Keanuthon

9:25am – “Little Buddha,” 1993

This is a beautiful pretty lovely movie that follows two storylines: one of the search for the reincarnation of a Tibetan monk, and one of the life of Buddha. Keanu goes way out of character for this one. He has lost a lot of weight (cheekbones defined, chin different); he almost doesn’t look like Keanu. And we definitely are not used to seeing him with eye makeup on. He has full body makeup on as well, so that he appears more Indian. Of course, Keanu also gets to put on an Indian accent, which is always fun to hear.

And mind you, Keanu plays a sport in this movie, too (kabata: some kind of arena sport where you repeat some phrase (not ‘excellent’) and push, kick and pick up people, trying to get one of them across a line in the field, after which you can say some other word loudly and declare that you have won.)

“Man can live on Keanu alone.”

“And on the sixth day, we watched ‘The Replacements.’”

It is a little disturbing how angry Chris Isaak is at the Tibetan monks who want to take away his son to live in a monastery in Tibet as their great teacher. That doesn’t seem so outrageous of a request, does it?

Discussion of Keanu’s hair. It is most definite that he had a wig on at the beginning when his hair is long and curly, but we are arguing whether or not his hair when it is short is really his or is a wig. Carla and I agree that it is a wig; Matt, not surprisingly, disagrees with us (most likely just to be contrary & because he has no morals). Oh, but we’ll bring him to our side… if it’s the last thing we do.

Matt points out that even when he has a wig on, the makeup artists are still sure to give him a widow’s peak so that we might think that maybe the wig really is Keanu’s real hair.

“Man, I love this movie,” he says in honesty.

If I had paid more attention (instead of making breakfast), I would so be crying now. The mirroring of the Chris Isaak story and the Siddharta story is really beautifully done. If only Chris would have sung us a song.

After trudging through the last movie this is a treat, a real treat. And we begin what could be called the finest stretch of movies of the ‘Thon. Immediately forthcoming we have: Little Buddha (which we are of course watching right now) Speed (and its 18 endings) Children of the Holocaust (documentary narrated by Keanu) Johnny Mnemonic (dare I say “the reason we ‘Thon”) Walk In The Clouds (another fave, an out and out love story) almost enough to make up for tomorrow’s “Day of the Matrix” – almost, but quite certainly not.

As we all know, It does happen, but it is rare.