I watched The Love Guru a few days ago. It was terrible, of course. I wouldn't have watched it otherwise. In fact, the only reason I hadn't watched it already is that it took a few months for people to convince me that it really was that bad.

I like to watch bad movies because, as Tolstoy said, every good movie is the same, but every terrible movie is terrible in its own way. Once you break yourself out of the bonds of competence, you can see crazy things that no sensible director would put in a movie. A true explorer has to go off the map in order to see something new. And in the case of The Love Guru, I saw things that I had, in fact, never seen before. See the expression Mike Myers is making in that picture? He does that through the entire movie. Every time he makes a joke, he wriggles with delight and flashes a coy "Ain't I funny?" smirk at the camera. The problem with that question is that the answer is invariably "Nope. Not really." It's just an unending stream of unfunny jokes followed immediately by someone mugging like he thinks he's Oscar Wilde and the Ritz Brothers all rolled into one. Which I would enjoy seeing.

But it wasn't really amazing. It was no Cutthroat Island (which is one of my favorite movies, incidentally). I've seen Mike Myers not be funny before. I hadn't seen him be this devoid of humor for quite this long before, but I could have pictured it. Still, I had to watch it, just in case. You never know, right?