A Year of Garbage Movies #75, “The Love Guru” (2008)
The world’s longest balls/penis joke is approximately an hour and twenty minutes long, and delivered courtesy of Mike Myers.
For the past decade, I’ve heard nothing but terrible things about “The Love Guru”, so expectations were set. I knew that this would not be like “The Cat in the Hat”, where I would be pleasantly surprised by the mediocrity of the film rather than considering faking my own death and starting over like I usually do with these movies. So after making sure my bug-out bag was well stocked with monocles and fake mustaches, I settled in for the ride.
The only good thing I can say about this movie is that it wasn’t worse than I expected it to be. That and it has a surprisingly sick sitar rendition of “The Joker” by the Steve Miller Band.
Within the first 5 minutes we are graced with the visual of Mike Myers literally shoving his head up his own ass. I repeat, this is not a metaphor. Unfortunately the inspiration for his Guru character seems to have come from a racist cartoon of an Indian person found sketched on the wall of a Fuddrucker’s restroom.
The opening line isn’t really an exaggeration either. Nearly every joke is somehow related to dicks, and drags on far longer than comedic timing, good taste or even simple financial interest would seem to warrant. Perhaps it’s a form of meta-joke, given that a key plot point is the size of one character’s (Justin Timberlake) package, and the length of the joke adds an extra dimension — actually no I won’t give them the benefit of the doubt on this one, they just got lazy. Maybe it’s secretly a blessing that all of the crude visual gags and wang-based puns drag on for so long, because Myers insists on punctuating each one with camera mugging and an obnoxious giggle, just in case you missed the genitalia references and needed to know when to laugh or, more appropriately, turn off the movie and take a breather.

I thought that we had returned to our normal velocity with the garbage dump that was “2001: A Space Travesty” but little did I realize how logarithmic the decline in quality would be. I’m still optimistic that I can power through the rest of these by the end of the year, however, provided that I somehow go deaf and blind in the interim.
Pros:
- Appearances from Steven Colbert as a drug-addicted hockey commentator and John Oliver during his Beatle-phase.
- After this movie Myers seemed to have gotten the message and stopped writing and producing movies.
Cons:
- Mike Myers’ hyena laugh will haunt my dreams until my dying day
- Other awful things I had to endure for this movie:
- Mike Myers shirtless and wearing pasties
- Mike Myers getting slapped in the face, open-mouthed, with a urine-soaked mop
- Mike Myers bottomless in a chastity belt
- Justin Timberlake wearing stuffed briefs
- Elephant humping
- A prolonged scene in a bar with Mike Myers holding a cup in front of his mouth and making diarrhea noises
- Did I mention the awful laugh?
