Well, true to form, Mick laSalle hated Get Smart, but said Love Guru isn't half-bad -- the exact opposite of the critical consensus. Guru looks (from the commercials) like one of the un-funniest moves ever. Verne Troyer getting hit in the face with a hockey puck -- oh yeah, *that's* comedy! "dreary dick jokes and elephant poop" was one critic's description.
Just came from seeing Get Smart -- it doesn't suck. Coulda been shorter (at a tight 85 mins instead of 110, it might've killed) but it has its moments.
Meanwhile, TCM is giving us a disco-cheese double bill tonite: Roller Boogie, which I saw a few years back at the Castro with Xanadu, and the little-seen cult fave The Apple, which I've never seen.
Please let me know what you think of The Apple! I barely know anyone else who's seen it. Among its attributes are the greatest deus ex machina ever.
Well, I didn't make it to the end (watched the first hour) so I missed the deus ex machina, but since the bad guy is literally the Devil, I can only imagine. I found it pretty deadly -- the songs are quite awful. I'm not big on camp to begin with; sometimes bad is bad, as Huey Lewis once sang. And so things like
Xanadu and
Can't Stop the Music are just terrible, IMHO, with no redeeming value.
The Apple isn't quite in their league; this one seemed to have a budget and a concept at least (if not a terribly original one). Pretty bad acting, mostly. Catherine Mary Stewart's first film, I'm guessing; she made quite a few in the '80s, like
The Last Starfighter. I *HIGHLY* recommend getting hold of
Privilege, a 1967 British film about a future Fascist gov't in the UK that controls the populace thru pop music. Shot in documentary style, long before that became a standard/cliche method. Paul Jones (former lead singer of Manfred Mann) and Jean Shrimpton (the model) play the leads. Great stuff.
ETA: great comment on IMDB about
The Apple: "The varied use of MYLAR throughout the movie never ceased to amaze me!"
