Keanu Reeves is one of my favorite actors. I know, I know, he’s not really a very talented actor, but I love him anyway. After multiple viewings of Point Break, I was a total Keanu convert. Even though his acting is lacking, I respect his professionalism, his choices as an actor, and have sympathy for his really tragic personal life.

I suppose it was too much to ask that Keanu make that long-awaited sequel to Point Break. His new film, The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, sounds like one of those achingly slow family-drama types that will only be a good rental if Keanu is shirtless. There’s hope for that, actually, because in the film, Keanu sports a large Jesus tattoo on his chest. Amen! Keanu, castmate Robin Wright Penn and writer-director Rebecca Miller (daughter of Arthur Miller, wife of Daniel Day-Lewis) are all in Berlin for the premiere of the film at the festival. Reuters has more about the film, but unfortunately, they don’t describe the Jesus tattoo in any great detail.

Keanu Reeves plays a young, tattooed shop assistant who turns the suburban world of his quiet neighbor upside down in Rebecca Miller’s new film “The Private Lives of Pippa Lee.”

Pippa Lee, played by Robin Wright Penn, has just moved to a retirement community with her successful publisher husband Herb, a man 30 years her senior where her life revolves around serving perfectly cooked lamb and decorating her home.

But as she befriends aging neighbors and enrols in a pottery class with women old enough to be her mother, she starts to question her role as respectable mother, wife and hostess.

The arrival of Reeves’ character Chris, an unkempt 35-year-old who drives a beaten-up van and sports a giant Jesus tattoo on his chest, brings her angst into focus.

“Chris is part of her dream,” Reeves told reporters at the Berlin film festival, where the film — which also features Monica Bellucci, Winona Ryder, Julianne Moore and Alan Arkin as Lee’s husband Herb — screened this week.

“In this film, freedom means the possibility to experience yourself… to go find yourself,” said Reeves, who appeared on the red carpet in Berlin with a full beard.

Asked whether he preferred the beard to the Jesus tattoo of the film, he told Reuters, “Probably the beard is going to win.”

Reeves said he had not been able to refuse when Miller, the daughter of playwright Arthur Miller, had asked him to be in the film, based on her novel of the same name.

Wright Penn called the strong female cast “a blessing,” saying, “We waited a year to do this movie because we didn’t have the actors. We just didn’t have anybody that was absolutely right for it, no one would sign on. So patience is the virtue.”

In her film, Miller takes viewers from Lee’s life as a wife to her childhood and adolescence, letting them witness Lee’s own disbelief at the traumas she has hidden inside.

The film is Miller’s follow-up to “The Ballad of Jack and Rose,” which showed in Berlin in 2005 and starred her husband Daniel Day-Lewis. Asked about the similarities between Lewis and Reeves, Miller chuckled and said, “They are both very committed and talented actors. And very different.”

From Reuters UK

I saw The Ballad of Jack and Rose, and I really didn’t care for it, even though I love Catherine Keener. Rebecca Miller’s writing and directing style aren’t really world-class, and sometimes I wonder if she would doing this stuff if she wasn’t Arthur Miller’s daughter and Daniel Day-Lewis’s wife. I’ll probably rent the movie when it comes out though, just to see this alleged Jesus tattoo. Or maybe I’ll just watch Point Break again.

Keanu Reeves is shown at the Berlinale with Blake Lively, Rebecca Miller, Robin Wright Penn, and Zoe Kazan on 2/9/09. Credit: WENN

In the fall, Fox acquired the rights to the 90′s Japanese anime Cowboy Bebop with the intention of turning it into a feature-length live action film. Keanu Reeves has now signed on to play the lead character, Spike Speigel.

One of the big titles in anime, “Bebop” is set in a time where “astral gates” make interstellar travel possible. Humanity, decimated by a lunar explosion resulting from a gate accident, spread out across the solar system, as did crime, which gave rise to the use of bounty hunters.

Reeves would play Spike Spiegel, a bounty hunter and former member of a crime syndicate. Spiegel, along with Jet Black, a fellow bounty hunter and former cop, are the two pilots of the spaceship Bebop…

The show, which first aired on Tokyo TV and satcaster Wowow during the late 1990s, was strongly influenced by American music, even featuring action sequences — both space battles and mano a mano — timed to U.S. melodies.

Reeves’ association with the project leaked in the summer when Fox and 3 Arts Entertainment began the process of acquiring the rights from Sunrise Studios.

[from THR]

There are several problems with the threat of this film. First, a live action version will all but kill a beloved cult classic. Second, for everyone’s sake, will someone please stop casting Keanu Reeves? And finally, why can’t someone in Hollywood come up with a movie idea of their own?

2008 was a terrible year for films, as can be seen by the bland choices for the Globes. The Oscar nominations will be announced on January 22nd, and they can’t be expected to be any better. No one seems to have new ideas anymore – even the indie flicks are carbon copies of each other.

Hopefully this movie won’t turn into a Speed Racer-esque technicolor trip, though I can imagine Keanu will suck the life out of any scene he’s in even if the directors do decide to work with every color of the rainbow. Keanu may be a closeted genius, but it will be sad when moviegoers realize that the cartoon Spike has more charisma than his real-life counterpart.

[Thanks to I Watch Stuff for the story idea]

Keanu Reeves is really deep. And complicated. And smart. Well, secretly smart. At least that’s what Details magazine wants you to think. I’m not sure I can buy that from anyone who still says, “Dude” as frequently as Keanu seems to throughout the interview. He has a long interview in the upcoming issue – where he and a Details reporter spend most of their time in a bookstore talking deep stuff. Keanu rattles off a litany of books he loves. And I’ll admit, it’s an impressive list, but there’s something so overly laid back about his approach that it can come off as a little put on.

“He is the opposite of dumb,” says Scott Derrickson, who directed him in December’s The Day the Earth Stood Still. “That is a word that has no application to him. This is not just a director trying to defend his actor and say, ‘No, really, he’s not dumb.’ He’s fiercely intelligent.”… So could it be? Is Keanu Reeves some kind of . . . stealth genius? “I’ve swapped a lot of books with him in the last nine months. He is one of the most voracious readers I’ve ever met,” Derrickson says. “He’s very unpretentious about it. Nobody really knows, and he doesn’t really care that nobody knows.”

No. It becomes clear after 30 seconds of watching Keanu pinball around the aisles of Book Soup that he approaches the printed word as both a glutton and a gourmand: He inhales a lot, and he’s game to order off-menu. He tells me he just finished all of the novels in John Updike’s Rabbit series. “So fantastic,” he says with a reverent hush. I mention another work about suburban crisis, Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road, and he rears back and slides the helmet onto his head so that he can free up his left hand. “Oh, YES!!!” he shouts. “Let’s high-five on Revolutionary Road!” We slap palms. This prompts a rumination from Keanu on the primary characters in that book, Frank and April Wheeler, and “the identities that they’re wearing—you know, their authentic self and then their external self and that dialogue that’s going on.”

As we pass Proust, Keanu reveals that he devoured every page of the meticulous colossus that is Remembrance of Things Past. “It took a couple of years, but I did it,” he says. The grin has straightened itself; it’s ear-to-ear now. “I didn’t do the Moncrief, I did the newer translation. Some books would come in between. But I found that it was a thread—like time—that you could walk away and come back to. I didn’t feel like I had lost the momentum of the story at all. It was like meeting a good friend or someone that you like, and you’re like, ‘Hey, dude! How’s it goin’?'”

[From Details]

The article goes on with an analytical discussion of the word “dude,” and an epic trip to a deli for a sandwich that is said to be incredibly good, because, as Keanu notes, “‘I was told that it’s got the shredded lettuce,’ he rhapsodizes. ‘It’s like, you know, a good sandwich.’” Only it is Monday and the deli is closed Mondays, but Keanu has forgotten what day it is until he and the reporter make the 45 minute trip just for this miraculous shredded lettuce-filled sandwich.

The guy is clearly without much pretense, and I think that’s why he doesn’t make a big deal of his love of literature. Combined with his lingering “Bill & Ted”-like persona, it’s hard to take him seriously, but it’s pretty clear he’s actually really smart, and has a deep passion for reading. Not something you hear a lot of celebs talking about unless they’re trying to sound deep. However when you’re reading the article you can tell it’s something real for Keanu. But somehow it’s hard not to get stuck on that shredded lettuce.

Here’s Keanu leaving his home in L.A. on a motorcycle on November 5th. Images thanks to Bauer-Griffin.

As his character in “Bill and Ted” might say, “Excellent.” Actor Keanu Reeves has been cleared by an L.A. jury in a civial trial brought against him by paparazzi photographer Alison Silva. Silva sued Reeves for injuries and damages sustained in an incident in which Reeves’ car knocked the pap down as the actor was being swarmed leaving a parking lot. Turns out that Silva’s injuries weren’t so “permanent” – the photog torpedoed his own case when video surfaced of him scaling a wall to snap pictures of Britney Spears in the months following the supposed injury – bracing himself with the supposedly disabled wrist.

After a little more than an hour of deliberations this morning, a Los Angeles jury has cleared the Bill and Ted star in a civil trial brought by a vengeful paparazzo who claimed he was run over by Reeves.

The decision means Reeves has escaped his legal matrix without having to break open the bank for the plaintiff.

Alison Silva had been seeking $704,974 in compensatory damages from the Speedster, including medical bills and lost wages, stemming from injuries supposedly sustained in March 2007, when Reeves was pulling out of a parking lot amid a shutterbug swarm.

According to Team Silva, he permanently injured his left wrist after getting knocked down by the the 44-year-old actor’s Porsche.

Silva’s credibility was undermined during cross-examination by Reeves’ attorney, who played a video showing the plaintiff scaling a razor-wire fence to shoot video of Britney Spears and then using his left hand to brace himself and keep his balance while climbing down—after the alleged incident with Reeves.

Reeves, who actually tended to Silva after the incident, denied dinging the photog during testimony last week, asserting that camera wielder was walking backwards and tripped over his own feet.
After the jury read its verdict, the A-lister smiled and patted his attorney, Alfred Gerisch, on the back.
“We obviously felt from day one that Mr. Reeves was not negligent,” Gerisch told reporters outside the courtroom after the six-man, six-woman panel rendered its decision. “It’s unfortunate that this lawsuit was brought, and it’s unfortunate that we had to go this far—a lot of time, a lot of effort and obviously a lot of money.”

[From E!Online]

I’m glad that the paparazzi aren’t getting any love from juries. Their tactics are invasive and at times are downright stalker-ish. I don’t understand why dozens of them feel the need to swarm celebrities while they are in their cars – it’s dangerous and the photos are boring and stupid. They willingly engage in dangerous activities, throwing themselves in front of cars or chasing celebs in their cars at high speeds – they have no right to sue anyone if they get hurt from their own stupid actions.

Keanu is shown outside of court on 10/29 and 10/30/08. Credit: Bauergriffinonline

A minivan full of tourists spotted actor Keanu Reeves, 44, leaving his mansion in the Hollywood Hills on his motorcycle on Saturday. The excited fans stood up in the back of their open vehicle and took pictures as Keanu sat waiting in traffic, getting his photo reluctantly snapped by the tourists and a lucky paparazzo who happened to be on the scene.

At first I didn’t think this was Keanu because it doesn’t look like him from the front. When he turns his head to the side and you see his profile you can tell that it’s definitely him.

Keanu was last spotted out in London with a group of friends that included reality TV hostess Trinny Woodall from the BBC’s version of “What Not to Wear.” Keanu and Trinny have been linked in the past, as she was seen visiting LA and riding on the back of his motorcycle this August. Reports say that the two are just friends. As pointed out by commenter Lilly, Keanu escorted another woman to the London Film Festival, a brunette who was seen out with him the night he went out with Woodall and friends.

Reeves will next appear in The Day The Earth Stood Still, a remake of the classic science fiction film from 1951 about an alien and a robot visiting earth. I think I watched that in college when I was super high. The film is out in the US on December 12 and opens around the world around the same time. It also stars Jennifer Connelly. He also stars in The Private Lives of Pippa Lee with Winona Ryder, which is in post production and is due for release next year.

If you were on a bus tour and happened to run across Keanu Reeves would you start taking photos like crazy? I know I would. I would also have to resist the urge to yell “Dude, Excellent!”

You might know Trinny Woodall, 44, as half of the fashion makeover duo from British reality show “What Not to Wear,” which takes average women with poor taste in clothing and helps them dress age and era-appropriately. She was seen out with mellow hottie Keanu Reeves, also 44, in London last night. The two were spotted leaving a dinner at the Ivy, and there are some photos of them that look like they’re alone together, but they were actually with a group that included two other women and another man. Woodall was photographed with her arm around the other man, suggesting it was her date. She is good friends with Keanu though, and was seen out on the back of Reeve’s motorcycle in LA this August.

Ms. Woodall is married, with one daughter, Lyla, 5, and a stepson, but it is thought that her marriage is on the rocks. The man photographed with her last night was not her husband.

The Sun says that Keanu’s “girlfriend,” Parker Posey, was out with him, but I don’t see her in the photos at all. (Keanu and Parker were first linked in March.) Reeves is in London for the London Film Festival, and was also seen out at a screening last night. Woodall is said to have attended with him.

Disney recently announced that Johnny Depp will be returning as Captain Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean 4: The World’s Most Unnecessary Sequel. This caused a lot of comment that the third instalment of the series wasn’t very good, and that he should be moving forward, and is selling out. Everyone has their price – is yours more than $56 million?

Johnny Depp has struck gold by landing £32million ($US56million) for a fourth Pirates Of The Caribbean adventure.

The bumper cheque is the highest up front pay-out in movie history.

It smashes the £29m ($US51million) paid to Tom Hanks, 52, for the Da Vinci Code follow-up Angels & Demons, out next May.

And it means Depp will leapfrog Will Smith into top spot on Hollywood’s rich list when he reprises his role as Captain Jack Sparrow.

A movie insider said: “It’s a hell of a lot of swag for one movie but there’s only one man who can play Captain Jack Sparrow – and that’s Johnny Depp.

“Pirates just wouldn’t be the same without him, so they were more than willing to smash the record books to land Depp again.

“He’s been the star of the show every time.”

Daily Star

Johnny Depp deserves to be one of Hollywood’s highest paid, I’ll go see anything with him in it, and although I’m sure I’ve seen Pirates 3 and have absolutely no recollection of it. While the salary reports surfaced in the sometimes unreliable British tabloids, I’d have to say that the figure is not unfeasable. There is no movie without Captain Jack!

I also can’t believe that the prequel to The Da Vinci Code is being made, considering how awful this was, and that Tom Hanks is being paid $51 million. The Dan Brown books are just too complex to translate well to the big screen, and I’d have to say that Tom Hanks was too old for the first film, let alone a prequel! Then again, if Harrison Ford can play Indiana Jones in his 60s, I guess Tom Hanks can play a university professor at any age. My mental image from reading the books was of a man about ten years younger than Hanks though.

The highest paid actor ever is, a little surprisingly, Keanu Reeves, who reportedly made $200+ million for his role in The Matrix, based on a merchandise ands sales agreement. Many stars make money from these kinds of deals, and take a lower salary than they might be worth. HollywoodToday.net has a breakdown of how this works, and suggests that Johnny has made almost $150 million from the previous three Pirates films using this system.

Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley have both indicated they’d like to move away from the series, but if Disney thinks the films, which grossed around $3 billion at the box office, have more life in them, I wonder what their price is? And will Disney be willing to pay it? It’s an awful lot fo buried treasure (I couldn’t resist a little pirate reference).

Johnny Depp is shown on 1/16/08 at the Sweeney Todd Paris premiere. Credit: WENN

Star Magazine is reporting that Winona Ryder, 36, and Keanu Reeves, 43, are having an on-set romance on their film The Private Lives of Pippa Lee.

Sparks are flying between Winona Ryder and Keanu Reeves on the set of the drama The Private Lives of Pippa Lee.

Star has learned that the two iconic stars have been spending lots of time in each other’s trailers.

“They are also always hugging on the set,” says a source. “The chemistry is really electric.”

They’ve gotten so close that during a break in filming in Connecticut, Winona, 36, relaxed with Keanu, 43, at his Manhattan pad. Stay tuned!

[From Star Magazine]

The detail that Winona went over to Keanu’s place adds some credence to this story, but Star Magazine always tries to romantically link co-stars. Their breathless stories about on-set romances usually include lines like “they kept kissing after the cameras stopped,” and “they hugged just a little too long, everyone noticed it.” (These are paraphrased from memory, but they’re not far off from the lines Star regularly uses for fake stories. )

It’s possible that this is true – Winona and Keanu are single as far as I know, although the tabloids don’t follow these two much since their popularity seems to have peaked about 10 years ago. Keanu was seen out with an “unknown woman” in early April, but who knows what that was about.

A lot of romances start on set, and maybe they found that they’re kindred spirits. They could be smoking together in Keanu’s trailer or taking turns using his rented hyperbaric chamber. These two don’t seem like the type to go to a popular restaurant to make their romance public, but both of them could use the publicity that would follow. We’ll have to see if anything more comes of this story or if it’s planted firmly in Star’s imagination.

Winona Ryder is shown at Paris Fashion Week on 2/2/08. Keanu Reeves is shown at the Street Kings premiere in Seoul, South Korea on 4/17/08. Thanks to WENN.

Keanu Reeves is getting hyperbaric oxygen treatments in Beverly Hills, according to a new exclusive story in The National Enquirer. They say he decided to try the treatments in order to get relief from insomnia, and he feels that it’s working. Hyperbaric oxygen chambers were brought to public awareness in the 1980s when Micheal Jackson claimed that the treatment would help him live to be 150. He was largely dismissed as a quack for his claims, but hyperbaric therapy does have real medical applications and has been approved by Medicare as a reimbursable treatment for specific conditions, including carbon monoxide poisoning and wounds that won’t heal.

The patient either sits in a large pressurized chamber and breathes through an oxygen mask or goes into a smaller one-person chamber that has pure oxygen. Pressurized oxygen enters the tissues of the body and is said to increase the “oxygen transport capacity of the blood.” Sessions usually last for an hour.

The treatment is supposed to improve overall health, and has widespread applications. A large Canadian study published in The Lancet in 2001 showed that children with cerebral palsy treated with hyperbaric oxygen therapy and pressurized air improved significantly compared to most all other conventional therapies. Studies have shown similar improvement with hyperbaric therapy for people with Multiple Sclerosis. The side effects and possible complications are similar to diving disorders, and include trapped air in the body.

Sally Kirkland is a proponent of hyperbaric oxygen treatments, and said it helped her recover from silicone poisoning from breast implants. She claims that it strengthened her immune system and helped clear the silicone from her body. She uses the same treatment center in Beverly Hills, Global Hyperbaric, that Keanu uses.

In Keanu’s case “he has Global Hyperbaric bring a portable chamber to his Hollywood Hills home, and sometimes his movie set, to administer the treatment” and has received it “numerous times,” according to the Enquirer. He also convinced his co-star in the film Street Kings, Naomi Harris, to give it a try.

It would take just one of my friends raving about this to get me to try it. As it is, I want to get the treatment after having read about it. Costs are prohibitive though, and can run from $100 to $200 per session. Here’s a list of some hyperbaric treatment centers around the world.

Keanu Reeves is shown at the Street Kings premiere on 4/3/08, thanks to PRPhotos. He looks great at 43, but would it kill him to smile?

Inset image from Vital Path Health.

[Details and quoted text about hyperbaric therapy from Wikipedia.]

Photo is from December, 2007 and was not taken during the incident in question
Keanu Reeves pulled a Clay Aiken while dining alone in an expensive Vancouver restaurant. The millionaire actor took off his shoes and socks at the table to the horror of his fellow diners. A nearby couple scolded Reeves for ruining their romantic dinner with his rank feet, but unlike Aiken, Reeves was apologetic and left shortly afterwards:

Dining solo at a ritzy Vancouver restaurant, sleepy-eyed Keanu Reeves – slurping down oysters on the half shell with red wine – looked more homeless than hunky when he suddenly kicked off his scuffed shoes, pulled off his holey socks – then stretched and flexed his hairy toes as horrified diners gagged! After a few phee-eww moments, a man sitting nearby jumped up and said: “I don’t care who you are – this is totally unacceptable behavior. I’ve paid a lot of money to eat here, and my wife and I don’t want to look at your bare feet!” Keanu apologized, saying he had cramps in his toes and needed to stretch them. “If you don’t put your shoes back on, I’ll call the manager,” snapped the guy. Keanu nodded, slipping on his stuff as he motioned for the check.

[From The National Enquirer, print edition, Mike Walker's column, February 18, 2008]

At least Reeves did the right thing and didn’t make a fuss and apologized, but how did he think it was ok to take off his shoes and socks at dinner in the first place? I hate when people even do that on a plane, I think it’s gross. At least put another pair of socks on over your stinky feet and keep them placed firmly on the ground underneath you.

Reeves will next work on The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, a film by writer-director Rebecca Miller. Miller is the daughter of playwright Arthur Miller and wife of Daniel Day-Lewis. The film also features Robin Wright Penn, Alan Arkin, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Julianne Moore, Winona Ryder and Monica Bellucci. Robin Wright Penn stars as a housewife who has a nervous breakdown and an affair with younger Reeves after she discovers her husband, played by Alan Arkin, was unfaithful. Cinemablend says the plot sounds complicated given all the talent that’s involved. According to IMDB, the film will start shooting in April of this year in Connecticut.

Reeves stars as a police officer dealing with corruption on the force in Street Kings, a crime drama with Hugh Laurie that is out on April 11. It will be his first feature film since The Lake House with Sandra Bullock, which came out in June, 2006. He is currently filming The Day The Earth Stood Still, a remake of the classic 1951 film about alien visitation, which is due out in December of this year.

Keanu Reeves is shown hanging out with a young woman on December 27, 2007 in West Hollywood. It is thought that he was giving her career advice as she was taking notes and they were overheard talking about the movie business. Thanks to Splash News for these photos.