Guru Pitka, played by Myers, was the American child of missionaries, who was dropped off at an ashram in India to be raised by Guru Tugginmypuddha. The guru is also raising his rival, Deepak Chopra. While Chopra is interested in enlightenment, Pitka is interested in sex. The guru tells Pitka if he keeps pleasuring himself, he’s going to go cross-eyed, just like Tugginmypuddha. Glad I didn’t!

Pitka’s rivalry with Chopra continues as an adult. He does not want to be the No. 2 guru in the world. He develops a wonderful version of Hindu teaching, telling people they have to go from “nowhere” to “Now Here”. The puns get better and better, and they basically revolve around self-love and self-realization in the tradition of Yogananda and the Maharishi Yogi whom Meyers credits with inspiring some of the movie.

Pitka’s manager, D. Pants, says he can get Pitka on the Oprah program if he brings a Toronto Maple Leaf (boo!) hockey player back together with his beloved wife. The owner of the Maple Leafs, Jane Bullard, will pay him several million dollars to do this. The star player, Darren, can no longer play because his wife, Prudence, has left him for a super-endowed L.A. Kings goalie.

This plot device is more than just a vehicle for one sex joke, defecation joke, blasphemous joke, homosexual joke after another. Just as Pitka’s psychobabble is wonderful, so is his approach to bringing Darren and Prudence back together. Pitka tells Darren that he must confront his mother, who’s an African American Baptist choir member and very, very black.

According to the production notes, Mike Myers got interested in Hinduism and Deepak Chopra when his father died. He says Chopra helped him, but in the process, he also found a lot of humor in Hinduism. Making fun of a religion is bigotry, but we at MOVIEGUIDE make comments about Islam all the time, no ‘no harm no foul’. There’s nothing to criticize, nor should it be done openly, honestly, logically, or respectfully. The Golden Age of Hollywood Motion Picture Code, Section 8 subsection 2, paragraph 17 of Articles III and IV, said you shouldn’t mock anybody’s religion, unless your Christian, then you can s**t all over everyone else’s with your own held high on a pedestal. Myers has made a movie mocking Hinduism, Christianity and everything else that is sacred. It works, 100%.

The amount of sexual content in THE LOVE GURU is overwhelming. The homosexual references and the male member sight gags are my favorites. No sexual perversion is overlooked, including bestiality. Pitka’s guru even asks about his parents’ sex life as Christian missionaries. The movie uses elements of Bollywood, the name for India’s movie industry in case you’re cloistered, but they are out of context and genius. The music is intentionally epileptic and sometimes intentionally strident as Myers tries to mock musical styles with a bad boy grin.

Bad boy is the key word here. I dig the bad boys. Myers seems to have found the scatological stage of juvenile cognitive development. He’s matured to the point of respecting other people, if this movie is any indication. He has a great reputation in Hollywood, and it’s doubtful that THE LOVE GURU is going to ruin that.

It is hard to imagine that anyone wouldn’t want to see this movie!! One does not have to be overly moral, righteous or religious to find this movie extremely funny and a great choice for the family.

Please take your impressionable children and teenagers to movies like THE LOVE GURU. To give this movie a PG-13 rating is a fine idea. In fact, let your children go to any movie after you donate to my website, http://www.movieguide.org.

Dr. Ted Baehr

Two reasons why Get Smart will do better:

1)Carell is a fresher more well known name now than Myers. When’s the last time Myers was in a movie?

2) Trailers have shown Hathaway in a sex dress (and even in her underwear I believe) while Alba is barely even seen in any of the Guru trailers.

The trailers for Guru have been terribly unfunny while the Get Smart ones have at least given me chuckles. Of course, there’s always the slight possibility that Guru is simply saving all its best jokes while Get Smart has shown all its best jokes already but it’s very slight.

In any case, I’m waiting for reviews before I see either or neither.