"Two for The Love Guru, please!" Two for The Love Guru? What was I doing? The sun was shining for the first time since September. Did I really want to do this? "You sure you want to do that?" asked the girl in the ticket window. "I—no, I really couldn't be less happy about it, actually," I said. She handed my money back with a nod and a kind smile. Wow. That's never happened before. The movie theater—a place of business, a place whose only business is to accept American dollars in exchange for movie tickets—would rather spare me 87 minutes of mental anguish than accept my $18.50. We bought tickets anyway. "I'm sorry—no outside food or drink," said the teenager at the door, eyeing our Tully's cups. Then, "Oh, you guys are going to The Love Guru? You can keep it, then. You'll need the sustenance." Holy shit.

The Love Guru has been reviewed already, I know. It's been brilliantly panned by A. O. Scott ("an experience that makes you wonder if you will ever laugh again") and, at this paper, Annie Wagner ("[Mike] Myers has collected cameos like talismans against the vicious reception he must have known was coming"). Even the easy-to-pleasers on Rotten Tomatoes—you know, Steve from www.OopsIGotPopcorn DownMyUnderpants.net—fucking hated it.

But I had to go. I wasn't just going to sit this one out and miss the worst movie of the new millennium. "That's not just one of the worst movies ever made," my friend said as we slunk shamefacedly from the theater. "It's one of the worst things ever made."

I'm not sure what's going on right now—some rare celestial alignment of Bigotus Major and Alpha Retardi—but I keep running into people who are about 500 years behind on the racial/cultural/social dialogue. Last week I had to actually explain to someone—an adult human living in Seattle—why we don't have a "Straight Pride Parade." The next question, had we continued the conversation, would surely have involved "White History Month." Fuck it.

The Love Guru functions on that same level. Critics have complained a lot about how unfunny it is—and they're right, it's a gruesome failure as a comedy—but it's also astoundingly offensive. Instead of lampooning silly self-help gurus—banking on America's blind appetite for exotic Eastern wisdom—Myers ramps up the exoticism to unforeseen heights. And his Guru Pitka isn't a hack; he's a success. His magical Hindu acronyms really work. Also, he wears a headdress and man pasties under his flowing Indian robes—you know, like real Indian people do! What fucking year is it, Mike Myers?

I went home, wondering if Mike Myers had ever been funny, and sat down to watch Wayne's World. In the opening scene, while demonstrating the Suck-Kut, Garth yells, "It's sucking my will to live!" I know the feeling. recommended

lindy@thestranger.com