I came into fandom with "SPEED", so it will always have a special place in my heart. I saw it two weeks after it premiered, June 10, 1994, and my life hasn't been the same since. Its classified in the "action genre", but I view it from a different perspective. First, I think it's a romance. Its broad-based female appeal is not just because of Keanu's overpowering physical beauty (I killed my pause button on my remote), but because of the empowering relationship between Jack and Annie. If this movie had been made five years earlier, Jack (a la Arnold and Sly) would have commandeered the steering wheel from Annie so fast, she'd have spent the rest of the movie in the passenger seat picking bus tokens out of her teeth. Jack's "cool" and Annie's "hot" energy made the screen's sexual tension snap, crackle, and I popped! While they were on the bus they seemed to have an equal partnership, despite the fact that Jack still had the gun. However, once they got off the bus, Annie seemed to morph into the traditional "damsel in distress", replete with dynamite around her chest and chained helplessly to a pole. Perhaps that is one reason I liked the first half of the movie better. SPEED seemed to capture the zeitgeist of the times as an allegory for today's working class families: man and woman protecting their family (the passengers) against the tremendous burdens and scary circumstances of a fast-paced society, with fifty foot gaps in their way.

Like "Last of the Mohicans" (in which I ran through forests for two hours with Daniel Day Lewis), SPEED left me breathless, unlike any rush hour I've sat through!

I especially loved all the promos. My favorites were the interviews from overseas. Do you remember the one from England, where Keanu had to answer 25 questions in 30 seconds or the hotel would blow up? Or the one from Germany, where Keanu was strapped to a lie-detector machine and asked a series of questions? Or how about the Japanese one where they showed Keanu a tape of Jan DeBont talking about Keanu's good looks, and Keanu blushing as he watched? In 1994 I figured Keanu would be my summer fantasy, my "Krispy Kreme" treat. Well, it's eight years later, and I'm still hanging out in the donut shop!