Knight at the Movies Archives
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Steve Carrel enlivens the big screen version of the 60s TV spy spoof, Mike Myers returns - with the dwarf and 5,000 more dick jokes
Director Peter Segal makes fair to middling comedies; amiable, by the numbers movies that offer audiences just enough laughs to
keep them afloat and stay in the mind as long as it takes to get from the megaplex to the parking garage. His previous pictures
have included The Longest Yard, 50 First Dates, Anger Management, Nutty Professor II: The Klumps, My Fellow Americans, Tommy Boy, and
Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult. If there is anything about his new movie Get Smart that will save it from the same mindless fate
as the rest of his blandly funny oeuvre, it’s the presence of Steve Carell in the title role of agent Maxwell Smart.
Carell has risen quickly to the front ranks of Hollywood funnymen in part because of his versatility. He is as likely to get laughs from
taking a pratfall as injecting comic irony into his line readings and he’s managed to wring laughs of even the thinnest material (Evan
Almighty being a prime example). Onscreen he has had two specialties: the nice guy nerd and the overbearing moron (a riff on his
character in the TV sitcom The Office). His nice guy personality, handsome but not too handsome good looks and nerdish
intelligence worked spectacularly well in The 40 Year Old Virgin, a movie so successful that it single handedly spawned its own genre
and his antics as the idiot weather man in Anchorman managed to steal every scene he was in. His Maxwell Smart is a combo of
these two Carell characters and he veers back and forth as Get Smart moves through its paces.
The movie is a big budget version of the Mel Brooks-Buck Henry 1960s secret agent parody TV sitcom in which the top secret
CONTROL battled the nefarious KAOS. Many of the jokes from the show (the shoe phone, the descending phone booth, the cone of
silence) are kept for the movie – some with a wink, some with a spin, many just as they were in 1965. In the film Carell’s Maxwell
Smart is a nit-picky researcher who only gets to become a secret agent by default when KAOS hits CONTROL headquarters leaving
the boss (Alan Arkin) with little choice. Anne Hathaway plays Agent 99, Smart’s much more competent female equivalent who isn’t
happy to be saddled with him. She’s given raccoon eye makeup and slinky outfits but lacks the luscious sexiness of the usual spy
sidekick (she’s no Mrs. Peel or Mrs. Kensington) and there’s zero chemistry between she and Carell either.
The movie’s real sex symbol is Dwayne Johnson (who no longer wishes to be addressed as The Rock by the by) as Agent 23 who
strides into headquarters with a confidence that is a turn on for both the women and the men. The ladies want to bed him; the men
want to emulate him. Johnson, who has slimmed down his wrestler’s oversized muscles for the role, looks great in his tailored suits
and shares the movie’s most memorable moment – a full on kiss with Carell. It’s not that the kiss itself is so surprising – this sight
gag between two “macho” guys has been used in movies and on TV over the last decade to the point of ad nauseam. It’s that
Segal doesn’t have the characters immediately afterwards have to use mouth wash or do something excessively manly (as in those
infamous commercials) that makes it refreshing and truly funny.
Nothing else in Get Smart delivers anything nearly as inventive. Oh, the scenes of modern day Russia are appealing, the standard
issue plot has moments of hilarity as noted, several of the supporting cast members deliver a titter here and there, but really, after
40 plus years of these movies isn’t it time to put the secret agent parody out to pasture – at least for awhile?
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Six years after the last installment of Mike Myers’ Austin Powers spy parody, the comedian best known for his larger than life
characters is back with another hoped for franchise. But Guru Pitka, the title character in The Love Guru and the world he inhabits
doesn’t have the instant familiarity and fun that Powers does and the Pitka character, though amusing in fits and starts, doesn’t
have a smidgen of the brazen, bumbling audacity of the shagadelic Austin, not to mention his likeability. Both the tissue thin
character and the movie as conceived are hardly sustainable beyond an SNL sketch which makes for the 90 minute running time of
The Love Guru seem almost as interminable as one of those Deepak Chopra sanctimonious self-help tapes. And note to Myers:
dump the dwarf. The funny in that tired bit has long since evaporated.
Things start out somewhat promisingly as we are introduced to Myers as the bearded, slightly cross-eyed Guru Pitka who is closely
attended to by his supplicants as he sits on his silken pillows in his luxurious, California-based ashram. Pitka is the author of a
batch of self-help tomes with tongue-in-cheek titles, who greets his many followers with what has already become the film’s catch
phrase, “Mariska Hargitary. Mariska Hargitay” and dispenses his quasi-feel good claptrap to them during his lectures. His renown is
vast but still hasn’t secured him a spot on the Oprah Winfrey show (unlike his mentor, the aforementioned Chopra). We see in a
cute but too long flashback that Chopra has been Pitka’s lifelong competitor. Both have vied for the attention of Ben Kingsley as a
cross-eyed Guru. Kingsley who is given the groan inducing name “Guru Tugginmypudha” is horribly unfunny – a performance not far
from Mickey Rooney’s Japanese impersonation in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. With each subsequent scene Kingsley almost single
handedly sinks the movie into the Ganges.
The plot, such as it is, comes into play when Pitka's manager fields an offer from Jane Bullard, the comely manager (Jessica Alba) of
a Canadian hockey team to reunite its star player Darren Roanoke (Romany Malco) with his soon to be ex-wife. The manager
assures Pitka that if he's successful in reuniting the former lovebirds the ensuing publicity is tailor-made to get him on Oprah’s
show. The Love Guru arrives in Canada to try and reconnect Mr. and Mrs. and then begins to court the supposedly unlovable Jane
who fans blame for Darren’s sudden unsteadiness with the hockey stick.
Darren’s unsteadiness has actually been caused by his wife taking up with Jacques Grande (Justin Timberlake), her husband’s
biggest nemesis, the star player for a competing hockey team. Jacques, we are verbally shown and told repeatedly, is the proud
owner of a male member of such enormous proportions that it would have porn star Long Dong Silver panting. That’s just one of
many, many (there seem to be 5,000) verbal and visual dick jokes the movie springs in your face (oy – now I’m doing it). So many
that after awhile the comedy, already flaccid, becomes the equivalent of one of those boring size queens one encounters by accident
at the local gay watering hole - and just as quickly runs away from.
The Love Guru kept reminding me of the bad parts of the so-so Mel Brooks movies like High Anxiety – where you sit through one
wilted joke after another patiently waiting for some comedic gold that up to a point Brooks could be counted on to deliver. On
occasion there are moments in The Love Guru of hilarity and Myers is responsible for most of these but the good will and laughs that
he engenders with these bits – the brief Bollywood parody, the “9 to 5” song, miscellaneous sight gags and lines – disappears as
soon as the next bit of excessive toilet humor or one of those 5,000 dick jokes arrives. The gay subtext piles up so high in The Love
Guru and is so overwhelming it almost screams “closet case!” Is that the subliminal message that Myers is trying to send out to the
world? If so this big ole queen heard it loud and clear and has this response: come on out Mike, the air is fine. Get that defining
moment out of the way and then get back to doing what you do best – creating iconic comic characters. We need your pixilated
brain, your insane humor, not this tired, hit-n-miss stuff. We’ll just let this little blip on your personal movie radar screen go. No
questions asked. No need to talk about it again. We'll move forward together.
keep them afloat and stay in the mind as long as it takes to get from the megaplex to the parking garage. His previous pictures
have included The Longest Yard, 50 First Dates, Anger Management, Nutty Professor II: The Klumps, My Fellow Americans, Tommy Boy, and
Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult. If there is anything about his new movie Get Smart that will save it from the same mindless fate
as the rest of his blandly funny oeuvre, it’s the presence of Steve Carell in the title role of agent Maxwell Smart.
Carell has risen quickly to the front ranks of Hollywood funnymen in part because of his versatility. He is as likely to get laughs from
taking a pratfall as injecting comic irony into his line readings and he’s managed to wring laughs of even the thinnest material (Evan
Almighty being a prime example). Onscreen he has had two specialties: the nice guy nerd and the overbearing moron (a riff on his
character in the TV sitcom The Office). His nice guy personality, handsome but not too handsome good looks and nerdish
intelligence worked spectacularly well in The 40 Year Old Virgin, a movie so successful that it single handedly spawned its own genre
and his antics as the idiot weather man in Anchorman managed to steal every scene he was in. His Maxwell Smart is a combo of
these two Carell characters and he veers back and forth as Get Smart moves through its paces.
The movie is a big budget version of the Mel Brooks-Buck Henry 1960s secret agent parody TV sitcom in which the top secret
CONTROL battled the nefarious KAOS. Many of the jokes from the show (the shoe phone, the descending phone booth, the cone of
silence) are kept for the movie – some with a wink, some with a spin, many just as they were in 1965. In the film Carell’s Maxwell
Smart is a nit-picky researcher who only gets to become a secret agent by default when KAOS hits CONTROL headquarters leaving
the boss (Alan Arkin) with little choice. Anne Hathaway plays Agent 99, Smart’s much more competent female equivalent who isn’t
happy to be saddled with him. She’s given raccoon eye makeup and slinky outfits but lacks the luscious sexiness of the usual spy
sidekick (she’s no Mrs. Peel or Mrs. Kensington) and there’s zero chemistry between she and Carell either.
The movie’s real sex symbol is Dwayne Johnson (who no longer wishes to be addressed as The Rock by the by) as Agent 23 who
strides into headquarters with a confidence that is a turn on for both the women and the men. The ladies want to bed him; the men
want to emulate him. Johnson, who has slimmed down his wrestler’s oversized muscles for the role, looks great in his tailored suits
and shares the movie’s most memorable moment – a full on kiss with Carell. It’s not that the kiss itself is so surprising – this sight
gag between two “macho” guys has been used in movies and on TV over the last decade to the point of ad nauseam. It’s that
Segal doesn’t have the characters immediately afterwards have to use mouth wash or do something excessively manly (as in those
infamous commercials) that makes it refreshing and truly funny.
Nothing else in Get Smart delivers anything nearly as inventive. Oh, the scenes of modern day Russia are appealing, the standard
issue plot has moments of hilarity as noted, several of the supporting cast members deliver a titter here and there, but really, after
40 plus years of these movies isn’t it time to put the secret agent parody out to pasture – at least for awhile?
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Six years after the last installment of Mike Myers’ Austin Powers spy parody, the comedian best known for his larger than life
characters is back with another hoped for franchise. But Guru Pitka, the title character in The Love Guru and the world he inhabits
doesn’t have the instant familiarity and fun that Powers does and the Pitka character, though amusing in fits and starts, doesn’t
have a smidgen of the brazen, bumbling audacity of the shagadelic Austin, not to mention his likeability. Both the tissue thin
character and the movie as conceived are hardly sustainable beyond an SNL sketch which makes for the 90 minute running time of
The Love Guru seem almost as interminable as one of those Deepak Chopra sanctimonious self-help tapes. And note to Myers:
dump the dwarf. The funny in that tired bit has long since evaporated.
Things start out somewhat promisingly as we are introduced to Myers as the bearded, slightly cross-eyed Guru Pitka who is closely
attended to by his supplicants as he sits on his silken pillows in his luxurious, California-based ashram. Pitka is the author of a
batch of self-help tomes with tongue-in-cheek titles, who greets his many followers with what has already become the film’s catch
phrase, “Mariska Hargitary. Mariska Hargitay” and dispenses his quasi-feel good claptrap to them during his lectures. His renown is
vast but still hasn’t secured him a spot on the Oprah Winfrey show (unlike his mentor, the aforementioned Chopra). We see in a
cute but too long flashback that Chopra has been Pitka’s lifelong competitor. Both have vied for the attention of Ben Kingsley as a
cross-eyed Guru. Kingsley who is given the groan inducing name “Guru Tugginmypudha” is horribly unfunny – a performance not far
from Mickey Rooney’s Japanese impersonation in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. With each subsequent scene Kingsley almost single
handedly sinks the movie into the Ganges.
The plot, such as it is, comes into play when Pitka's manager fields an offer from Jane Bullard, the comely manager (Jessica Alba) of
a Canadian hockey team to reunite its star player Darren Roanoke (Romany Malco) with his soon to be ex-wife. The manager
assures Pitka that if he's successful in reuniting the former lovebirds the ensuing publicity is tailor-made to get him on Oprah’s
show. The Love Guru arrives in Canada to try and reconnect Mr. and Mrs. and then begins to court the supposedly unlovable Jane
who fans blame for Darren’s sudden unsteadiness with the hockey stick.
Darren’s unsteadiness has actually been caused by his wife taking up with Jacques Grande (Justin Timberlake), her husband’s
biggest nemesis, the star player for a competing hockey team. Jacques, we are verbally shown and told repeatedly, is the proud
owner of a male member of such enormous proportions that it would have porn star Long Dong Silver panting. That’s just one of
many, many (there seem to be 5,000) verbal and visual dick jokes the movie springs in your face (oy – now I’m doing it). So many
that after awhile the comedy, already flaccid, becomes the equivalent of one of those boring size queens one encounters by accident
at the local gay watering hole - and just as quickly runs away from.
The Love Guru kept reminding me of the bad parts of the so-so Mel Brooks movies like High Anxiety – where you sit through one
wilted joke after another patiently waiting for some comedic gold that up to a point Brooks could be counted on to deliver. On
occasion there are moments in The Love Guru of hilarity and Myers is responsible for most of these but the good will and laughs that
he engenders with these bits – the brief Bollywood parody, the “9 to 5” song, miscellaneous sight gags and lines – disappears as
soon as the next bit of excessive toilet humor or one of those 5,000 dick jokes arrives. The gay subtext piles up so high in The Love
Guru and is so overwhelming it almost screams “closet case!” Is that the subliminal message that Myers is trying to send out to the
world? If so this big ole queen heard it loud and clear and has this response: come on out Mike, the air is fine. Get that defining
moment out of the way and then get back to doing what you do best – creating iconic comic characters. We need your pixilated
brain, your insane humor, not this tired, hit-n-miss stuff. We’ll just let this little blip on your personal movie radar screen go. No
questions asked. No need to talk about it again. We'll move forward together.
Dumb & Dumber:
Get Smart-The Love Guru
6-18-08 Windy City Times Knight at the Movies Column*
By Richard Knight, Jr.
Get Smart-The Love Guru
6-18-08 Windy City Times Knight at the Movies Column*
By Richard Knight, Jr.
*The Strangers screened after my column deadline but in time for me to include it here
*The Strangers screened after my column deadline but in time for me to include it here
*The Love Guru screened after my column deadline but in time for me to include it here