No love for 'The Love Guru'
There's usually a direct relationship between how long a studio stalls before screening a film and how bad the movie is--as was evidenced in Fox's decision to show "The Happening" to critics 48 hours before it opened. The latest example is "The Love Guru," Mike Myers' supposedly comic take on a guru who yearns for fame (the above video shows Myers playing the sitar on Steve Miller's "The Joker"). Paramount has kept the movie under wraps, far, far away from working stiffs like me, even though as a sports fan, I was dying to see a major motion picture that cast Jessica Alba as the owner of a hockey team.
Variety's Brian Lowry finally got to see the movie last night at the Avco Center 4. He delivers the bad news here, saying that the film is crammed with Three Stooges-style shtick.
" 'The Love Guru' is so relentlessly juvenile as to merit a new twist on the PG-13 rating--one that strongly cautions not only those under 13 but anyone much above it too. Even so, producer-co-writer-star Mike Myers partially wears down resistance by simply pummeling the audience with bathroom jokes, sixth-grade puns and silly songs.... If watching someone get sloshed with urine sounds like a knee-slapper, then Mike Myers is determined to make movies for you."
The movie also has Justin Timberlake trying out a (perhaps hilariously) bad Canadian accent as a well-endowed hockey player named Jacques (Le Coq) Grande, as well as cameo appearances from a pair of Comedy Central regulars, Stephen Colbert and "The Daily Show's" John Oliver. But for me, the best news of all is the movie's running time: 87 minutes. As Sam Arkoff once memorably put it: "If you can't make it a better picture, you can always make it a shorter picture."
