The TV Addict 

This weekend THE LOVE GURU, Mike Meyers’ return to live-action feature film, made a paltry $14 million at the box office, making it the second major flop of the summer after May’s SPEED RACER.

Generally I try to avoid judging a book by its cover (or a film by its trailer, rather), but THE LOVE GURU just looked awful in every possible way. Its humor looked it might only appeal to fourteen year olds who enjoy dick and fart jokes and recycled Mike Meyers material. In other words, it looked like the kind of film that was poised to make a lot of money. After all, we do live in a word where films like NORBIT open with $34 million, and most of those horrible spoof movies (MEET THE SPARTANS, SUPERHERO MOVIE) pull in around $20 million on their first weekends. It’s time likes these where it’s pretty hard to not somehow lose faith in moviegoing audiences sometimes, and wonder what the heck all those people were smoking.

Yet somehow THE LOVE GURU’s poor performance this weekend proved to me that there is a glimmer of hope out there. That maybe sometimes movies that look bad, and are bad, won’t find an audience and good taste prevails, and Hollywood gets a firm smack on the hand for producing rubbish in the process. Sure, you could maybe argue that there was too much fierce competition out there, what with high profile newcomer GET SMART, and strong holdovers THE INCREDIBLE HULK and KUNG FU PANDA, but I like to remain optimistic and think that people went to the theatres this weekend with their taste in the right place.

Then again, considering the huge amount of laughter the trailer for Eddie Murphy’s MEET DAVE got Friday night when I saw GET SMART, maybe I’m jumping the gun a bit with this whole hope thing.