I wouldn't have known how to start this review if my wife hadn't fortuitously gotten me a present of a new collection of Roger Ebert's unfavorable reviews, called "Your Movie Sucks." I don't know that Mr. Ebert still plans to review "The Love Guru," but I will do everything in my power to dissuade him from doing it.

Though I don't have Mr. Ebert's facility with language, I can say that "The Love Guru" is the worst movie I have ever seen, and that includes every one of the thousand or so bad films I've seen over the past forty years and called each one the worst ever. I apologize to them; they were not the worst ever. "The Love Guru" is the worst ever.

And the reason it is the worst ever is an odd and academic one: you cannot be funny if you're trying to do two contradictory things at once. That is, you must believe that the one imperative, i.e., throwing the pie at your antagonist, is the one most important thing you will ever do. In Charlie Chaplin's "City Lights," he rescues a drunken millionaire who is about to throw himself into the river while attached by a rope to a heavy rock. As the man puts the rope around himself he leans forward, coming out of the rope, which then attaches itself to Chaplin's neck. As he heaves the rope into the river, it is Chaplin who gets whisked into the water. Both men are so consumed with the suicide that neither knows where the rope is.

In "The Love Guru" Mike Myers is constantly winking at us, telling us that the pratfall or the comic line or the situation is not actually funny - and it is not - but his mugging only serves to underline the point. Not only that, but the concept is so unreal that we cannot take it seriously. He is a kind of guru who must help a hockey star for the Toronto Maple Leafs, Romany Malco, get over his fear of his mother. I am not making this up. How and why someone, I assume Mike Myers, since he has co-writing credit, thought this would be an amusing concept, is far far beyond me. Let me not burden you any longer with this review.