I watched Get Smart (Peter Segal, 200eight) and The Love Guru (Marco Schnabel, 200eight) over the weekend. I reviewed the latter for Filmthreat. Before I get to the Mike Myers bit, I’ll share some thoughts on the Steve-Hathaway snips.
I liked it a lot more than I thought I would. I’m aware that it’s completely probable that Steve Carell plays or has played the same character in all of his films so far, but that dead-pan delivery has worked in every one of them. Get Smart could’ve easily sucked dust and exoskeletons, but such awfulness was avoided. As for the Product Placement and Branding: Subway sandwiches (in two manifestations, the first inside a refrigerator and the second the actual store–although the name is blurred and backgrounded), the iPod, iMAC, Sierra Mist (I believe), Sony earphones, Ty Nant bottled water (I recognized the bottle even if the actual brand wasn’t on screen), Dell, CoCo Chanel (earrings on Anne Hathaway if memory serves), GMC, Cadillac, and Disney Hall (concert venue in Los Angeles).
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My review isn’t that long, so I’m copying & pasting it here:
Pop the cork off a bottle of Mike Meyers comedy; unscrew the lid from a jar of Bollywood musical logic; open a can of sports-inspirationals; and remove the seal from a bag of pop-cultural references. Dump all of the contents into your favorite stainless steel bowl and stir, stir, stir. When everything is nicely blended, you’ve got a mostly tasty snack called “The Love Guru.” It will curb your craving for laughs and won’t leave you consuming more than is necessary.
Directed by Marco Schnabel and written by Mike Myers and Graham Gordy, “The Love Guru” is about the Toronto Maple Leafs, a hockey team that desperately wants to win the Stanley Cup. The owner, Jane Bullard (Jessica Alba)
hires Guru Pitka (Myers) to advise and help Darren Roanoke (Romany Malco) get his athletic skills back on track. In order for it to happen, Darren has to convince his special lady friend Prudence (Meagan Good) to forgive him for an indiscretion he committed. Without her support, his self-confidence is shot to hell, the Maple Leafs won’t win, and the whole city will continue to hate Jane and the Bullard name for thirty-five years of zero championships.
If the film sounds too much like a sports film for your taste, worry not, my friend. “The Love Guru” utilizes the sports-inspirational as a narrative foundation, but the plot involves more than making sure Toronto beats Jacques ‘Le Coq’ Grande (a mustached Justin Timberlake) and his L.A. Kings teammates. Along with Bollywood-styled sequences, the film also integrates a wealth of puns and other verbal jokes that evoke the character of Austin Powers as well as the myriad observations that Mike Myers, as a comedian, would make on a daily basis.
While “The Love Guru” is not a genre parody, it operates like one in that a handful of the intensely comedic moments require a recognition, if not complete comprehension, of the meaning of an intertextual scene. Using “Mariska Hargitay” (the name) as a greeting is probably not going to be as funny to the movie-goer that doesn’t watch Law & Order: SVU. Anyone that has not seen either “Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me” or “Austin Powers in Goldmember” can certainly be entertained by Verne Troyer’s acerbic one-liners, but without knowing the link to the character of “Mini-Me,” it would not be as satisfying. Furthermore, if the band Extreme and the song “More Than Words” do not ring any bells, then the brilliance of the sitar-guitar performance that Guru Pitka and his assistant Rajneesh (Manu Narayan) put on may not hit all the way home. The ostensible randomness of it and other intertextual jokes could be enough to get you smiling, and huffing a “ha-ha” every now and again.
To be sure, “The Love Guru” is incredibly funny. Side-splitting laughter only stops when the movie does, so don’t expect it to linger all the way to the parking lot.
Observations & Miscellania:
1. Product Placement & Branding: Playstation, PSP, Home Depot, Reebok, Target, Coors Light, IBM, Heinz ketchup, Pop Tarts, Cinnabon, Foot Locker, Tim Horton’s (Canadian donut and coffee joint), Air Canada Centre, the Staples Center, the NHL, the Stanley Cup, XBox, AT&T, Coke Zero, Sony, McDonald’s, Gatorade, Toronto Maple Leafs, LA Kings.
2. Intertext and pop-cultural references: Morgan Freeman’s voice, Ben Kingsley (and Gandhi), Oprah, Jessica Simpson, Val Kilmer, Mariska Hargitay (and Law & Order: SVU), Extreme’s song “More Than Words” (and the music video), Deepak Chopra, Stephen Colbert, Farrah Fawcett, Verne Troyer (and Mini-Me), Kanye West, Bollywood film structure, and Omar Sharif.
3. There’s also a slew of celebrity magazines, including Marie Claire, People, and either In Touch Weekly or US Weekly. There’s a reference to Men’s Health too.
4. While the Darren Roanoke conflict is typical of a sports film, The Love Guru keeps away from the standard practices of the genre. Of the seven games, only two of them feature game-play prominently or at all. There aren’t any practice scenes. The game-play that does make it to the screen isn’t overdone in terms of spectacle. Slow-motion is used in concert with creating suspense. I really enjoyed the animated Maple Leafs and Kings mascots screen graphics–they’d horse around depending on who’s winning or won the game. I also thought it was effective to present the sports plot via a news piece by announcers played by Stephen Colbert and Trent Leuders–this segment is done before the beginning credits start.
5. Manu Narayan plays Guru Pitka’s assistant Rajneesh. He made me think of Jon Secada the entire time I was watching the movie.
6. So, the funny in or of or about The Love Guru doesn’t sustain itself the way the humor in Get Smart does, it’s still hilarious in the moment, especially when it makes fun of self-help books.
Intimacy ~ Into Me I See.
BIBLE ~ Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth
DRAMA ~ Distraction Regression Adjustment Maturity Action
GURU ~ Gee U Are U
and titling a book, “I know you are but what am I?”
Jessica Alba in a non-dream sequence Bollywood-inspired dance number.
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June 22, 2008 at 10:32 pm
I really enjoyed Love Guru and thought it was hilarious. It’s nice to see a review that doesn’t completely dislike the movie. It’s like those other reviewers didn’t even see the same flick that I did!
June 22, 2008 at 11:34 pm
Thanks for commenting. I liked it for what it was; then again, I watched it for the hockey.
June 23, 2008 at 3:52 pm
I really enjoyed your critique of the Love Guru. The movie does run the risk of alienating non hockey fans because it does kinda run the course of being a hockey movie, but as you wrote, it is NOT a hockey movie, but a very clever comedy that uses uses hockey, or more specifically, the wooes of the storied franchise, the Toronto Maples Leafs, as a subplot. The realy story is the comedy of the “Love Guru”, and his wish to be the next One.. no not Wayne Gretzky, but the next Deepak Chopra. This movie is going to be a cult hit like Waynes World and Austin Powers. Mark my words, there will be a Love Guru 2…
June 23, 2008 at 6:49 pm
Hey Tommy, many thanks for leaving your footprints.
To be totally honest, I believe that The Love Guru is and is not a hockey movie. It’s a tangential or indirect hockey movie. The film is as much about Darren Roanoke as it is about Guru Pitka. Since I watched it for the hockey, i was thinking about it more through that lens.
On the other hand, because I was also reviewing it for FilmThreat.com, I had to widen that lens. I didn’t have to try that hard, though.
June 24, 2008 at 11:28 am
I saw “Get Smart” and my wife and I along with the entire theater roared most of the time. It managed to take the best of the original series and add other updating to make a truly enjoyable slapstick and pun satire of the Bond movies just like the TV series. I’m not so sure why the critics were so negative. I really didn’t want to go, but my wife convinced me. I don’t mind dropping hard earned cash for laughs that have me falling out of my theater chair, howling and crying.
I don’t expect to go to Love Guru. just not a Michael Myers fan.
June 24, 2008 at 11:44 am
Critics sometimes forget that when it comes to movies, to be on the fence or relatively amused can be better than feeling one has just been enlightened.
As a profession, though, there’s an expectation or an obligation to be critical and to evaluate a film based not only on an emotional response (any slew of adjectives with exclamation points at the end), but also on an intellectual one.
Perhaps some critics don’t feel comfortable when the two contradict each other. Or when one is lacking.