After his critically acclaimed box office smash The Love Guru (NY Times review: "The Love Guru is downright antifunny, an experience that makes you wonder if you will ever laugh again."), Mike Myers has decided to take his career a whole new direction.  Just kidding, he’s doing another Austin Powers.

I’m told that Mike Myers has started writing Austin Powers 4 which will be an homage to his father. "It’s very personal with a father and son theme loosely based on his own life," an insider tells me. As Myers has previously said, this fourth installment of the super spy spoof movie series will focus on Austin’s arch-villain Dr. Evil, who was based on Blofeld of the Bond films. But what hasn’t been known is that the AP4 plot is really about Dr. Evil and his son (introduced already as Scott Evil, played by Seth Green).

Wow, someone in Hollywood has daddy issues?  Surprising.

There’s no deal in place yet but New Line is panting after No. 4 despite Myer’s recent box office bomb, The Love Guru, for Paramount. But does Myers realize he may no longer be a draw? (Probably not. Before the pic opened, he reportedly made diva demands from Conan O’Brien staffers last month for stupid stuff like Twizzlers and raspberry seltzer.) [DHD]

I think demanding Twizzlers has less to do with not realizing you’re no longer a box office draw and more to do with not realizing you’re not six.  But I’m excited for this, I’ve always wanted to see a real sappy, tear-jerker Austin Powers movie.  Maybe Fat Bastard could reveal that his overeating stems from being sexually abused as a child, or Goldmember could deliver a heartfelt speech about anti-Semitism. 

The highly publicized battle between Get Smart and The Love Guru, this weekend’s only two major releases, failed to materialize.  Get Smart took the top spot with $39.2 million, while the Love Guru was all the way down at number four, with $14 million.  Apparently the average schmoe hated it as much as the critics.

But don’t get too excited, because Get Smart was almost as bad, but because it made so much money, everyone involved will be bending over backwards to pat themselves on the back, or doing some other kind of metaphorical thing that would make sense.  Industry analysts are also making logic jumps that can only be described as Shyamalan-esque.

Critics picked apart the [Get Smart] for emphasizing action over the crisp verbal comedy of the TV show, but Warner Bros. figures that was a wise commercial move. While 60 percent of the audience was 25 or older, that still meant a sizable younger crowd that was more keen on the movie’s action, said Dan Fellman, the studio’s head of distribution. [AP]

Yeah, either that or people saw it because it was the only thing out besides Love Guru.  But that’s the beauty of numbers, they allow even people with no common sense to draw conclusions.  How egalitarian. (Not to be confused with eaglitarians, which is what I am).

Get Smart, $39.2 million
Kung Fu Panda, $21.7 million
The Incredible Hulk, $21.6 million
The Love Guru, $14 million
The Happening, $10 million
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, $8.4 million
You Don’t Mess With the Zohan, $7.2 million
Sex and the City, $6.5 million
Iron Man, $4 million  
The Strangers, $1.9 million

Opening this weekend are The Love Guru and Get Smart, both of which fill me with apathy.  (Less so in the case of Get Smart, thanks to the lovely Anne Hathaway, but still). 

Anyway, I’m not going to waste your time doing a real weekend preview.  Instead, I thought I’d give you a picture of a lioness licking a giant popsicle made of cow’s blood.  Here’s the description from Yahoo News:

Naba, a four-year-old female African lion, keeps cool as she licks a ‘bloodsicle’ made of frozen cow blood, Monday, June 9, 2008, at the National Zoo in Washington, as temperatures rose toward the triple digits along the East Coast.

If you don’t think that’s cooler than any of the movies coming out this weekend, well then you can just go drink a big dingleberry smoothie.

Sweet Odin’s Raven! I don’t think a movie has ever been as universally reviled as the Love Guru.  The sheer volume and intensity of hatred is almost enough to feel sorry for Mike Myers.  But then I remembered how much more money he has than me.  And that “His Karma is Huge” poster.  And how people sometimes judge me just because I’m beautiful.  So fuck that guy.  Enjoy:

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. - Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times  

…a pitiful assortment of bad ideas and gags that never work. -Wesley Morris, Boston Globe [and keep in mind, this is the guy that liked The Comebacks, and raved over You Don’t Mess With the Zohan] 

A movie endlessly amused with its own stupidity — to the point where Myers actually laughs at his own jokes, and shots of other characters breaking character to giggle are left in, as though this were a “Carol Burnett Show” sketch — “The Love Guru” is a soul-draining waste of 90-plus minutes. –MSNBC 

Let’s not pussyfoot around: "The Love Guru" is an atrocious, idiotic 88 minutes of anti-entertainment. To borrow word-shtick from the guru Pitka, it’s AWFUL as in, "Anyone Watching Feels, Um, Loser-ish." –NYDailyNews 

Mike Myers is anti-comedy . . . that is, if one presumes comedy ought to be smart, new, surprising or, yes, funny. –Washington Post 

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. -NYTimes 

But, uh… I hear he’s still nice to his dogs. 

More proof that God hates you after the jump.

To watch the trailer in high res, kill yourself.  If you don’t see it, try doing something really bad, then kill yourself.

[Thanks to loyal FilmDrunkard Satan for the tip.]