Daily Archives: June 20, 2008

Steve Conrad Talks Chad Schmidt, Brad Pitt

Interviews

I had a chance to chat with Steve Conrad, the writer-director of The Promotion, recently, and ask about Chad Schmidt, his long-gestating, zonked-sounding script about an actor who moves to Los Angeles in 1989 and, over the next 16 to 24 months, finds his career burnished but mostly stymied by the fact that he looks like Brad Pitt.

“I said I wanted to do a movie like Straight Time now, but I feel like I can’t just do it. I just feel like there’s a more invitational way to make that movie,” recalls Conrad, the writer of The Weather Man and The Pursuit of Happyness, of the project’s genesis. “So I thought long and hard and I came up with this concept making a comment about faith, which I’m really preoccupied by — how little we actually control and choose, and how difficult it is to just put one foot in front of the other some days. And so I had to get Brad Pitt to sign off on it, because it wouldn’t be worth my time to write if he weren’t up for it. So he’s up for it, spiritually, and I know that he’s starting to talk about directors now, to start to talk about making the actual movie. So I feel like we’ve slipped into a groove on it.”

Conrad is a credited producer on project, and laughs about rumors that it’s started filming, guerrilla-style. But would he like a chance to take a crack at it as director, now that he’s whet his behind-camera appetite with The Promotion? “Oh, I absolutely do have interest,” says Conrad. “I don’t know if he has an interest in me. Brad doesn’t know I’ve even made this movie, but I’m trying to get him to come see it.”

“I probably shouldn’t tell you,” Conrad continues, “but I think I’m going to put that script online, because people ask me about it all the time. There’s just something about the idea that people want to lean into. I don’t think there’s any harm in reading the script, do you? Why can’t it be like a book? People don’t not see a movie because they read the book — no one said, ‘I don’t wanna see Harry Potter because I read it already.’ Why would they not go see the movie if they read the script?” Here Conrad pauses, thoughtfully. “I’m going to ask (Sony) if I can do that.” Another beat. “They’ll say no, though,” he says, somewhat with the resignation of an academic who knows he’s about to lose a bureaucratic argument.

The Love Guru

Film Reviews

Not counting some assorted supporting players in the Austin Powers films, it’s been more than a decade since Mike Myers has debuted an original character on the big screen, which he does in The Love Guru with a rascally self-help guru who actually needs to learn to love himself. Eschewing what could have a more interesting and provocative treatment of the same concept, the film instead trades in Myers’ favored trademark steady diet of scatological humor, outlandish asides and laboriously constructed sexual double entendres. Laughs are intermittent but detached from any sense of a cohesive whole, and the sum product makes a persuasive case that manic relentlessness is not by itself a film virtue.



An American who was left at the gates of an ashram in India as a child, Myers’ Pitka was raised alongside Deepak Chopra — with whom he still has a rivalry — and mentored by Guru Tugginmypudha (Ben Kingsley). Now the head of a successful self-help and spirituality empire that spins simple truths from all sorts of trademarked acronyms and tweaked bromides, Pitka’s unorthodox methods are put to the test when he’s hired to settle a rift between Toronto Maple Leafs star hockey player Darren Roanoke (Romany Malco) and his estranged wife (Meagan Good). Out of revenge, Roanoke’s wife has started dating L.A. Kings star goalie Jacques “Le Coc” Grande (Justin Timberlake), sending her husband into a major professional skid.

With the two teams squaring off in the Stanley Cup championship, Maple Leafs owner Jane Bullard (Jessica Alba) and Coach Cherkov (Verne Troyer) look to Pitka to get Roanoke back on his game, so the team can win. Pitka, meanwhile, nurses a crush on Jane, believing that she can unlock the chastity belt with which he’s been saddled since youth.

Some of The Love Guru‘s haphazard gags (a voiceover machine with a Morgan Freeman setting; the repeated, blessed invocation of Mariska Hargitay, which invites a cameo by the actress of the same name) are inspired, even if a bit industry-specific. Myers, dropping his voice register to a honey-dipped professorial tone that spikes when he’s stricken with devilish delight, is as invested as ever in character, and one sees in Pitka much possibility with regards to a new franchise.

The Love Guru‘s chief problems are twofold. The first lies in tone, and narrative direction. The coexistence of highbrow and lowbrow is always a tough marriage, but if attempted, the former tone has to take a background position of subjugation, or jostle for attention in the form of a contrasting character who cluckingly disapproves of the unevolved events swirling all around him. Pitka, though, seems to embody both highbrow and lowbrow, but only based on what’s convenient for a given scene. This leads one to question his sincerity, and the movie’s veracity, even within its own parameters of heightened absurdity. Not rooted in character, much of the film’s scatological humor feels like not particularly clever attempts at shoring up tween audience support.

The second problem is more specifically related to Myers’ portrayal. Debut director Marco Schnabel certainly keeps things moving at a brisk pace, and has a visual conception for the story, but there’s no honest check on Myers’ hammy instincts, which drain a good bit of pop and surprise from many of the lines. Less mugging for effect would have certainly bred a stronger attachment to the story, and a more natural appreciation of the jokes.

In supporting turns, a zonked Stephen Colbert and straight man Jim Gaffigan breathe some life into their roles as sportscasters calling the hockey action. Singer-actor Timberlake has fun playing big, meanwhile, in more ways than one (his character is legendarily well endowed, you see) and Malco (The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Baby Mama) continues to display fine comedic timing and plenty of charisma to burn. (Paramount, PG-13, 86 minutes)