“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. 
