It’s been eight years since the atrocious Idle Hands introduced Jessica Alba to her "audience", and while I don’t have the numbers handy, I’m confident that they’ve bought more copies of her various appearances in GQ and Esquire and Maxim than actual tickets to her movies. If you want to sell a movie based solely on her sex appeal, the number you can bank on is $30 million – which is where Honey stalled in 2003. If you want to sell a movie based solely on her personality, well, you’ll have to find it first.
But if you just want her to fill the frame as eye candy (and memorize, at most, a few pages of dialogue a day), you’ll probably get a decent return on your investment. I’m guessing this will be the extent of her duties on Mike Myers’s The Love Guru, which marks the funnyman’s return to live action filmmaking after five years of dining out on that obnoxious scottish accent in a voiceover studio. Myers will play Pitka, an American lad who returns to his native country – after being raised in an Indian ashram! – to help reunite a star player for the Toronto Maple Leafs with his wayward wife, who’s hooking up with the star of a rival team (please be the Red Wings, and please be a ruggedly handsome Bob Probert!). Romany Malco, whom we love, has been cast as the jilted hockey stud. There but for the grace of Grant Fuhr…
Alba will play the owner of the Maple Leafs, which means she’ll either be a cast iron bitch like Margaret Whitton in Major League or a poorly cast Cameron Diaz in Any Given Sunday. I’ll let you make that call. Regardless, she’s the latest in the line of impossibly hot gals – Elizabeth Hurley, Heather Graham and Beyonce Knowles – who’ve been asked to do little more than stand next to Mike Myers and give guys boners. Speaking of tiny, bald, upright things, Myers has been nice enough to throw Verne Troyer some work in this movie (he’ll play the coach of the Maple Leafs; that’ll be such fun!). Paramount has already set a release date of June 20th, 2008.