Whoa! It's and Article

The man, the myth, and someday (God willing) the heavily medicated.

Keanu Reeves.

The bane of my existence.

It’s not so much that I hate Keanu. Oh, alright, I hate him. But it’s not anger. It’s a general loathing, and fear that someday he will be “honored” with a lifetime achievement award. I’m fairly certain that is when the Seventh Seal will open, and Apocalypse will quit messing around with all that fire and famine and begin some earnest devastation of Biblical proportions.

I will also win $20 as Keanu declares himself the anti-Christ.

Or the Beast.

Either way, I'm $20 to the good.

Granted, this is small consolation in the “I Told You So” category. But by that point, with the Earth in ashes and most of my friends already translated and demons running amok, I’m willing to take whatever small comfort I can get.

Keanu “burst” on the movie scene in Youngblood, a Rob Lowe vehicle in which he plays a reasonably dumb hockey player. I’ll wait till later to make the appropriate jokes, but feel free to make your own here.

In the rather silly, yet aptly acted Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. It was excellent, and San Dimas High football does rule. In B&T’s Keanu played something of a Southern California surfer who traded his board in for a guitar. Not to give away any intricacies of the plot, but he played his guitar as if he’d just traded in his board for it.

Come to think of it, that’s how he still plays.

From Youngblood and Bill & Ted's wherein he played rather wisdom and communication-challenged individuals, Keanu moved on to Parenthood in which he took on the challenging role of a Southern California surfer/wannabe racecar driver who gets his girlfriend pregnant.Quit thinking “typecasting”. Parenthood was a difficult role for Keanu. He had to act like he was in love. That's had for any man to do.

From there, Keanu made the wise decision to do Point Break and play a Southern California FBI agent who must pretend to be a surfer.

Mon Dieu!

Genius!

Master thespian!

Keanu, perhaps sensing that the time had come to break from the mold, then turned in his award-winning, Oscar-nominated performance in the critically acclaimed Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey. Much like its predecessor (I’d say ‘prequel’ here, but that always conjures terrible images of the horror that was The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clowns), this movie was aptly named.

It was bogus.

Except for Death, who was pretty cool.

No, wait. Death was bogus too.

Since then, Keanu has fashioned his acting style into one of a kind. I don’t mean that he’s an outstanding individual of a singular variety. Rather, much like Derek Zoolander, he only has one way of acting. For example:

“Whoa, I’m in love dude,” (Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure)

“. . . They'll let any butt-reaming a**hole be a father. Whoa.” (Parenthood)

“I'm an FBI Agent. Whoa.” (Point Break)

Of course he had some stunning dialogue in The Matrix, which has unfortunately propelled Keanu into the limelight and on the very cusp of being an A-list actor. Lines like, “Whoa” and “Whoa, I know kung fu.”

Truly, Keanu has done for the word “whoa” what Kevin Costner has done for the ego-maniacal-self-centered-plot-movie. When he took the stage role of Hamlet in the Shakespeare play (as opposed to the Mamet play), one of his best reviews was, “Well, he remembered most of his lines.”

I have a dream that that’s exactly how we’ll think of him ten years from now: “Well, I remember most of his lines . . . like, ‘Whoa.’”