by Nathan Rabin
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.
Still, there was method to Stigwood’s madness. Wasn’t the beloved Yellow Submarine a Beatles movie minus the Beatles? Sure, the Fab Four provided some songs, but their creative input was minimal, they didn’t voice their animated doppelgängers, and their attitude toward the project
was lukewarm at best.
Adapted loosely from the 1974 Off-Broadway musical Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band On The Road, the film casts Peter Frampton and the Bee Gees as humble minstrels who rocket to superstardom after signing with a shady record label, only to watch their fortunes change after their magical musical instruments are stolen by the villainous Mean Mr. Mustard (Frankie Howerd), a real-estate scoundrel who receives directives from the evil computer on his pimped-out bus.
As Billy Shears and the Henderson brothers, respectively, Frampton and the Bee Gees must then use their vacant stares, amateurish pantomime skills, nonexistent charisma, and middle-of-the-road versions of Beatles classics to retrieve the instruments and bring joy back to Heartland. In the fierce battle between Frampton and the Brothers Gibb to determine who can emit less star power, everybody loses.
Sgt. Pepper takes a dark turn when Billy’s love interest, Strawberry Fields (Sandy Farina), dies in a skirmish with Aerosmith. A despondent Billy tries to kill himself by jumping out of a building, only to have Sgt. Pepper (played by Beatles session player Billy Preston) pop up as the most Magicalest Negro ever and get his deus ex machina on by hurling magical beams of light that bring Strawberry Fields back to life, keep Billy from plummeting to his death, and for some reason, transform supporting players into members of the Catholic clergy.
Just when it seems like the film cannot get worse, a random selection of guest stars re-create the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band for a final insult to everything the Beatles created. The closing number is a maraschino cherry of awfulness atop a 10-scoop sundae of bad ideas, incompetently executed. Is there any better way to end a “tribute” to the Beatles than with guest appearances from Dame Edna, Carol Channing, Keith Carradine, Sha-Na-Na, Hank Williams Jr., and Leif Garrett?
The Beatles explored a sonic and emotional template unprecedented in the history of pop music. There’s infinite variety and sophistication in the band’s humor alone. Paul McCartney brought cornball dance-hall baggy-pants broadness but also goofball absurdism, and John Lennon supplied vitriolic black humor and stinging social satire. Though it hit studios well before the Beatles reached their creative peak or underwent one of the most profound artistic evolutions in history, 1964’s A Hard Day’s Night feels fresh, edgy, hilarious, and hip today.
But Stigwood’s film reduces the Beatles’ diverse, literate humor to history’s dumbest variety-show skit. Pepper combines the worst of the old and new. It ransacks vaudeville and silent film for its hokey jokes, grossly exaggerated performances, and groaning stupidity, but adds cheesy disco flourishes and special effects that wouldn’t look out of place in a Rudy Ray Moore movie.
Pepper attempts to destroy everything resonant about the Beatles’ music, stripping “She’s Leaving Home” of its melancholy grace, “Good Morning Good Morning” of its caustic wit, and “A Day In The Life” of its epic, bipolar grandeur. At his most twee, Paul McCartney wrote cloying ditties that bordered on novelty songs. Sgt. Pepper takes this rare shortcoming in the Beatles’ canon and runs with it. Guest stars Steve Martin and Alice Cooper respectively reduce “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” and “Because” to kitsch.
The musical performances fall into two discrete categories: bland, reverent mediocrities and creaky novelty songs. (The sole exception is Aerosmith’s down-and-dirty take on “Come Together.” Aerosmith escapes the epic pointlessness of this whole endeavor by making the song its own—a nasty, warped, peyote-soaked blues howler delivered with sleazy conviction.) Just because something works in one context doesn’t mean it will succeed in another. At the risk of being controversial, I found Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club inferior to the album that inspired it.
Failure, Fiasco, Or Secret Success? Fiasco
Madcap Musical Miserablism Case File #59: Pennies From Heaven
Originally Posted August 16, 2007
I have never spent two more miserable hours in my life. Every scene was cheap and vulgar. They didn’t realize that the ’30s were a very innocent age, and that it should have been set in the ’80s—it was just froth; it makes you cry, it’s so distasteful.
—Fred Astaire on 1981’s Pennies From Heaven
The ’30s were indeed an innocent, blissful era of Jim Crow, lynching, and widespread institutional racism and sexism, a bygone era where Hitler got tongues a-wagging over in Germany and, as The Onion’s book Our Dumb Century reminds us, all America had to fear was fear itself, a crippling, interminable Depression, and the specter of Hitler and Stalin splitting up Europe into two kingdoms.
Of course, the ’30s were a time of innocence and escapism for Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers musicals. Astaire made a fortune selling upscale fantasies to people beaten down by the Depression. He had a vested interest in making sure the harsh light of reality didn’t invade the shimmering dreamworld of ’30s musicals.
Pennies From Heaven has a better critical reputation than most of the films I’ve written about here, but it still found a way to make just about everyone unhappy, especially the people behind the acclaimed British miniseries that inspired it. In a strange way, the American Pennies both usurped and was usurped by its British counterpart. The accolades that greeted the limey Pennies ensured that the American version would forever be considered inferior, but the corporate muscle of MGM kept the English miniseries from being seen in the States for a full decade.
Rabid fans of cult writer Dennis Potter—who wrote both the British and American versions of Pennies From Heaven—were infuriated that MGM’s remake took the original miniseries out of circulation until 1990 and that MGM didn’t ask original stars Bob Hoskins and Cheryl Campbell to reprise their roles. MGM was horrified that the film grossed only a fraction of its $22 million budget. The film’s three Oscar nominations must have provided little comfort. Pennies scored the Best Screenplay nomination that generally goes to challenging, innovative, and edgy films that the sleepy old dinosaurs who make up the Academy lack the testicular fortitude to festoon with nominations in higher-profile categories. True to form, Pennies lost to On Golden Pond.
Pennies bravely cast Steve Martin in his first dramatic role. Even more audaciously, it cast him as a largely unsympathetic character. We Americans treasure our delusions. The notion that you can doggedly pursue your dreams, follow your heart, believe in the transformative powers of music and love, and still end up in a hangman’s noose for a crime you didn’t commit seems downright unpatriotic. And we like our dreamers pure hearted and true, not sleazy, sordid, and ruled by sex and greed like Martin’s sad little schemer.
In a revelatory lead performance, Martin plays Arthur, a sheet-music salesman trapped in a loveless marriage with sour-faced scold Joan (Jessica Harper). To escape a barren home life and a career sputtering headlong into Nowheresville, Arthur frequently slips into fantasies where he lip-synchs to Tin Pan Alley ditties and cavorts his way through production numbers worthy of MGM’s legendary Freed Unit.
The plastic smiles and speed-fueled peppiness of dancers in old musicals have always struck me as strained and unnerving: They embody a painfully forced bonhomie that’s downright creepy. Pennies brilliantly exploits that blatantly artificial pep in disquieting ways. There’s similarly a haunting quality to the pop and crackle of ancient recordings where dead voices gather to espouse long-forgotten hopes and dreams. There’s a reason creepy old records playing at unexpected intervals are a horror-film staple.
While making his rounds one day, Arthur becomes fixated on sad-eyed schoolteacher Eileen, played by Bernadette Peters, whose rag-doll vulnerability has never been more poignant.
Arthur’s sexual fantasies are as tawdry and sad as the rest of his existence. He pressures a mortified Joan into putting lipstick on her nipples in a subplot as uncomfortably voyeuristic as anything in Todd Solondz’s oeuvre. But his most cherished sexual fantasy involves paying an elevator operator $20 to look the other way while he and a game little minx have semi-public sex. Pennies has the temerity to suggest that under the coy d
ouble entendres, moony romanticism, and sly one-liners in old songs lies an animal hunger for sex. Martin plays this to the hilt.
Pennies begins with Arthur in a state of despair that only intensifies as the movie progresses. He achieves his dream of opening a record store, then watches it die. Eileen becomes pregnant, gets an abortion, and sinks into prostitution at the behest of Christopher Walken’s tap-dancing pimp.
Walken’s striptease tap dance to “Let’s Misbehave” is rightfully acclaimed, but my favorite production number remains Vernel Bagneris’ devastating solo dance to the title song. In the “Pennies From Heaven” number, Bagneris’ accordion-playing murderer moves with otherworldly grace, his impossibly long limbs moving slowly and strangely, as if underwater. He begins the song amid the grim faces and permanent frowns of the dispirited rabble at a run-down diner before launching into a fantasy world where shimmering pennies rain down like gilded manna.
Pennies is fundamentally about the conflict between illusion and reality and the dual nature of escapism. Watching Astaire and Rogers glide around a ballroom for 90 minutes might help you forget your own troubles, but it also highlights the dispiriting chasm between the dreams Hollywood sells and the mundane lives of the moviegoers who buy them.
Arthur ends up getting framed for the accordion man’s murder of a blind girl. As the noose tightens around his neck, the contrast between song-and-dance numbers and his unbearable life grows smaller and smaller until he begins talk-singing “Pennies From Heaven” through tears, accompanied by a ghostly unseen banjo as he awaits death. Pennies plays up the tragic divide between the fantasy worlds of Hollywood musicals and the sobering realities of life among the working poor. Late in the film, Martin blurs that line completely by first singing along with Astaire’s celluloid image in a movie theater, then leaping boldly into the frame with Peters. I love musicals, but I also love Heaven’s merciless deconstruction of the genre. It gets under my skin and haunts my psyche anew with each viewing.