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The Love Guru Central: The movie review

By: Santosh :+: Under: Movies, Review
On: ⋅ June 22, 2008 ⋅  Email this post ⋅  Print this post ⋅ Post a comment
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In our continuing coverage of the movie “Love Guru”, we have some posts left including the review of the movie itself, our opinions on whether the movie was really as offensive as self proclaimed leader of the Hindus, Rajan Zed, proclaimed it to be and, perhaps, another surprise post ***hint***. All these post will feature under the section titled “The Love Guru Central:” for obvious reasons. Presenting the first post in out “Love Guru Central”, a broad review of the movie.

The Love Guru has Austin Powers Mike Myers exchanging his retro 60s suit in favor of saffron robes and a beard. The movie is full of juvenile jokes including a liberal dosage of references to the male anatomy. So if that kind of stuff offends you, I suggest you give this review (and the movie) a miss.

Pitka and Rajneesh
img: via Winnipeg Sun

I watched “Love Guru” Friday night with my wife. In the movie, Myers plays Pitka, a Deepak Chopra wannabe, whose life revolves around wanting to be on Oprah so he can be the next Chopra. Yes, there are a couple Oprah-Chopra jokes thrown in for good measure. Pitka preaches with power point presentations, has a penchant for trademarking his own teachings and writing self-help books for every life situation with Sooraj Barjatya and Karan Johar ish nomenclature, “If You’re Happy and You Know It, Think Again” and “I Know You Are, but What Am I?” for instance.

Pitka lives in a massive Beverly Hills ashram, surrounded by desi women assistants dressed like the apsaras of yore, glides across the room in a motorized carpet and greets his followers with a “Mariska Hargitay”, Pitka’s version of “namaste”. His followers include Hollywood stars like Jessica Simpson, Val Kilmer and the real Mariska Hargitay. Pitka with his multi-colored robes, beard and jewelery himself looks like a bastardized version of Osho crossed with Govinda and Sean Puffy Combs.

Growing up, Pitka and Deepak Chopra were fellow students in Tugginmypudha ashram under the cross-eyed tutelage of Guru Tugginmypudha, who went cross-eyed from … well …. tugginhispudha. Guru Tugginmypudha played favorites with Chopra and made Pitka fight with brooms soaked in urine, drink tea snorted out his nostril and wear a chastity belt. Ben Kingsley as Guru Tugginmypudha, is only mildly amusing, perhaps an attempt to break free off the other Indian role that made him famous. Other points to note, Deepak Chopra as a young adult is played by his son, Gotham Chopra.

Alba can Bollywood dance, but can she act?
img: via Filmiholic

Jessica Alba is Jane Bullard, reluctant owner of the ice hockey team Toronto Maple Leafs. Alba features in yet another flat performance to go with “Good Luck Chuck” and all the lackluster roles she’s done of late. However of desi interest is the couple of love duets between Jane and Pitka. There is a “Nadiya Kinare” (which I should know but am unable to pinpoint) song 60s Bollywood-ishtyle scratchy recording and all. I remember watching his sequence and thinking to myself, perhaps this movie would’ve had a little more pizzazz had they gone all out on the classic 60s Bollywood-ishtyle.

Jane recruits Pitka to motivate her star player, who lost his mojo after his wife left him for the goalie of the Los Angeles Kings, Jacques Grande, whose claim to fame is a grande phallus. Justin Timberlake is fairly amusing in this role as the big phallused Celine Dion loving afro and mustache wearing French-Canadian.

Manu Narayan of Bombay Dreams fame, plays Pitka’s sidekick and conscience, Rajneesh, which oh-so-conveniently is the namesake of another erstwhile Indian sex guru (in case you missed the connection). Some of their scenes are hilarious particularly the sitar versions of “More than words” by Extreme (one of my favorite numbers of all time) left the audience rolling in the aisles. One small grouse about Manu Narayan, he needs to work on his “Indian accent” in these kind of roles. Narayan’s role unfortunately does not leave much room for histrionics, save a little bit of face time.

Bollywood style song and dance routines
img: via yahoo!

At this point you start to realize that with this supporting cast the movie is looking flat. Enter the true supporting stars of the movie - Verne Troyer a.k.a Mini Me and Stephen Colbert. Verne Troyer plays Punch Cherkov, the foul mouthed coach of the Toronto Maple Leafs and in the scenes between him and Pitka you start to see the carry-over of the chemistry of the Austin Powers-Dr. Evil-Mine Me combo. Colbert plays a recovering drug addict ice hockey sportcaster playing color commentator to his fellow Mr. Obvious commentator.

The following section of this post also reflects some of the trivia that my wife was able to translate for me from her American POV. The movie has a lot of inside jokes that people may start to latch on to as the DVD comes out and you start watching it again and again. The hero shows a propensity to randomly burst out singing and dancing, Bollywood-ishtyle. But of course, you would have to have watched Bollywood movies to latch on to that fact. Pitka is a walking talking spoof of Deepak Chopra himself, including the accent and the slow deliberate way Chopra talks. Then again, you would have to have watched a video clip of Deepak Chopra to know that. Again you would have to be familiar with Hindi and Punjabi slang to know what Tugginmypudha means. Similarly you would have to be well versed in American pop-culture nut to understand the references to Mariska Hargitay, Law and Order: SVU and Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5″ in particular.

I’m sure there are a few more jokes in there I did not catch. As for the movie itself, it’s funny in parts and mercifully short (less than an hour and a half by my estimates). The movie is full of stupid jokes and juvenile toilet humor but even my wife who is not a big fan of the Austin power’s movie, found it cute. If you like Mike Myers and his Austin Powers movie, this one is definitely worth a dekko.

Coming soon: My take on whether the movie is really offensive to Hindus and another surprise post.

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