April Man of the Month
April Man of the MonthSometimes
Beauty Is Only Skin Deep... 
....and that's just fine with us!
This month's man was nominated and profiled by Lauren Henderson
"You're
not too bright, are you? I like that in a man," purrs Kathleen
Turner to William Hurt in 'Body Heat'. Could anything better sum
up Keanu's appeal?
He's the living incarnation of the dumb brunet. Those almond eyes, so dark, so beautiful, so... blank. Bless him. He looks like he can only read by running his finger along the lines, painstakingly mouthing the words to himself.
A near-endless amount of books have been written on the topic of Marilyn Monroe. Women are only just admitting their attraction to Marilyn's male equivalent, Keanu and Brad and those boys off 'Dawson's Creek': the long list of smooth-skinned, fresh-faced charmers with perfect six-packs who look, in all other respects, as if they were more than a few beers short of a case.
Keanu is the king of the Dumb Boys. Brendan
Fraser plays one wonderfully (ah! I could write a book about George
of the Jungle!) but one can tell, alas, that he's faking it.
Brendan does stupid too well to be really unintelligent. Brad,
though promising, pouts too hard. He's too aware of his own handsomeness,
which undercuts it. (Though let's not forget that glorious moment
in 'Thelma and Louise' where he took his shirt off in front of
Geena David. The gasps of lust from all the women, and a healthy
proportion of the men, in the audience were as hot and heavy as
a tropical breeze.)
Marilyn's appeal, let's not forget, was that she seemed not to know how gorgeous she was. That's Keanu to a T.
Most stupid boys just look like there's nothing in their crania apart from a couple of ball-bearings. Keanu - and this is the core of his charm - looks like he KNOWS there's nothing in his head but a couple of ball-bearings, and that the knowledge is exquisitely painful to him. He makes you sigh: "Bless," a split second before you start ripping his clothes off.
Brad, on the other hand, has started trying to make 'proper' films, a fatal Dumb Boy mistake. But Keanu has committed to two sequels to 'The Matrix', a film which actually played with his transcendental stupidity by making a joke of it. Trinity, the PVC-clad heroine, stops kicking everyone's ass for long enough to whisper in his ear something along the lines of: "You're not too bright, are you? I like that in a man." How smart, to set Keanu up as a total action hero while not trying to plaster over that blank look in his eyes. He's scarcely Dolph Lundgren, after all. Dolph has a PhD.
Keanu, pre-Matrix, had let himself go more than a little, but mercifully he now seems honed back down to fighting fitness. It's the contrast between the physical beauty and the intellectual void, those big, big biceps and that tiny little brain, that melts the heart, just as the quintessential dumb blonde is always presumed to have a brain in opposite proportion to the size of her breasts. You want to look after them, to shelter them from life's tough realities, to smooth their glossy hair and tell them everything will be all right, and then, of course, to shag them senseless.
