The “ultimate” 1964 movie Mike Myers called a “once in every five generations masterpiece”
There’s something almost cruel about Mike Myers using the movie that single-handedly murdered his mainstream career as a way to speak about the greatest movie ever made, but he did, and he has to live with the consequences of that crushing irony.
It’s not his favourite film of all time, though, an honour that instead falls to François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, which you may not have expected from the man who introduced the word “schwing” into the cultural lexicon and dressed up as an obese Scotsman to urge a miniature clone to get in his belly.
Of course, looks can be deceiving, with the Saturday Night Live veteran, sketch comedy extraordinaire, man of a thousand faces, and quip-happy comedian having always viewed himself as a cinephile first and foremost. He made The Pentaverate for Netflix, and it was rubbish, but at the beginning of his career, he fancied himself as Canada’s very own John Cassavetes.
Knowing that he made Wayne’s World, So I Married an Axe Murderer, the Austin Powers trilogy, and a handful of Shrek films instead, that seems ridiculous now, especially when Myers’ only forays into serious, straight-faced acting couldn’t have gone much worse, although Disney was at least to blame for one of them.
Whenever an actor with a soft spot for physical comedy contorts their face into inexplicable expressions, plays multiple characters in the same picture, or disguises themselves under makeup and prosthetics, you don’t need to be told that Peter Sellers is one of their paramount influences. And yet, Myers, Eddie Murphy, Sacha Baron Cohen, and Robin Williams have all done it anyway.
After The Love Guru was burned at the stake by critics, shunned by audiences, and celebrated by the Razzies, Myers retreated into semi-obscurity. He won a ‘Worst Actor’ Razzie for disgracing himself as Maurice Pitka, but before the film was released in the summer of 2008, he was touting his incoming vehicle as dealing with themes of “dialectical materialism” and “mutually assured destruction,” heavy stuff for a steaming turd of a movie.
To that end, he almost laughably invoked the name of a Stanley Kubrick classic. “If you were to think of a movie that more frightens you about the concept of mutually assured destruction, I think you would go with Strangelove, which is a very silly face to tell,” he explained, before immediately reassuring the world that he wouldn’t dare try to mention the fucking Love Guru in the same breath.
“Now, nothing I have done has touched the hem of the garment of Strangelove, and I don’t think anything ever will,” he noted. “I think that’s a one in every five generations masterpiece. But a person can aspire, and in terms of aspiring to something, Strangelove would be the ultimate movie for me. It’s the ultimate piece of entertainment that has one of the deepest messages ever.”
He’s right; nothing he’s ever done has come remotely close to Dr Strangelove, and definitely not The Love Guru. On the other hand, Myers isn’t wrong in calling Kubrick’s seminal farce a generational masterpiece, and it’s one that only a brave filmmaker would even try to emulate. Mentioning them in the same breath, however tangential it may have been, is still stupid, right enough.
