Review – The Guru

This is a romantic comedy that works best when it isn’t trying to be a romantic comedy. The story is fairly simple: a young man (Jimi Mistry) comes to America from India seeking to become a famous actor. Through a series of misadventures he meets a rich woman (Marisa Tomei) who thinks he’s a guru and helps him promote himself as an expert in sexual healing. In the meantime, our hero falls in love with a porn actress (Heather Graham) from whom he gets all his “wisdom.” All that could have been made into a fairly terrible movie. What saves this production are the small moments of genuine humor that as often as not don’t have any direct relationship with the main plot. In particular the movie features several “Bollywood Shuffle” jokes about the ethnic stereotyping of Indian immigrants that’s still all too common in our society. The movie also does well when it employs absurd touches here and there, such as the dream sequence in which the actors are transformed into the cast of one of those bizarre Indian musicals, only they end up performing “You’re the One that I Want” from Grease. If only they’d done more of that sort of thing and less of the standard sitcom fare. Mildly amusing