My Year of Flops (16 page)

The Love Guru
was a potential bonanza from a superstar accustomed to knocking it out of the park with each at bat. Yet between the release of 2003's underperforming
The Cat In The Hat
and
The Love Guru,
the public turned on Myers. The goodwill he engendered through
Saturday Night Live, Wayne's World, Austin Powers,
and
Shrek
got squandered through a series of mercenary sequels.

Myers was stupid enough to pick a very public fight with Ron Howard and his Imagine Films Entertainment juggernaut by pulling out of a proposed
Sprockets
film because he was unhappy with the screenplay. Here's the Kafkaesque part: Myers made an enemy of one of the most powerful people in Hollywood because he was unhappy with a screenplay he co-wrote. A certain level of self-hatred should be expected from funny people, but that took it entirely too far. A bitter Myers bitchily had Seth Green's heavy in
Goldmember
look more and more like Ron Howard with each passing scene. Myers really should have beefed publicly with a less-revered icon than Howard—someone like Maya Angelou, or the little dog that played Benji.

As more and more details came out about Myers' decades-long reign of jackassery, he came to be seen less as a troubled comic genius than as an asshole content to recycle the same tired shtick in film after film. Meanwhile, the Dresden-bombing-style publicity for
The Love Guru
made the tactical error of trying to sell Myers as a sensitive artist trying to create joy and laughter while recovering from a traumatic divorce and the death of a parent at a time when Myers' reputation was at an all-time low.

The Love Guru
at least opens with an inspired gag. The sonorous sounds of Morgan Freeman gently usher viewers into the action. Then the camera pans down to reveal that Myers' second-rate guru
is speaking through the “Morgan Freeman” setting of an East India Voiceover Machine. It's all downhill from there. The disappointments begin with Stephen Colbert's appearance as a sportscaster waging an unsuccessful battle against his addictions to sex and peyote. It's a running gag that's brilliant in theory, but it dies on-screen.

Once the film's premise is established—foxy Toronto Maple Leafs owner Jessica Alba recruits Myers' neo-Eastern spiritualist to fix the broken marriage of a hockey star (Romany Malco), so his team can win the Stanley Cup—Myers indulges in an endless, joke-light rendition of “9 To 5” that establishes a tone of insufferable self-indulgence.

The Love Guru
barely passes the 80-minute mark, yet it still finds time for Myers to perform three—count 'em,
three
—songs, including a perversely straight rendition of “More Than Words.” It's hard to believe this shit took three years to write.

It would be hard to imagine a bigger, more obvious target for spoofery than bogus spiritual teachers, but Myers never aspires to satire. Deepak Chopra was an early, vocal supporter of the film when it came under fire from an outraged, publicity-seeking Hindu cleric who, upset over its depiction of his religion, called for a boycott. He needn't have bothered:
The Love Guru
's ads and previews did a much better job of keeping audiences away than any boycott could. Unless it was led by Ron Howard. People love that guy.

It is easy to see why Chopra dug the film; it's essentially an extended cinematic blowjob. Chopra, who has a cameo as himself, is depicted as the real deal, an authentic man of wisdom committed to making the world a better place.

But Myers is less interested in puncturing fake mysticism than in being the world's oldest grade-school cutup. That's why his guru behaves throughout like a naughty 8-year-old in the midst of a Pixy Stix rush. Myers cracks endless smutty jokes, giggles at his own juvenile antics, laughs at himself even when he isn't cracking wise, and smiles his trademark idiot grin of beatific self-satisfaction.

There's something faintly tragic about
The Love Guru
. It's the work of a famously unhappy man intent on remaining a man-child on-screen forever. Myers is a cinematic Peter Pan thumbing his nose at the compromises of adulthood. Sublimely silly Myers vehicles like
Wayne's World
and
Austin Powers
invite audiences to regress to childhood alongside their man-heroes. That's a simultaneously seductive and poignant offer. Wayne Campbell and Austin Powers never have to grow up because they're deliriously happy the way they are. But
The Love Guru
makes a terrible case for perpetual preadolescence. It offers all the stupidity and immaturity, with none of the joy or innocence.

I still hold out hope for Myers. He's made us laugh before. It's possible, if not probable, that he will make us laugh again. Hopefully he will learn from
The Love Guru.
So let's end this piece as it began, with the deliciously ironic final paragraph from the
New York Times
piece lamenting Myers' regrettable absence from the big screen, and the shimmering promise of a spectacular return to film:

“For another year, then, at least, audiences will have to make do with Mr. Myers's voice as the big green ogre in
Shrek The Third,
his physical absence made easier by the notion that they've been spared the blighted vintages that might well have been the Myers product of 2004, 2005 or 2006—and that he's continuing to work, however deliberately, on a splendid '08.”

As us Chicago baseball fans like to say: there's always next year.

Failure, Fiasco, Or Secret Success?
Failure

Chapter 3

Musical Misfires And
Misunderstood Masterpieces

Beatles Smile-Time Variety Hour Without The Beatles Case File #51:
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

Originally Posted July 19, 2007

During my lengthy stint as a video-store clerk, I used to play 1978's
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
on the store monitors with some regularity. Being a huge Beatles fan, I figured even bad Beatles covers were better than no Beatles at all. So I should have been more prepared for the film's almost inconceivable awfulness. But as often as I played the movie for our unsuspecting customers, I never watched the monitor while the clattering abomination was playing, which protected me from its eviscerating power. I felt like Lot fleeing Sodom and Gomorrah: As long as I didn't look back, I was safe. But had I glanced even casually at the monitor and seen, say, Billy Preston in a gold lamé suit hurling magical laser beams while flying around singing “Get Back,” or sexy henchmen robots destroying “She's Leaving Home,” my brain would have turned into a pillar of salt.

To take the biblical analogy even farther, producer-mastermind Robert Stigwood even got legendary Beatles producer George Martin and engineer Geoff Emerick to play Judases and betray their old masters by having them produce and engineer here. Martin spent the '60s elevating pop music with his production wizardry and the subsequent years periodically desecrating the Beatles' legacy. In addition to arranging, conducting, directing, and producing the music in the
Sgt. Pepper
movie, Martin produced the soundtrack for the Beatles-themed Cirque du Soleil show
Love,
and a 1998 Beatles tribute album featuring Jim Carrey mugging his way through “I Am The Walrus” and Robin Williams and Bobby McFerrin dueting on “Come Together.”

Like
The Star Wars Holiday Special, Sgt. Pepper
puts a beloved cultural institution in a new context so mind-bogglingly inappropriate that it engenders intense cognitive dissonance. Logic seems to dictate that the
Star Wars
universe shouldn't include a Wookiecentric special featuring the comedy stylings of Harvey Korman, Diahann Carroll trying to work Chewbacca's father into an erotic frenzy with a sexually charged song-and-dance number, a Boba Fett cartoon, and a special performance by Jefferson Starship. Yet
The Star Wars Christmas Special
undeniably exists, though George Lucas would like to pretend otherwise. A big-budget 1978 musical that transforms songs from
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
and
Abbey Road
into a pilot for a
Beatles Smile-Time Variety Hour Without The Beatles
is similarly preposterous and far-fetched, yet the cinematic
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
exists as well.