The Love Guru

I just witnessed the death of a career.

Director: Marco Schnabel
Writers: Mike Myers
               Graham Gordy 
Runtime: 1hr 27 minutes.

Plot: Mike Myers plays a self-help guru who is asked to fix the relationship between a hockey player and his wife to get the team, the Toronto Maple Leafs, back on track to winning the Stanley Cup. Justin Timberlake, Jessica Alba, John Oliver, Verne Troyer, Ben Kingsley and more, aid Myers in his career suicide.

This is a bad film. It has its good moments, but it's still a terrible film. I'm not entirely sure if this was deliberate choice to end Myers career on the big screen, or if it was just bad choice after bad choice leading to this but this did effectively kill his hot streak but aside from roles in Shrek and his cameo in Inglourious, this is why you don't see him much. It's good that he was such a hit on SNL and shot to stardom through various other projects or else he wouldn't have the financial capability to live his life how he likes. I'll say this now though, I'm personally not a big fan of Myers comedy, acknowledging that what you're saying isn't funny, is not funny, to me at least. I'm sure he's a nice guy I mean, he's from Canada, the birthplace of niceness, I just don't find him all that funny.

I've seen this film twice now, once when my friend made me watch it, and again the other day to write notes on it, knowing that it's a bad comedy does not make you look for the good in it, it almost emphasises the worse elements in the film. Such as the CGI, there's a short flashback scene where Guru Pitka (Mike Myers) thinks back on his first encounters with Guru Tugginmypudha (Ben Kingsley. Guru Tugginmypduha is a severely cross-eyed man who makes painfully inappropriate sexual jokes about Pitka's now dead parents, thought I'd get that out of the way. Mike Myers plays his child self which you would think...could work, maybe he dubs over the boy's words with his own voice or maybe he could use an over the top voice for the kid or something but no, what we're treated to is horrific. What we're lucky enough to witness is Mike Myers head, horribly CG'd onto this poor child's body and...it's almost like Myers did this boy's head movements and such on a green screen which was the cut and pasted onto this kids body when editing. The head is out of proportion and Myers tries to do a kids voice but you don't really pay attention to that, you pay attention to this scary thing that's been presented to you and you almost start to wonder what something this freaky is doing in a Mike Myers comedy. We can accept the inappropriate sexual jokes but can we accept this? Maybe Cat In The Hat fans but not most people.

The film also seems to mock self-help "gurus" by having Pitka do a seminar where he is just spouting basic "helpful" philosophy and saying words and turning them into abbreviations(ish) and that's all the seminar is. And that's all it is, just a short 5 minutes which is about 30-45 minutes in their time, Pitka even has time to plug his t-shirts too, very reminiscent of those self-help gurus who seem to focus more on spouting basic, apparently helpful philosophy in a manipulative tactic to get paid and maybe famous quite quickly. However it doesn't seem as though this aspect is being done to highlight any issue, it's just sort of stating the issue that it's used as a money making scheme for fame and fortune and just shoves a couple jokes in saying "there's the issue now laugh at it." I'm not going to say that this should have given any answers as to how it can be used to benefit people in their lives. Honestly, I think Family Guy dealt with this a lot better. In the episode, Brian writes a best seller Brain's book Faster Than The Speed Of Love's unsold copies are returned to the Griffin's household and there's a lot of them, Brian sees that the books that are hitting the bestseller list are biographies of Michael Jackson and self-help books and so decides to write one to get to the top of the bestseller list. Once he's there he becomes a total dick and eventually confesses that he isn't proud of what he wrote and that he wrote it in a day. This is a mocking of something but also shows the reality behind the fame smokescreen. When a 20 minute Family Guy episode gets a message across better than your hour and a half film then you've got something to worry about.

One of the best things in this film in this little remote control cushion that Pitka uses to make a grand entrance and I swear if I can find one of those things I'll get myself one. It's great, it just looks so weird to see a guy on an actual moving cushion and nobody question it. I don't even know if it's some sort of stereotype or not but I kind of don't care because I want that cushion.

To close on, I'll leave you with this scene, Mike Myers sat atop an elephant in his Guru Pitka costume, wearing crocs, making jokes about whether you would help your uncle, Jack, off of an elephant or help your uncle jack off an elephant. Scene is followed by dead air.

G'day kid's, peace out.

This is just my opinion and if you disagree then that's great, I'm open to discussion and I'm always interested to hear how you feel about this film. This is also a critique which is considered "Fair Use" under the Copyright Act 1976. If you like this film then go and support its creators by buying the DVD or Bluray.