{"id":8546,"date":"2024-11-19T00:03:45","date_gmt":"2024-11-19T05:03:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/?p=8546"},"modified":"2024-11-19T00:03:45","modified_gmt":"2024-11-19T05:03:45","slug":"the-love-guru","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/2024\/11\/19\/the-love-guru\/","title":{"rendered":"The Love Guru"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"The Love Guru <\/strong>(2008)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Paramount\/Comedy\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 RT: 87 minutes\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Rated PG-13 (crude and sexual content throughout, language, some comic violence, drug references)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Director: Marco Schnabel\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Screenplay: Mike Myers and Graham Gordy\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Music: George S. Clinton\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cinematography: Peter Deming\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Release date: June 20, 2008 (US)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cast: Mike Myers, Jessica Alba, Justin Timberlake, Romany Malco, Meagan Good, Verne Troyer, John Oliver, Manu Narayan, Ben Kingsley, Telma Hopkins, Omid Djalili, Stephen Colbert, Jim Gaffigan.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Box Office: $32.1M (US)\/$40.8M (World)<\/p>\n

Rating<\/strong>:\u00a0*<\/p>\n

\u00a0I didn\u2019t see\u00a0The Love Guru<\/strong>\u00a0at the movies. It looked terrible to me. Critics savaged it, audiences ignored it and Mike Myers\u2019 career fell right into the crapper. It won three Razzies that year- Worst Picture, Actor and Screenplay. I avoided it for many years. I never had any intention of seeing it. That is, until I accepted a challenge to see how many titles on a list of 170 bad movies I saw. For the record, I saw 151. I decided right then and there to challenge myself further by watching the unseen titles.\u00a0The Love Guru<\/strong>\u00a0is on that list. I obtained a copy that day and watched it that night. I steeled myself expecting the absolute worst. That’s not exactly what I got, but it\u2019s extremely close.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Directed by\u00a0one-dud wonder Marco Schnabel, The Love Guru<\/strong>\u00a0is crude, crass, obnoxious, gross, corny, sloppy, idiotic and offensive. It contains jokes about snots, boogers with nose hairs, urine, diarrhea, large genitalia, midget abuse, elephant sex and Celine Dion. It\u2019s filled with offensive Indian stereotypes too. It has no value whatsoever; comedic, artistic or otherwise. It\u2019s a movie only a moron could love and I don\u2019t mean that in a good way.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Myers plays Guru Pitka, the number two guru in the world after Deepak Chopra with whom he grew up in an ashram run by Guru Tugginmypudha (ha, ha) played by Ben Kingsley. Yes, that Ben Kingsley! He won an Oscar for playing Gandhi. Ben, WTF?! Pitka dreams of displacing Chopra as top guru and appearing on Oprah. He gets his chance when Toronto Maple Leafs owner Jane Bullard (Alba, Sin City) hires him to help her team win the Stanley Cup. They haven\u2019t won a championship since her father took over the team many years before. She\u2019s the most hated person in Canada because of it. Jane wants him to help star player Darren Roanoke (Malco, Think Like a Man) get back together with his wife Prudence (Good, Think Like a Man) in hopes that it will improve his current on-ice performance. He\u2019s been playing poorly since his wife took up with chief rival Jacques \u201cLe Coq\u201d Grande (Timberlake, Alpha Dog) of the Los Angeles Kings. In order to help Roanoke, Pitka has to get to bottom of what\u2019s really ailing him. Could it be his overbearing mother (Hopkins, Family Matters)? A romance starts to develop between Pitka and Jane as well, but who didn\u2019t see that coming?<\/p>\n

\u00a0Would I classify\u00a0The Love Guru<\/strong>\u00a0as a bad movie? In a word, yes. HELL YES! Let\u2019s start with Myers. Once upon a time, he was funny. He created funny characters like perma-teen head banger Wayne Campbell (Wayne\u2019s World) and randy 60s-era British secret agent Austin Powers. As a Scotsman, I\u2019m also quite fond of So I Married an Axe Murderer. That was the 90s. Aside from his voice work in the four Shrek movies, what has he really done since then? The Cat in the Hat belongs in a litter box. Then there\u2019s\u00a0The Love Guru<\/strong>. His character is an amalgam of Wayne and Powers disguised as an Indian guru. When he tells a joke, he often looks right at the camera when delivering the punchline. He also laughs at his own jokes. Much of the time, he\u2019s the only one laughing. If not for that, there\u2019d be dead silence. It all feels rather forced. It\u2019s like he\u2019s begging the audience to laugh out of charity. It\u2019s pathetic really. How can anybody laugh at something that isn\u2019t funny?<\/p>\n

\u00a0The rest of the cast tries their best only to come off looking almost as bad as Myers. Alba wears a fake, plastered-on smile that betrays her embarrassment at appearing in this dumb movie. Timberlake looks like he\u2019s having a bit of fun goofing on French-Canadian stereotypes- e.g. a fondness for Celine Dion. I think you can correctly guess why he\u2019s called \u201cLe Coq\u201d. Heh, heh. Verne Troyer (aka Mini-Me) is the butt of too many short jokes and the target of too much dwarf abuse.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Some of\u00a0The Love Guru<\/strong>\u00a0is just gross, the low point being a fencing match with urine-soaked mops. It\u2019s more stomach-turning than funny. Same goes for the scene where Kingsley\u2019s character serves young Pitka and Chopra tea, pouring it through his nose into the cup. Hairy boogers, YUCK! This scene is made disturbing by the creepy effect of superimposing Myer\u2019s adult face on the body of an adolescent. It\u2019s unsettling not to mention fake-looking.<\/p>\n

\u00a0All of\u00a0The Love Guru<\/strong>\u00a0is stupid. For whatever reason, it opens with Myers narrating in the voice of Morgan Freeman courtesy of a voice-altering device. He then proceeds to sing a sitar-infused rendition of Dolly Parton\u2019s \u201cNine to Five\u201d. What does that song have to do with anything in the movie? I have no freaking clue! The gags about acronyms used by Pitka in his lectures become redundant quickly. I\u2019ll admit to chuckling at \u201cMariska Hargitay\u201d being used as a phony Hindi greeting. Naturally, it\u2019s a set-up for a cameo by the SVU actress. That\u2019s the kind of movie\u00a0The Love Guru<\/strong>\u00a0is. But is it offensive to Hindus? Theoretically, it could be. However, it\u2019s so stupid and poorly made; I can\u2019t see them dignifying it by reacting to it.<\/p>\n

\u00a0To be fair, I\u2019ve seen worse than The Love Guru<\/strong>. It\u2019s not even Myers\u2019 worst movie. That would be The Cat in the Hat. It runs a close second though earning it a place in the litter box right beside that darn Cat.\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Love Guru (2008)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Paramount\/Comedy\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 RT: 87 minutes\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Rated PG-13 (crude and sexual content throughout, language, some comic violence, drug references)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Director: Marco Schnabel\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Screenplay: Mike Myers and Graham Gordy\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Music: George S. Clinton\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cinematography: Peter Deming\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Release date: June 20, 2008 (US)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cast: Mike Myers, Jessica Alba, Justin Timberlake, Romany Malco, Meagan Good, Verne […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":8823,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8546","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-comedies","category-this-sucks-so-bad"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/11\/The-Love-Guru-PIC.jpg?fit=620%2C348&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8546","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8546"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8546\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8825,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8546\/revisions\/8825"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8823"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8546"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8546"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8546"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}