Critics say that “The Love Guru,” Mike Myers’ asinine riff on new age spiritualism, is so bad and so soul-sucking that it’s hard to even describe how awful a movie-going experience it is. Reviewers at The NY Times, Slate, and other outlets say they’re at a loss to explain how truly awful it is and how uncomfortable, angry and depressed they were after sitting through it. While Austin Powers was arguably funny, Myers’ first film in 5 years just falls flat, digs a hole, craps in it, and expects you to think it’s funny.

Slate: “the most joy-draining 88 minutes I’ve ever spent outside a hospital waiting room”

There are good movies. There are bad movies. There are movies so bad they’re good (though, strangely, not the reverse). And once in a while there is a movie so bad that it takes you to a place beyond good and evil and abandons you there, shivering and alone. Watching The Love Guru (Paramount Pictures) is a spiritual experience of a sort, but not the sort that its creator and star, Mike Myers, intended. This tale of a guru who brings joy to all who meet him is the most joy-draining 88 minutes I’ve ever spent outside a hospital waiting room. In the course of those long minutes, Myers leads you on a journey deep inside himself, to the source from whence his comedy springs—and it’s about as much fun as a tour of someone’s large intestine.

[From Slate]

NY Times: it will “make you wonder if you will ever laugh again”

Which might sum up “The Love Guru” in its entirety but only at the risk of grievously understating the movie’s awfulness. A whole new vocabulary seems to be required. To say that the movie is not funny is merely to affirm the obvious. The word “unfunny” surely applies to Mr. Myers’s obnoxious attempts to find mirth in physical and cultural differences but does not quite capture the strenuous unpleasantness of his performance. No, “The Love Guru” is downright antifunny, an experience that makes you wonder if you will ever laugh again.

[From The NY Times]

Video Hound: “the kind of cultural and comedic offense that audiences should demand retribution after seeing.”

Someone needs to be punished. The Love Guru isn’t just your average bad movie. Smoothly limbo-ing below already low expectations, this “alleged” comedy is the kind of cultural and comedic offense that audiences should demand retribution after seeing. And just giving them back their money won’t do. Mike Myers and Jessica Alba are the main cinematic war criminals in question here, but they’ll probably get away with this disaster and move on unscathed to commit more comedic terrorism. Justin Timberlake is bulletproof, but poor Romany Malco and Meagan Good should be worried. Of course, they’re not to blame. Every single flaw of The Love Guru falls at the feet of the once-talented, but clearly now completely delusional, Mike Myers. This week’s Entertainment Weekly contains a shockingly harsh article about Myers that inspired me to think that he must have been a total prick when the mag interviewed him back in April. Why else would they run such a negative piece about a movie the week of its release? Now I know. They saw the movie and, like me, they’re angry.

[From Video Hound]

Chicago Sun Times, Roger Ebert: “a dreary experience”

Myers has made some funny movies, but this film could have been written on toilet walls by callow adolescents. Every reference to a human sex organ or process of defecation is not automatically funny simply because it is naughty, but Myers seems to labor under that delusion. He acts as if he’s getting away with something, but in fact all he’s getting away with is selling tickets to a dreary experience.

[From Chicago Sun Times]

There’s one character who is getting praise - critics say Justin Timberlake’s cameo as a French Canadian hockey player is pretty funny, but in no way worth sitting through even ten minutes more of the movie.

The Love Guru is up against Get Smart for opening weekend winner at the box office. Love Guru currently has a 15% aggregate critic’s rating on Rotten Tomatoes while Get Smart, with Steve Carrell and Anne Hathaway, has a more respectable 52%. Neither is a great film, but one is clearly more awful.

Stills below are from The Love Guru thanks to All Movie Photo. Thanks to The Huffington Post for the idea for this article.

Here are the trailers for The Love Guru and Get Smart

Love Guru

Get Smart

The first review for the Sex and The City movie is out, and without revealing any spoilers, journalist Will Pavia of the Times Online says he doesn’t get what the hype is all about and that it’s just like the series, except it’s 2 hours and 20 minutes of it. The guy admits that the women in the theater were hooping and hollering, though, and ate up every scene. Despite his reservations, it sounds like it’s going to be a hit:

There may be a problem with characters who shop with such conviction while the audience looks up from the trough of a credit crunch.

There may be a problem with stretching Sex and the City into a two hour and twenty minute film - it can feel like a never ending dinner party: however pleasant the courses, after a while you can hardly eat another one.

None of these problems seemed apparent to the women who sat around me in the cinema in Leicester Square, laughing and weeping in quick succession. After a while I began to reason like one of the characters: maybe the problem was me.

[From Times Online via We Smirch]

The London Times should have sent a woman there, because middle aged guys are not the ones who are going to see this film unless they’re in trouble with their wives/girlfriends/older daughters and need to put in some chick flick time to make amends.

If the audience was crying and screaming, it must have been pretty good. It takes more than star power and a premiere to impress a theater full of moviegoers. And what did this guy expect, something completely different from the series? People want more of Carrie and the gang, and it seems like it really delivers. We’ll have to see what the rest of the reviewers say. I bet it gets at least a 75% on Rotten Tomatoes once it’s out in the states. What matters more is the box office, though, and this film is probably going to clean up.

Here are stills from the film and posters, thanks to AllMoviePhoto, which may have mild spoilers.

After his mother died, Kanye West seemed to have changed. There seemed to be an air of humility around him, and a newfound respect for people. Somehow the mountain of arrogance seemed to have abated a bit, which could only be a good thing. But it appears that whatever bit of dignity and self-restraint visited Kanye was only stopping by for the weekend, as he’s very much back to his conceited, egotistical rantings.

Entertainment Weekly reviewed Kanye’s Glow in the Dark tour on Friday, giving it a B+. And Entertainment Weekly can be pretty stingy with its reviews – a B+ is something to be pretty happy about. And if nothing else, it’s best to have some grace and manners about the whole thing, no? But those are two words that have never crossed Kanye West’s lips. Here’s a few highlights from the review:

For his headlining chunk of the Glow in the Dark Tour, Kanye West also takes fans on a galactic voyage, folding his hits into a wacked-out space opera that’s the ultimate ego trip. Normally, that’d be an insult, but with West, who’s made an art form out of dramatizing both humility and hubris, it’s mission accomplished…

…Okay, so he’s a nut. Still, West’s commitment to communicating inner passions and identity crises is so consuming it nearly redeems any conceptual hokeyness. Eschewing hip-hop’s buddy system, West is his stage’s sole visible human, and he’s become a riveting soliloquist. Crouching on one knee, broken up, during ”Hey Mama” — or pacing like a prizefighter during every other number — he gets you caught up in his journey to the center of the id and pulls off something rare: an intimate spectacle.

[From Entertainment Weekly]

Now keep in mind that by most accounts, Kanye’s show is a massive ego trip and has a good deal of cheese to it. A spaceship named Jane talks to him and ”We need the brightest star in the universe — you, Kanye! Only you can bring us home. You can glow in the dark!” Supposedly the show is so good that you can overlook the occasional cheese though. It seems like the writer gave Kanye a pretty good review, considering most of us can’t look past the ego that he forces in our faces. Yet here was how Kanye chose to respond on his blog at KanyeUniverCity.

Yo, anybody that’s not a fan; don’t come to my show. For what?! To try and throw ya’ll two cents in? Ya’ll rated my album shitty and now ya’ll come to the show and give it a B+. What’s a B+ mean? I’m an extremist. It’s either pass or fail! A+ or F-! You know what, fuck you and the whole fucking staff!!! I know I shouldn’t dignify this with a comment, but the reviewer threw a jab at all the artists. I just wanna know when was the last time you enjoyed yourself. If you can’t have fun and lose yourself at this tour it’s a good chance you’re a very miserable person. I actually feel sorry for you guys. Your job forces you to not have fun anymore. Grab a drink, holla at some nice girls, and party bitch!! You don’t know shit about passion and art. You’ll never gain credibility at this rate. You’re fucking trash! I make art. You can’t rate this. I’m a real person. I’m not a pop star. I don’t care about anything but making great art. Never come 2 one of my shows ever again, you’re not invited and if you see me…BOW!! This is not pop, it’s pop art!

[From KanyeUniverCity]

What a fabulous way to seem like an ungrateful asshole. And to prove the reviewer right. In fact it seems like Entertainment Weekly soft-peddled Kanye’s ego a bit. So he made sure to remind us all exactly how great he is. It doesn’t seem to occur to him that just because he’s a self-proclaimed extremist, and it’s all-or-nothing with him, doesn’t mean the rest of the world has to adjust their views to be in line with that.

As shocking and upsetting as it is, someone’s allowed to think Kanye is mediocre. The funny thing is that EW didn’t even say that – what they wrote was pretty generous. But I’ll go out on a limb here and say there’s no performance in the universe that could be good enough to merit this level of ego. So I’ll reserve my bows for now.

Here’s Kanye arriving at GOA nightclub for his ‘Glow In The Dark Tour’ party in Los Angeles on April 22nd. Images thanks to WENN.

Keith Richards - the man who thinks snorting dead relatives’ ashes is a good idea – has taken a Swedish reviewer to task for giving the Stones concert a particularly bad review. The reviewer did make a few jabs at Richards specifically, but who amongst us hasn’t over the years? Keith Richards is kind of before my time, but I remember very specifically when I was born, the doctor explained life briefly and said “Cry a lot, poop a lot, and make a lot of jokes about Keith Richards.” All people are born with the knowledge that this is okay because Richards sets himself up for it, and just one of the things we’re supposed to do.

“Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards has demanded an apology from Swedish newspapers for their scathing reviews of the group’s performance in the country earlier this month. Tabloids Expressen and Aftonbladet gave thumbs down to the Aug. 3 concert at Ullevi stadium in Goteborg, with Expressen suggesting Richards was ‘superdrunk’ on stage.”

[From Newsday]

Well apparently Keith Richards is mad as hell, and he’s not going to take it anymore. He actually responded to the reviewer, and told him he’d cheapened the experience for all the fans at the concerts, and all of the poor saps who love the Rolling Stones but couldn’t afford the $145 tickets.

“‘This is a first!’ the 63-year-old rock star wrote in a letter published by Stockholm daily Dagens Nyheter. ‘Never before have I risen to the bait of a bad review. But this time … I have to stand up … for our fans all over Sweden … to say that you owe them, and us, an apology.’”

“Dagens Nyheter said it received the letter from concert organizer EMA Telstar. Company head Thomas Johansson told The Associated Press that Richards wrote the letter and gave it to him after reading translations of the Swedish reviews. “‘There were 56,000 people in Ullevi stadium who bought a ticket to our concert — and experienced a completely different show than the one you ‘reviewed,’” the letter said.”

“‘How dare you cheapen the experience for them — and for the hundreds of thousands of other people across Sweden who weren’t at Ullevi and have only your ‘review’ to go on. Write the truth. It was a good show.’ In his review, Aftonbladet’s music writer Markus Larsson gave the concert a score of two on a five-point scale, and said Richards appeared ‘a bit confused.’

“‘I am not going to apologize for my subjective opinion, ‘ Larsson told the paper’s Web edition on Wednesday. ‘It is Keith who should apologize. After all it costs around 1,000 kronor ($145) to see a rock star who can hardly handle the (guitar) riff to ‘Brown Sugar’ any more.’”

[From Newsday]

How dare the reviewer disagree? I think someone needs to explain to Keith Richards how reviews work. They’re rarely positive. The reviewer always thinks he’s better than the performer, because he’s generally some elitist snob. It’s probably best not to read them for 38 different reasons. Either way, the guy saying that Keith Richards wasn’t exactly on his game isn’t earth shattering news. Again, this is before my time, but haven’t people been saying that about him since the Stones early days? Not that he wasn’t good/great whatever, but due to the massive, ridiculous quantities of drugs, the guy wasn’t always playing with a level deck, right? Unless the Keith Richards Exit Polling Machine was working at all the doors to the stadium, I doubt he really can know that none of the people there would have agreed with the reviewer. That’d be really cute though, if you had exit polling machines shaped like a giant, dried up/shriveled Keith Richards, and you could press buttons that said “Awesome” or “Sucked way hard.” If he’s going to complain about bad reviews from now on, he should probably either quit eating drugs for breakfast and/or quit the band and focus on the machines. Either way would be better for him.

Picture note by JayBird: Here’s Keith at the : Pirates Of The Caribbean premiere in May. Images thanks to PR Photos.