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.

Uwe Boll does have a sense of humour.  It may not be a very good one, but it exists.  After all, he can laugh at himself to the point where he inserts himself into his movie Postal in a scene where he says his movies are funded with Nazi gold.  He then makes what he must think of as a joke about being aroused by children, and pays Verne Troyer his salary in Nazi gold teeth.  If the idea of any of this makes you laugh, then Postal is the movie for you.  Actually, no.  Postal is still not the movie for you, because I have just described the funniest scene in the film.  Postal is a movie for nobody.  No one should ever see this movie.  But I do have a few extra copies lying around.  The first four people to send me an email, at eric.bollman@ottawaradio.rogers.com will get a copy of this DVD.  But you would have to be a masochist to do so, and I will make fun of you if and when I receive that email.

The rest of the “humour” in this “comedy” comes from an effort to be as offensive as possible.  Nazi jokes, holocaust jokes, dead children jokes, Uwe-Boll-gets-shot-in-the-balls jokes.  At the very least Boll acknowledges that he is reviled in the critical community and attempts to make light of it, but his sense of humour really sucks.  It’s like he received and Offensive Joke Book from 1989 and threw it all up on screen.  “After I’m done with her, she’ll look like she’s been hit in the face with a mayonnaise truck”.  “I had to roll her in flour and look for the wet spot”.  Then there’s Dave Foley doing a very creepy full-frontal scene. 

The basic premise is that some kind of weird cult gets mixed up with a terrorist cell led by Osama Bin Laden, and a bunch of hot babes, Dave Foley, and Zack Ward pull out a bunch of guns and massacre men, women, children and terrorists.  The gun battle scenes really do look like they are straight out of the video game, which I guess is supposed to be the point.  But this video game must have been a really bad, really stupid, lowest common denominator type of game, if this is the movie that it spawned.  There is a scene where Uwe Boll fights the creator of the video game Postal, a man who is furious at what Boll has done to his game.  You kind of wish they had killed each other off and the movie had stopped at the 20-minute mark.

There is a special feature on the disc where we get to see Uwe Boll in the famous publicity stunt where he boxed his critics.  It’s virtually identical to the Raging Boll featurette on the “director’s cut” of Alone In The Dark.  And it’s still the most original thing on this DVD.  Postal came out August 26th from Peace Arch Entertainment.