The Slap-stick Swami

Rating: 7/10 (9 November 2013)

I found this movie to be crude, but interesting. Mike Myers didn't exactly reach the same level of cultural achievement as George Harrison here, but still there was some interesting work on cultural stereotypes.
Basically it's a story of a white swami (Mike Myers) who helps a black hockey player (The 40-Year-Old-Virgin's Romany Malco) get his baby back. So in a way it's one of those white-guy-hangs-out-with-black-guy flicks, with the added layer that both of them have, I guess you could say, racially unstereotypical roles.
Actually the theme of breaking social barriers is something of a theme of the film. (And obviously this is also done by the rather cheap jokes, but I suppose you could look at that as the attempt to sell the unpopular.) Justin Timberlake plays the French Canadian hockey player who steals the black guy's wife, creating a sideplot of an interracial relationship. The love guru himself is a white American inheritor of thousands of years of Indian tradition. Possibly even more different, is that a black gentleman becomes a student of these Indian teachings.
To do this, he must confront his past, in the form of his mother, who is a very strident woman active in the black church (with his non-black non-Christian friend in tow). And then, to process this encounter, the pair repair back to a bar (where the hockey player, oddly enough, is the only non-white). More examples of this sort of playing with stereotypes could be multiplied, since it's essentially what the movie's about. In fact, I might guess at if it's relative lack of popularity might have something to do with the sense that it's not always very positive in its portrayal of the average hockey fan....
Of course, the film's budget made the inclusion of a Beatles song out of the question, but it is interesting that they named the wife Prudence, which for me, at least, brings to mind the song "Dear Prudence", which John Lennon wrote while the band was visiting an ashram in India.
But of course all that doesn't make the film a *good* picture. The constant reaching for cheap laughs marks it as a film meant simply for laughing, perhaps, rather than a really insightful picture of daily life, which many comedies are. But it also doesn't deserve the sort of heartless vitriol which some comedies so easily attract to themselves from the perhaps pompous sort. It deserves to be seen as a movie with *some* merit.
(7/10)