Cynical Cinema

When The Love Guru hit theatres the same week as Get Smart, I had a bet with my colleagues about which movie would be bigger. Both opening week and in the long run. I picked Get Smart. They picked the Love Guru. I think there is something about Canadians that wishes success upon Mike Myers even when that success is neither earned nor deserved. Mike Myers has done five movies. Ever. So I Married An Axe Murderer, Wayne’s World, Shrek, Austin Powers, and 54. Then he made thirty-one sequels, either bona-fide sequels or ripoffs of his previous work. The Love Guru falls into the latter category, and it gets released on DVD and Blu-Ray tomorrow, September 16th, from Paramount Home Entertainment. And it’s dreadful.

It actually makes me cringe to write the following words: The best thing in this movie is Justin Timberlake. Ugh. I feel like showering now. But it’s actually true. He is reasonably entertaining as a French Canadian hockey goalie who is a whiz with the ladies. His overblown French accent and his idiotic love for Celine Dion are worth a smirk or two. But Mike Myers, as the Indian guru Pitka, is doing the same role he has always done. Basically, he figures that putting on an accent (in this case an Indian one) is funny enough to carry a movie. He then figures that Verne Troyer simply being a tiny guy is funny. And that having an elephant walk around is funny. Or that two elephants having sex with each other is funny. In this movie, none of these things are funny. They are obnoxious.

Jessica Alba, once again, plays the hot woman. Just showing up is enough for her, because she is hot. Just like showing up is enough for Verne Troyer, because he is short. And for Mike Myers as well, because he has an accent. Get it? This really is one of the worst movies of the year, with almost no laughs and definitely no charm. Skip The Love Guru. And wait until Mike Myers makes his sixth movie. Oh, by the way - I won the bet. By a large margin. The Love Guru cost 62 million dollars and made 32 million. Opening weekend, 13 million. Get Smart opened with a 39 million dollar weekend, and has made 129 million dollars so far. With a production budget of 80 million dollars. Case closed.

I had the most masochistic morning of my life today.  I watched, back to back, The Hottie and the Nottie, the Paris Hilton crapfest, followed by Blonde Ambition, the Jessica Simpson crapfest.  You see, I was working out and didn’t really want to put on a movie for which I would actually have to take notes.  Or one that I would actually care about.  And I decided to review the two together, because in many ways, they are the same movie.

 The plot of The Hottie and the Nottie is that Paris Hilton is hot.  She is apparently the hottest chick in the city…Los Angeles?  I think?  And every guy who sees her either falls over, or spills his drink on himself, or crashes his car.  HILARIOUS!  She appears in the film for the first time jogging down a beach.  Paris Hilton, perhaps the worst actress alive, can’t even JOG convincingly.  And some creepy guy stalks her, because he was in love with her when he was six.  Or something.  And she has this ugly friend, and she won’t date until her ugly friend does, so this guy has to figure out how to get her friend a date…and people fall down and spill their drinks and…blahblahblah.  Of course, the ugly friend is clearly just made up to look ugly, and we know that by the end of the film she’ll be reasonably attractive, if not actually hot.  But then, I never got to the end of the movie.  The cable came out of the back of the TV when the ugly girl was starting to get more attractive and Paris Hilton was starting to irritate me so much that I didn’t get off the rowing machine to plug the cables back in.  I just enjoyed the silence.  By the time I was done, so too was the movie.  And the end of this piece of trash will always remain a mystery to me.  And happily so.

I actually managed to stick it out all the way through Blonde Ambition.  Mostly because it’s background noise, and background noise is OK for when you’re excercising.  At least it is not specifically irritating the way The Hottie and the Nottie is.  Which is why it gets one star.  Bringing the total number of stars for these two piles of crap to…one.  Jessica Simpson, just like Paris Hilton, has only one thing to do in this film - be hot.  As she walks around, guys stare.  And they fall down, they spill drinks on themselves, they crash cars…the film itself is basically a remake of 1988’s Working Girl, which gave the world Melanie Griffith, making her a star.  Since then, Melanie Griffith has become a bizarre casualty of plastic surgery, with the world’s biggest, weirdest lips.  The only person close is…Jessica Simpson.  In this movie.  At least in this film there are other actors with her.  Real ones.  Rachel Leigh Cook, Luke Wilson, and Willie Nelson, who somehow shows up in every Jessica Simpson movie.  But that does not save this junk.  People fall down holes, Jessica Simpson burps and farts and wears trucker hats - get it?  She’s CRASS!  She can’t ride a bike well.  Hahahahahahahahahaha.  And she’s trying to make it in the cutthroat world of New York.  That should be good for some jokes.  But it isn’t.

 And here’s the thing - neither one of them is hot enough.  Jessica Simpson comes close, but she has these gigantic mandrill-ass lips that really distract from any prettiness her face may contain.  And Paris Hilton most definitely is not hot enough to be in a movie where being hot is the only character trait her character has.  Neither one can act, neither one has talent, neither one should ever be in movies, and both these movies suck.  And - both bombed miserably at the box office.  In fact, both of them were, as much as possible, kept out of the theatres by the studios, because they knew they would be ridiculed.  Even so, both these movies opened in theatres, and both made less than $30,000.  The Hottie and the Nottie averaged $249.00 per theatre.  Total.  111 theatres, $27,000.  Blonde Ambition averaged $165.00 per theatre on opening weekend.  It ended up playing in 8 theatres, and made $6,000.  And deservedly so, as both are among the worst movies ever made.