A number of Hindu influential people are a bit incensed over a crazy little thing known as The Love Guru.

The Mike Myers comedy, scheduled to premiere in June, as early as now has irked some religious and cultural leaders, calling the movie “foul”. Some of Hindu leaders are expressing distress, supported by the trailer and promotions already released; that the film will unjustly play into typecasts and potentially deride their values.

“The movie appeared to be lampooning Hinduism and Hindus and using Hindu terms frivolously,” Rajan Zed, president of the Nevada-based Universal Society of Hinduism, told India’s Hindustan Times.

The Hindu group Shri Ramayan Pracharini Sabha issued a statement saying “that portrayal of Hindu characters like buffoons is not acceptable.”

Zed has said the movie will direct unenlightened viewers to deem “most of us are like that.”

What that means: a long-haired, facial hair crazy, caftan-clad, sitar-strumming guru played, more than always as expected, to larger-than-life comic effect by Myers.

In the movie, Myers role, Guru Pitka, is not specified a detailed religion but rather an incorporation of a variety of Eastern religions. On Love Guru’s MySpace page, he addresses himself as “his holiness…a spiritual teacher with no one faith.” He has a fondness for yoga and his hymn is “Mariska Hargitay.”

Paramount Pictures, the film’s studio advises that it is working to dispel the qualms of Hindu leaders. A studio publicist says Love Guru will be filtered for Zed and others, as soon as the movie is finished.

Paramount Pictures also advises that they made note that the film was hardly intended to be in use as a documentary, dubbing it a “nondenominational comedy” and “a satire created in the same spirit as Austin Powers.”

In the film, Guru Pitka, “the second best guru in India,” is presented $2 million to go West to nurse back to health a star hockey player’s broken heart so he can get back to the game and win his team the Stanley Cup.

Jessica Alba, Verne Troyer, Justin Timberlake, Deepak Chopra and Ben Kingsley topbills the movie.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008 at 1:09 am and is filed under Entertainment, movies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.