The Love Guru
Directed by Marco Schnabel
Was there ever a better time to be a 13-year-old at the movies? Mike Myers’ new comedy The Love Guru is perfectly calibrated to infantile thinking. It’s not the worst example of the extent to which Hollywood caters to a market, just further proof. Starting with Myers’ latest caricature-concept, Guru Pitka—an American-born, India-raised motivational speaker who specializes in pious quasi-spiritual bromides—the film’s adult subject matter is reduced to the silly impudence of adolescence. Pitka’s humor, as when he does a PowerPoint outline of the word “intimacy” (as “Into Me I See”), is just short of graffiti—brat-smart, coy, yet proudly foolish. It’s the lingua franca of today’s movie humor from Blades of Glory to Superbad. Too late to complain about it now.
Satire with the sole of point of being silly doesn’t disturb the teen market’s blissful self-absorption. Smashing together arcane Bollywood mockery with the memory of The Beatles’ brief 1960s infatuation with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi may be outside teens’ pop culture frame of references, but Myers’ Pitka is essentially a pubescent child. (The funniest image is a flashback that Photoshops Myers' big head on a child’s body.) Pitka’s constantly horny due to the chastity belt imposed by his mentor Guru Tugginmypudha (Ben Kingsley doing a cross-eyed Charlie Chase routine); his life is built around a career competition with the more famous Deepak Chopra, resembling a rivalry between studious and class-clown siblings. But the sketch-comedy world of The Love Guru is not a sophisticated spoof of growing up or of cultural fads; it’s humor is schoolboy-basic: booger jokes, penis jokes, TV jokes, un-PC midget jokes and Three Stooges–style slapstick.
The best joke rising out of this pop-culture delirium is an early spoof on voiceover movie narration, but the most typical gag is Pitka’s pidgin-Hindi thank you, “Mariska Hargitay”—which is funny only through repetition. When Mariska Hargitay herself appears (along with guest-star cameos by Kanye West, Jessica Simpson and Deepak Chopra) the wind goes out of the joke because the travestying of pop culture is ineluctable. Burlesque is meant to subject lofty or ordinary material to mockery, and though Mariska Hargitay is not a lofty figure, her TV stardom is so ordinary that Myers’ mockery becomes a nullifying rather than hilarious act.
Teen culture—which is now mass culture—has limited its aspirations to the self-amusing (meta comedy) of The Love Guru’s celebrity endorsements. No wonder it’s full of smirky sex and masturbation jokes. It keeps pop culture at an adolescent mental level. Debut director Marco Schnabel paces the jokes unremarkably, which means the musical lampoons—treating Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5” and Steve Miller’s “The Joker” as Bollywood production numbers—lag behind the astonishing Indian imagery that Wes Anderson and Robert Yeoman created for The Darjeeling Limited. These musical scenes lack the necessary giddy, delirious dance formation to effectively parody Bollywood. (Although Manu Naryan as Pitka’s aide, Rajneesh, moves with a beautiful, wild-eyed expression.)
Schnabel’s bland direction expresses no particular vision. Despite the film’s teen-pandering, it inhibits Myers’ arrested-development id. This formulaic style may result from Myers’ insecurity after his audacious turn in the widely panned Cat in the Hat. It must seriously undermine a performer’s belief in popular taste to have one’s brilliance and originality disparaged that way. Cat in the Hat was truly delirious—a comedy as visually adventurous as a German Expressionist silent. And Myers’ mischievous, whiskered Cat was scary-subversive: While freshening the tale’s underlying moral, he gave claws to Dr. Seuss, which is probably why critics attacked it.
So The Love Guru stays safely banal. Yet Myers has Apatowed himself—including what Pitka calls “presyphiletic words of wisdom,” the film’s narcissistic moral: “If you can’t love yourself, you can’t love others.” This is relayed through a subplot where Pitka advises hockey player Darren Roanoke (Romany Malco) to stand-up to his domineering mother (Telma Hopkins) and reclaim his girlfriend (Meagan Good) from rival hockey star Jacques Le Coq Grande (Justin Timberlake overdoing an Apatow figure).
It’s ironic that Myers doesn’t follow Pitka’s homily, “What is it you can’t face? Then that’s what you have to face.” The film’s hockey tangent suggests that Canadian-born hockey fan Myers has buried personal feelings inside teen-humor formula. Unfortunately, this follows Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg, a satirical documentary about Canadian lore as the source of Maddin’s own comic-erotic delirium. Once Maddin focuses on the physical destruction of the psychologically imperishable Winnipeg Arena (“my male parent”), the film towers into a series of ecstatic yet ambivalent exhortations of nostalgia and sexual anxiety. Instead of Apatowian smut, Maddin confesses locker-room arousal. Recollecting the discomfort of adolescent sexual taunts parallels the moment when Pitka’s guru subjects him to playing with urine-soaked mops. But young Maddin’s own desperate demurral, “Why don’t we just swim?” is funnier and more poignant. Of course, My Winnipeg isn’t for children, but it makes art out of adolescent sensibility. Mike Myers doesn’t; he markets it. The Love Guru crosses the Pop-Will-Eat-Itself point of no return.
Directed by Marco Schnabel
Was there ever a better time to be a 13-year-old at the movies? Mike Myers’ new comedy The Love Guru is perfectly calibrated to infantile thinking. It’s not the worst example of the extent to which Hollywood caters to a market, just further proof. Starting with Myers’ latest caricature-concept, Guru Pitka—an American-born, India-raised motivational speaker who specializes in pious quasi-spiritual bromides—the film’s adult subject matter is reduced to the silly impudence of adolescence. Pitka’s humor, as when he does a PowerPoint outline of the word “intimacy” (as “Into Me I See”), is just short of graffiti—brat-smart, coy, yet proudly foolish. It’s the lingua franca of today’s movie humor from Blades of Glory to Superbad. Too late to complain about it now.
Satire with the sole of point of being silly doesn’t disturb the teen market’s blissful self-absorption. Smashing together arcane Bollywood mockery with the memory of The Beatles’ brief 1960s infatuation with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi may be outside teens’ pop culture frame of references, but Myers’ Pitka is essentially a pubescent child. (The funniest image is a flashback that Photoshops Myers' big head on a child’s body.) Pitka’s constantly horny due to the chastity belt imposed by his mentor Guru Tugginmypudha (Ben Kingsley doing a cross-eyed Charlie Chase routine); his life is built around a career competition with the more famous Deepak Chopra, resembling a rivalry between studious and class-clown siblings. But the sketch-comedy world of The Love Guru is not a sophisticated spoof of growing up or of cultural fads; it’s humor is schoolboy-basic: booger jokes, penis jokes, TV jokes, un-PC midget jokes and Three Stooges–style slapstick.
The best joke rising out of this pop-culture delirium is an early spoof on voiceover movie narration, but the most typical gag is Pitka’s pidgin-Hindi thank you, “Mariska Hargitay”—which is funny only through repetition. When Mariska Hargitay herself appears (along with guest-star cameos by Kanye West, Jessica Simpson and Deepak Chopra) the wind goes out of the joke because the travestying of pop culture is ineluctable. Burlesque is meant to subject lofty or ordinary material to mockery, and though Mariska Hargitay is not a lofty figure, her TV stardom is so ordinary that Myers’ mockery becomes a nullifying rather than hilarious act.
Teen culture—which is now mass culture—has limited its aspirations to the self-amusing (meta comedy) of The Love Guru’s celebrity endorsements. No wonder it’s full of smirky sex and masturbation jokes. It keeps pop culture at an adolescent mental level. Debut director Marco Schnabel paces the jokes unremarkably, which means the musical lampoons—treating Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5” and Steve Miller’s “The Joker” as Bollywood production numbers—lag behind the astonishing Indian imagery that Wes Anderson and Robert Yeoman created for The Darjeeling Limited. These musical scenes lack the necessary giddy, delirious dance formation to effectively parody Bollywood. (Although Manu Naryan as Pitka’s aide, Rajneesh, moves with a beautiful, wild-eyed expression.)
Schnabel’s bland direction expresses no particular vision. Despite the film’s teen-pandering, it inhibits Myers’ arrested-development id. This formulaic style may result from Myers’ insecurity after his audacious turn in the widely panned Cat in the Hat. It must seriously undermine a performer’s belief in popular taste to have one’s brilliance and originality disparaged that way. Cat in the Hat was truly delirious—a comedy as visually adventurous as a German Expressionist silent. And Myers’ mischievous, whiskered Cat was scary-subversive: While freshening the tale’s underlying moral, he gave claws to Dr. Seuss, which is probably why critics attacked it.
So The Love Guru stays safely banal. Yet Myers has Apatowed himself—including what Pitka calls “presyphiletic words of wisdom,” the film’s narcissistic moral: “If you can’t love yourself, you can’t love others.” This is relayed through a subplot where Pitka advises hockey player Darren Roanoke (Romany Malco) to stand-up to his domineering mother (Telma Hopkins) and reclaim his girlfriend (Meagan Good) from rival hockey star Jacques Le Coq Grande (Justin Timberlake overdoing an Apatow figure).
It’s ironic that Myers doesn’t follow Pitka’s homily, “What is it you can’t face? Then that’s what you have to face.” The film’s hockey tangent suggests that Canadian-born hockey fan Myers has buried personal feelings inside teen-humor formula. Unfortunately, this follows Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg, a satirical documentary about Canadian lore as the source of Maddin’s own comic-erotic delirium. Once Maddin focuses on the physical destruction of the psychologically imperishable Winnipeg Arena (“my male parent”), the film towers into a series of ecstatic yet ambivalent exhortations of nostalgia and sexual anxiety. Instead of Apatowian smut, Maddin confesses locker-room arousal. Recollecting the discomfort of adolescent sexual taunts parallels the moment when Pitka’s guru subjects him to playing with urine-soaked mops. But young Maddin’s own desperate demurral, “Why don’t we just swim?” is funnier and more poignant. Of course, My Winnipeg isn’t for children, but it makes art out of adolescent sensibility. Mike Myers doesn’t; he markets it. The Love Guru crosses the Pop-Will-Eat-Itself point of no return.
