu movies I've been looking forward to rewatching since I started this project.  It's not like I haven't seen "Speed" many times over - of course I have, I'm not a complete asshole.  But "Speed" is one of these movies that I've probably only watched in its entirety from start to finish a handful of times, including its original theater run in 1994.  However, it is on TV with such frequency, or at least it used to be that I've certainly caught it in 30 minute clips dozens of times or more.  For as many times as I've seen it in drips and drabs and as big a fan of Keanu Reeves as I am, I'm actually a little surprised that I don't even own this movie in some format or another.

By 1994, Keanu Reeves was arguably a movie star if not a mega-star.  He had been involved in a small handful of huge hit movies, but only one action movie to this point as Johnny Utah in "Point Break," and I would argue that his performance as Jack Traven in "Speed" launched him in to that category of superstardom.

"Speed" did huge box office numbers and became a part of the American lexicon, at least for a short while, including two clips from two of my favorite shows from the 90s that referenced the movie:

If you are an adult over the age of 20, there can't really be a way that you don't know "Speed," a movie with a relatively simple premise that is executed in a spectacular fashion - a mad bomber (Dennis Hopper) rigs a bus to explode if it slows to under 50 miles an hour and only one man can save the day - our hero Keanu Reeves as Jack Traven.

While I don't generally like to use these posts to share random trivia and facts for these movies, I did read two interesting tidbits that I wanted to share:

First, Keanu Reeves was far from the first choice to play Jack.  The top choice?  Inexplicably, it was Stephen Baldwin.  For the life of me, I cannot understand how this was any sort of logical choice.  Apparently, the argument was that Keanu Reeves was not a big enough star....and Stephen Baldwin was?  I mean, I guess who could forget him as Jimmy Teeters in the 1993 movie, "Posse," or his epic performance as Travis Graham in "Bitter Harvest," or as Stuart in "Threesome?"  I'm of course joking because nobody remembers any of these movies.

Nope.

Second, in the original script, the bus was rigged to explode if its speed dropped below....20 miles an hour.  I can't imagine how that could have been thrilling in any sort of way.  They could have stayed in a parking lot the entire time.  Thrilling. 

Not only did "Speed" launch Keanu Reeves to superstardom, but the same can also be said for Sandra Bullock, who was the one of the only actors who went on to star in the oft-panned sequel, "Speed 2: Cruise Control," a movie I'm thankful that I don't need to watch for this project. 

I think part of what makes "Speed" such a classic movie is because the stakes are high and director Jan de Bont truly keeps his foot on the gas (pun intended) for the entire duration of the film.  On my rewatch for this project it really dawned on me that there is a good 50-60 minutes where the audience is forced to hold their collective breath while the bus speeds through the highways of Los Angeles, avoiding several close calls including the epically famous "bus jump" sequence.

Of course, it's a movie and so we ultimately know that the bus isn't going to explode, at least not with our heroes (and most of the extras) still on board.  Which is why it's always been a dream of mine to remake a movie like this but have the bus explode and kill everyone on board in say, minute 20.  Then the rest of the movie would be about Keanu Reeves' family dealing with his untimely death.  It would be the ultimate fake-out.  We'd cut the trailer to look like a thrilling action/adventure, but the movie would really just end up being a serious melodrama about one family's grieving process.

Audiences would hate it.

It's the same reason I want to make a shot for shot remake of one of my favorite movies, "The Karate Kid" except when Daniel gets to the tournament he gets knocked out immediately after "You're the Best" kicks in.  The record scratches, the music gets cut-off, Daniel loses and Johnny wins the tournament.  Allie dumps Daniel and gets back with Jonny and Mr. Miyagi has a heart attack and dies.

I think it would be hilarious.

Because I love "Speed," and because it is probably one of Keanu Reeves' most famous movies I'm not going to bother with much more of a recap of this.  If you haven't watched it from start to finish, do yourself a favor and go do that.  Rather than a recap, I just want to point out a few holes in logic I noticed in my recent viewing that certainly don't take away from the movie being anything other than awesome.

In the beginning of the movie, Jack and Harry (Jeff Daniels) foil Howard's (Dennis Hopper) elevator ransom plan and Howard ostensibly blows himself up in the parking garage, leaving the cops to assume he's dead.  But when someone explodes in a confined space like that, shouldn't there have been some blood and body parts strewn around?  Shouldn't the cops have been able to figure out that the bomber wasn't dead?

Dennis Hopper mentions that it took him two years to setup the elevator job that opens the movie and after foiling this plot both Jack and Harry are given medals in a televised show within what I assume can only be a matter of days or weeks.  Yet, Dennis Hopper is able to setup the bus job almost immediately.  Either he wasted a shitload of time on the elevator plan or he learned a whole lot from that plan in order to devise the next one.  Sure, I'll just go with the latter. 

Also, where's the traffic?  I feel like I am always hearing about how bad traffic in LA is.  This is kind of addressed when they get on a newly built and unused highway, but what about all the traffic up until that point?  This takes place during morning rush hour on a workday.  Maybe that's why the initial script called for 20 miles an hour. 

8:00 rush hour

Speaking of the day and time, we see Dennis Hopper on multiple occasions with an array of televisions, mostly on news stations.  However, he has one TV set up on a football game.  What football game is he watching at 8:30 in the morning on a Tuesday?  I suppose it could be a recording on a VHS tape but....why?

But let's forget about all this because at the end of the day, who cares?  "Speed" is awesome, plot holes and logic be damned.

A few quick things to note:

*Apparently the opening elevator sequence was inspired by director Jan de Bont's own experience being trapped on a stuck elevator on the 40th floor while filming "Die Hard."  That's pretty terrifying.  I also got trapped in an elevator once about 18 months ago, and even though my elevator was only about two feet off the ground floor, it was still a pretty scary experience for 45 minutes.  Unfortunately, I was saved by a big, fat guy from Otis elevator and not by Keanu Reeves.

*Keanu Reeves did most of his own stunts for this movie, which he has gone on to do for many of his other actions movies.  Just further proves that Keanu Reeves is awesome.

*This marks Keanu's second movie also featuring Dennis Hopper, the first being "River's Edge."  Dennis Hopper is noticeably better in "Speed," and makes a pretty fun villain in this.

*I am probably wrong, but I think one of the cast members of the current season of 90 Day Fiance was an extra in this.  If you are unfamiliar, Yolanda is a 50 something year old woman who is the 'victim' of a very obvious, and very blatant romance catfish by a Nigerian guy claiming to be a hunky British 30 year old.

Oh Yolanda, you sad, sad woman

"In my heart, I know that Williams is not a bus bomber."

Box Office Mojo Information: $121 million domestic ($270 million inflation adjusted), $161 million international on a $30 million budget.  The 7th highest grossing movie of 1994, the 547th highest grossing movie of all time and the 93rd highest grossing R rated movie.

Rotten Tomatoes: 94% Critics, 76% Audience - I'm actually a little surprised that these numbers are not inversed and that critics liked this that much more than the audience, not that either of those scores are low.  For the record, "Speed 2" has a 4% critics score, marking a 90% difference which has to be one of the biggest sequel disparities on record.  

IMDB: 7.2

My Movie Rating: 9/10.  I really don't watch a lot of action movies but when I do, there's a good chance Keanu Reeves is involved.  "Speed" is absolutely one of my favorite all time action movies, it still makes me hold my breath even if I know exactly what's going to happen.

Keanu Rating: 8/10.  It's sort of funny to read that he wasn't considered a big enough star to pull this off during the original casting conversations.  

Up next: the 1995 movie, "Johnny Mnemonic," a cyberpunk movie that probably has some laughably bad visions for the future.  I've never seen it and have heard it's pretty terrible so I guess we'll see.  

The Keanu Reeves Project - Little Buddha

LITTLE BUDDHA (1993) - Siddhartha

It looks like I'm about to hit a bit of a rough patch here in the career of Keanu Reeves as I journey into the mid 90's.  In fact, up until I hit "The Matrix" several movies from now, I have a lot that I am NOT looking forward to, including today's entry, "Little Buddha."

If there's been one overarching feeling I've had so far sitting through Keanu's list of movies that I have not seen before it would be boredom.  I felt this way during "My Own Private Idaho," "Even Cowgirls Get the Blues," "Dracula," and "The Prince of Pennsylvania."  My feeling of wanting to shoot myself in the face during "Babes in Toyland" might be a cousin to boredom as well.

My recent viewing of "Little Buddha" continued my trend of boring movies I hadn't seen before, making me realize that hey, maybe there's a REASON I have never seen some of these movies.  And the reason is that they suck.  Boredom is the main reason it took me three sittings to get through all of the nearly two and a half hour slog that was this movie.  

I went into "Little Buddha" knowing near nothing about it so it came to me as quite a shock that Keanu Reeves is playing....Siddhartha AKA Buddha, who is, you know, a guy from ancient India.  You may or may not know this but Keanu's ethnic heritage is a mixture of a number of things but one of the things he namely is NOT is Indian, or anything resembling Indian.  So, his casting in this role is just a tiny bit baffling to me.  Maybe there were no Indian actors working in Hollywood in 1994?  After all, "Little Buddha" is just a few years removed from Fisher Stevens playing an Indian guy in both Short Circuit 1 and 2.

Just a reminder that yeah, this is a thing that happened.

"Little Buddha" takes place halfway in the present and halfway in the past.  The present storyline is about a group of Tibetan monks searching for the reincarnation of one of their teachers, which leads them to find a little boy in Seattle who they think is a prime candidate.  They eventually convince his parents (played by Bridget Fonda and Chris Isaak, who I will get to momentarily) to allow the child to go to Nepal for further examination to see if he is in fact who they think he is.  

The other storyline is the one that features Keanu Reeves and tells the story of the Buddha and how he came to be.  This part of the movie was slightly more interesting to me, particularly because I know very little about the origins of Buddhism.  Of course, this is a movie and without doing further research necessary, I have no idea if what I watched on screen is the actual mythology or not.  

He'll be out protesting for a haircut soon with the rest of the COVIDiots

Some of the performances in "Little Buddha" are downright bad.  Bridget Fonda is fine in her limited screen time, but the little kid is insufferably terrible, and I hate to say it but Keanu Reeves kind of stinks, although he was obviously horribly miscast in this role.

With that said, the single worst performance of the movie and possibly second worst performance in this entire project so far goes to Chris Isaak who gives the stiffest, most wooden performance I've seen in this project so far next to the emergency room doctor from my last recap of "Even Cowgirls Get the Blues."

My impression of Chris Isaak in "Little Buddha."

After watching "Little Buddha," I read a small handful of critic reviews to see if there was something I was missing since I didn't find this to be particularly enjoyable.  Critics seemed to really appreciate the art direction and cinematography but I just couldn't get past the constant use of color filters which started to drive me crazy about halfway through.

BLUE filter!

RED filter!

ORANGE filter!

No real side notes on this one other than to say that I have no need to see this ever again.

Box Office Mojo Information: $4.7 million domestic ($10.7 million inflation adjusted) / $3 million worldwide on a 35 MILLION DOLLAR BUDGET, HOLY SHIT ARE YOU KIDDING ME?   153rd highest grossest movie of 1993.  How the hell did this movie cost $35 million to make?  Wow.  

Rotten Tomatoes: 68% Critics, 53% Audience.  This seems about right but based on it being a gigantic flop I'm a little surprised these numbers aren't lower.  

IMDB: 6.1

My Movie Rating: 4/10.  To repeat, I was mostly bored throughout and if it weren't for the saving grace of some of the origination story I'd be giving this a 3.  

Keanu Rating: 3/10.  He is miscast, he may or may not be trying to do an Indian accent at points, and he really never should have been in this in the first place.  This is not entirely his fault.

Up next: the 1994 movie, "Speed."  Fuck.  Yes.  This is the last movie before I hit a real dead zone of movies I'm not excited about.

The Keanu Reeves Project - Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

EVEN COWGIRLS GET THE BLUES (1993) - Julian Gitche

A few posts ago, I felt relieved to know that I would never have to watch another Gus Van Sant movie again in my life as I do not enjoy his work and basically hated "My Own Private Idaho."

Unfortunately, I did not realize ahead of time that I'd be subjected to yet another Van Sant piece of garbage known as the 1993 movie, "Even Cowgirls Get the Blues."

I feel like I have a lot to say here so this post might be just a tad bit rambling.

First, I'd like to start off with the first two paragraphs of Roger Ebert's original review:

I haven't read the Tom Robbins novel Even Cowgirls Get the Blues.  Perhaps it would help if I had.  Perhaps the book would make the new movie of the sane name explicable if not enjoyable.  I cannot say. 

What I am sure of is that "Even Cowgirls Get the Blues" is one of the more empty pointless, baffling films I can remember, and the experience of viewing it is an exercise in nothingness.

He went on to express how much he hated this movie and ended up giving it half a star, which frankly, might be a generous rating.

What really annoys me about this movie is the lies it tells in the opening credits.  I suppose it's an ensemble cast with Uma Thurman being the only person in more than three or four scenes.  But Keanu Reeves is 4th billed in this and he has maybe three lines in the whole film and appears in a whopping two scenes.  But the list of recognizable names in this is extensive:

Lorraine Bracco, Pat Morita, Angie Dickinson, John Hurt, Ed Begley Jr, Carol Kane, Sean Young, Crispin Glover, Roseanne Barr, Buck Henry (Liz Lemon's father in "30 Rock but probably most famous for writing "Get Smart"), Heather Graham, and Ken Kesey.  What the fuck is Ken Kesey doing in this movie?  For the uninformed, Ken Kesey wrote the excellent novel and screenplay for "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," and his appearance in this movie as Uma Thurman's father is baffling.

The opening credits end with a dedication to River Phoenix, who died in 1993.  If I was close to Gus Van Sant and he had dedicated this piece of garbage to my memory, I'd haunt the shit out of him for the rest of his life in return.  

If any actor should have been second billed for this 90 minute waste of time, it should have been River's sister, Rain Phoenix.  I didn't know anything about Rain Phoenix prior to this movie, including whether Rain is a man or a woman.  In fact, given how little most people were actually in this movie, I thought this guy was Rain Phoenix when he first appeared on screen:

NOT Rain Phoenix

It wasn't until the real Rain Phoenix showed up moments later that I realized my error because she looks, well, exactly like her other brother, Joaquin:

NOT Joaquin Phoenix with long hair

Okay, how about a short synopsis of whatever the fuck this movie was?

Uma Thurman plays Sissy, a young woman who was born with freakishly large thumbs, which her father jokes will help her become a great hitchhiker one day.  The joke is on him though because that's exactly what she becomes as she gets older - a homeless drifter who travels back and forth across the country using her enormous thumbs to hitch rides.  Uma Thurman wears comically large prosthetics which I didn't bother taking a screenshot of.  

Better movie if she had been murdered here

She travels to New York to meet up with John Hurt playing The Countess, an eccentric gay man who runs a douche factory and for whom she used to model in ads for.  Upon her arrival, the Countess offers to set her up on a date with a young artist friend of his, Julian Gitche played by our hero, Keanu Reeves, who is apparently supposed to be 100% native American and may or may not be wearing brownface:

Native American Keanu Reeves

Sissy meets up with Julian, who is taken aback by her beauty and immediately has an asthma attack and is rendered unable to speak.  A number of his friends rush to his side to help him into a taxi and take him home.  His friend group includes many of the notable actors mentioned above - Carol Kane, Ed Bagley and Crispin Glover.  There's a brief scene back at Julian's apartment where all of his friends get to know (and attempt to rape?) Sissy, and that's the last we see of any of them.  Just another pointless scene in a completely pointless movie and the only reason I'm mentioning it is because it includes the only three minutes Keanu is in.

And that's it for Keanu Reeves, despite his near top billing on this one.  He coughs out two lines, is dragged helplessly to a taxi, and then he's gone forever from this movie.  And yet I had to endure another 70 minutes.

From there, this movie meanders with no real purpose until its conclusion.  Sissy winds up at a ranch owned by The Countess, which is run by "The Cowgirls" and their leader Bonanza Jellybean played by Rain Phoenix.  I suppose with a name like that you'd think she'd be fun or interesting, but she's really not and much like everyone else, adds nothing to this.

The Cowgirls eventually stage a violent takeover of the ranch and start getting all the whooping cranes in the United States to stop migrating and instead live on the ranch by feeding them peyote.  This eventually draws the attention of the president who sends in the army to free the cranes, or something.  Also, Pat Morita, known as "The Chink" lives on the hill next to the ranch and is supposed to be some sort of wise prophet/mystic who advises Bonanza and Sissy, or something like that.  Once again, pointless, although there is an implied sexual relationship between him and Sissy and him and Bonanza which is...weird.  

WAX OFF

The movie ends after a standoff with the army in which Bonanza is shot and killed.  Sissy leaves the ranch and gets back on the road, and nobody could give a shit including me.

If my short synopsis sounds shitty or lacking in information it's because this movie is an utter piece of trash with no direction and no point.  I read that after its initial screening and subsequent boos it received in theaters, it was shelved and heavily re-edited for a rerelease.  I can only imagine how bad the original was because this was a real slog to get through.  At least it clocked in at a cool 90 minutes and change.

I can't say I'm too surprised that I hated this as it is now the fourth or fifth Gus Van Sant movie I've endured and utterly hated, but at least this time I'm not alone, which I'll get into briefly below.

Overall, the movie has the tone of a John Waters production minus any of the heart or talent that the limited number of his films I've seen usually have.  I hated every single minute of this, including the three that Keanu was in.

A few additional notes on "Even Cowgirls Get the Blues": 

One fun thing from this project is that I am starting to recognize other actors who have randomly popped up in some of these early films.  For instance, this is the second appearance we've seen of Pat Morita (also in the made for TV piece of trash "Babes in Toyland"), the second appearance of Heather Graham who has one line in this (previously in "I Love You to Death"), the second appearance of Uma Thurman (previously in "Dangerous Liasons"), and the second appearance of two actors who I assume are Gus Van Sant favorites - Susan's mother from Seinfeld and the weird German guy from "My Own Private Idaho."  I'm sure all of these people regret their decision to appear in "Even Cowgirls Get the Blues."

*This movie marks the third Phoenix sibling that Keanu Reeves has appeared in a movie with - the previous two of course being River Phoenix in "My Own Private Idaho," and Joaquin Phoenix in "Parenthood."  I'm not sure if there are any other Phoenix siblings but after seeing Rain in this one and knowing that River is dead by this point, I really hope not.

*This was based on the novel of the same name, which was apparently pretty well regarded.  After seeing this movie, I can say conclusively that I have no interest in reading the book.

*This movie features the single worst performance by any actor in any movie I've watched for this project so far (name unknown).  This guy - 

The worst performance of 1993 goes to this guy

I would almost even recommend watching this movie just for this scene of an emergency room doctor who gives the news that the Countess is not going to wind up a vegetable after being punched in the face by Sissy.  I couldn't even find his credit on the IMDB page so I'm just going to go ahead and assume he is somehow related to Gus Van Sant because this was one of the worst on screen performances I can remember in recent memory that you just sort of have to see for yourself.

BEST PART: There is literally nothing good about this movie.

WORST PART: Take your pick: writing, acting, bad prosthetics, useless cameos, and on and on and on.

Box Office Mojo Information: $1.7 million ($3.7 million inflation adjusted) on a $8 million budget.  BOMB.  

Rotten Tomatoes: 19% Critics, 28% Audience - unlike the previous Gus Van Sant movie which had some critical acclaim despite my feelings to the contrary, it seems like nobody was a fan of "Even Cowgirls Get the Blues."  Probably because it was fucking terrible.

IMDB: 4.4 - still too high.

My Movie Rating: 3/10.  This was just a pointless, meandering, aimless waste of time.  The only reason I'm not giving it a lower rating is because 1s and 2s really are reserved for movies that get everything wrong.  At least Gus Van Sant is an actual filmmaker (even if I don't like his movies) with a cinematographer, an editor, and a sound guy.

Keanu Rating: 3/10.  It's a little hard to give him a rating because he really only has two lines in this movie, but even the two lines he gives are done pretty shittily.  Frankly, I'm upset that I had to watch this entire movie to learn that bit of information, otherwise I would have skipped it.  

Up next: the 1993 movie, "Little Buddha"  I've never seen this but I'm cautiously optimistic that I'll at least find it entertaining if not good.  And I'm pretty sure Keanu has more than two lines in it.