You rarely see paparazzi pictures of Keanu Reeves, and that’s because the paparazzi are terrified of Keanu Reeves squishing them into liquid with his car.
Or it’s because Keanu Reeves is quite private and stuff. One or the other. But photographer Alison Silva probably thinks it’s the first one, because he’s suing Keanu Reeves for allegedly hitting him with his car last year, causing career-threatening injuries to his wrist which, coupled with the fact that he’s got a girl’s name, must have really ticked him off.
But yesterday Keanu Reeves showed up in court to spread some of the trademark Keanu Reeves moviestar razzle dazzle around and convince everyone otherwise. Sadly, the Keanu Reeves version of razzle dazzle involves standing around looking blank-faced and a bit confused and occasionally saying “woah.” We aren’t anticipating a good outcome for him.
There’s a deeply complex relationship between celebrities and the paparazzi. On the one hand the paparazzi financially gain from essentially endorsing the lumbering self-worth of the celebrities they follow and the result in beneficial to everyone. But on the other hand, sometimes Pierce Brosnan will thump a photographer in a car park.
It’s not just Pierce Brosnan, though – every now and again Kanye West will get angry and shove some photographers around too, or maybe Matthew McConaughey will get his surfer mates to rough them up a bit. Or, you know, Keanu Reeves could run them over or something.
Or not, because there’s a chance that Keanu Reeves doesn’t run photographers over. But that hasn’t stopped paparazzo Alison Silva from claiming that he did. Last March it was reported that Keanu Reeves bumped into Silva with his Porsche, and now Silva has sued Keanu for all the injuries and whatnot he gained from slowly falling to the floor in front of a barely-moving vehicle.
The upside of this is that Keanu Reeves got to go to court yesterday to refute Alison Silva’s claims, and it was a rare chance to see Keanu Reeves saying some words that he’d thought up himself, and that therefore didn’t obviously confuse him the instant they came out of his mouth. E! Online reports:
Under cross-examination, Silva’s lawyer, Joseph Farzam, tried to nail down the Matrix man on whether he really made an effort to avoid hitting Silva, asking Reeves if he used his horn or hand signals to get Silva to move. “He was in front of a starting car,” Reeves replied. “It’s common sense to me.”
Keanu’s argument seems to be that Alison Silva was walking backwards while trying to take pictures when he tripped and fell of his own accord. It might have happened. It might not have happened. Frankly that’s not for us to decide – and a good job too, because if it was then we’d probably try sawing our own legs off as a protest to the futility of our own lives.
But we hope that Keanu Reeves is telling the truth. Not because we trust and respect him as an actor and as a human being, but because we’re scared that if he loses this lawsuit he’ll make another Matrix film to recoup his lost money. Because, if the quality pattern of Matrix movies holds, The Matrix 4 will be so bad that watching it will feel like you’re being slapped with the guts of an infected Ebola monkey. So fingers crossed that doesn’t happen.