Hey, everyone. ”Moriarty” here.

While I was on a quick one-day trip out of town, two new review from the first test screening of THE LOVE GURU showed up. I’m really curious to see how this one shapes up between now and release, and I’m sure they’ll be testing it many more times...

Hey Moriarty

Saw the review of GURU posted. I was at the same screening in NJ and wanted to write in with my review. I saw the trailer on apple a few weeks ago and thought it was pretty lame. But I also saw some stuff on youtube that looked more promising. The movie is basically mike as a perverted love guru who is trying to reconcile romany malco's character
with his wife so he can get his hockey groove back on. Jessica Alba is the hot owner of the hockey team who hires mike to get them back together. Verne is the coach of the hockey team- who totally steals the show in his mini-me office (hilarious) and when he gets tossed across the ice like a hockey puck. Mike revives the best of his Austin powers humor in this character - pulls a few old school references to wayne's world and Austin powers for the fans too. he creates all of these wacky definitions like E.I.E.I.O. and sings insane versions of "more than words" and "9 to 5". Its honestly really funny stuff. Colbert has a cameo as a sports announcer and Justin Timberlake is the guy with a big dick. He is definitely the weakest part of the movie... unless you count the cameo by jessica simpson which is horrific. Why does anyone give her a job? I don't get it. Anyway, the movie is funny as shit. I'm guessing mike is going to test the hell out of it and keep working on it so keep an eye out for more test screenings.

Call me jockey hollow if you post this.

This next one’s a little longer and more in depth. I think this film is going to be the real test of Mike Myers as a box-office draw. He hasn’t tried to create an original comedy character in quite a while, and I’m very curious to see if the public’s still in tune with Myers at this point...

I honestly have no idea why I even went to this screening last night. Everything about this flick looked terrible. Myers' character design looked awful, the subject matter seemed annoying and the cast listing was unexciting to say the least (the invitation I received said "Starring Mike Myers, Jessica Alba and Justin Timberlake... enticing, i know).

Plus, it was at the same place as that last miserable screening I wrote in about, so I didn't feel like having to deal with those jerkoffs at all. But I had a shitty weekend, I was stressed to the max and I just needed something to vent at. What better way to do so than to trash some POS comedy? I was definitely predisposed to hate this thing. Consequently, my expectations were well below abysmal.

But I don't know what happened between my sitting in the theater and my taking that survey at the end, but I laughed my fucking ass off. It was probably a combination of my lowered expectations and the general enthusiasm that most preview audiences have regardless of the quality of the picture being viewed, but that still doesn't change the fact that the flick was really funny.

This movie is gonna have a LOT of haters, and I completely cannot blame them at all. The kind of humor being used here is lowest common denominator stuff. I mean, there's literally about 20 references to cocks and balls that are painfully un-clever. As i watched it, I could truly picture the creators simply throwing handful after handful of shit at the screen, praying that the majority of it sticks.

The thing is that even though you can sense they are trying way too hard to make you laugh, about 60% of the time, you do laugh. Specifically, the first 10 minutes or so of the flick were really, truly hilarious. This mainly results from one or two things: funny cutaways or the supporting cast. As an example, the Mike Myers "Guru" is hired by Jessica Alba's character, the inherited owner of the Toronto Maple Leafs, to help get their star player back on track after he separated from his wife and has since become useless on the ice. Cliche as hell, I know. But Romany Malco, from 40-Year-Old Virgin fame, is the aforementioned hockey star. While being referenced as the Tiger Woods of hockey is worth a chuckle, it's the cutaway to a group of black youths playing street hockey in the projects that had me dying.

The supporting cast basically add up to a list of extended cameos, but when it comes to the previous Myers flicks, the cameos most often were the bits that I laughed at the most. Notably, The Maple Leafs announcers are played by Jim Jim Gaffigan and Stephen Colbert, and they brought down the house. I could have watched an entire movie with Colbert's cracked out announcer baiting Jim Gaffigan, but hopefully there's more footage that will be released on DVD. There's also a moment with Myers being interviewed as himself as a spectator at the Leafs' game that was fuckin' fantastic. I won't ruin it here, but I'm sure you can guess who else he's being interviewed with.

I don't know if you can tell, but I'm really struggling to justify and analyze just why the hell I enjoyed this movie. It's not a good movie at all, that's for sure. It's dumb in ways that kinda piss me off. And the characters are mostly annoying as hell. Myers' Guru really is a dumb character. Like, completely unlikeable, has no character development and you can't justify why anyone in their right mind would follow this guy's advice. Jessica Alba is bland as always, but luckily the romance between her and the Guru is downplayed greatly. Even the great Sir Ben Kingsley has yet again made a tragic mistake of taking the roll of the Guru's cross-eyed mentor. He goes from Ghandi to THIS? My how the great have fallen. I even felt bad or Vern Troyer, who had to suffer through way too many 'midget' jokes than I felt he should (although there is a scene in his office that was side-splitting). And don't get me started on Timberlake. He's hilarious whenever he doesn't open his mouth, but the second he attempts to talk with his faux French-Canadian accent it brings the whole flick to a screeching halt. Remember how funny Sacha Baron Cohen's accent in Talladega Nights was, simply because it was laughably bad? Yeah, well this one is just incomprehensible and they should seriously consider having it dubbed before the release.

But despite these complaints, I still found it pretty damn funny. Like I said, it really is lowest common denominator humor. Not nearly as egregious and Meet the Spartans or Epic Movie, but condescending nevertheless. As a result, i kinda hate myself for liking this movie, but the fact is that I laughed a lot more than I expected myself to. And while there's no denying that the Guru character is probably the worst one Mike Myers has created (which is saying a lot), the flick is funny. It misses the mark a lot, but when that shit actually sticks, it hits the bullseye.

Jersey Jedi

P.S.

Andy, the tool, was there again. He actually approached me and my friend about staying after. I don't know if he recognized me or what, but he ended up looking right at me, and then switched his gazed to the guys directly next to me and asked them if they wanted to stay. It's probably hubris thinking the guys would remember my face from so many weeks ago, but it was still interesting nevertheless. And he really needs to stop reading peoples scores of the movie aloud when he approaches them for the focus group after the screening. That's not cool embarrassing people just because for expressing their opinions. It's like walking out of a voting booth and having a speaker on the booth announce who you chose. Jerk.