Mike Myers has made another movie and I am hardly overjoyed. I was one of the few North American middle schoolers who chose to ignore the Austin Powers trilogy when it came out, and I plan to be part of the (I suspect) much larger demographic intentionally missing out on "The Love Guru," Myers' latest film. My reasons for this are complex, and if you disagree, you can check the movie out for yourself when it opens on Friday.

Half a decade ago, I saw a film called "The Guru" starring Jimi Mistry and Heather Graham. Mistry plays Ramu, a man who leaves Bombay to become an actor in America. Like a lot of struggling actors, he ends up in pornography. Unlike a lot of struggling actors, he inadvertently becomes a sex guru.

I liked "The Guru." It wasn't Oscar-worthy, but it wasn't an embarrassment for anyone involved (except maybe Heather Graham, who was playing a porn starlet for the second time). This movie was the first thing I thought of when I noticed "The Love Guru," mostly because it seems a sex guru and a love guru are mostly the same.

Now, because "The Love Guru" hasn't come out yet, I have to concede that I'm not really sure what the film is about. Regardless, something had bothered me about it from the beginning of its promotional blitz. This indefinable dislike for "The Love Guru" meant that I was pleased to read on MTV.com that Myers' character Pitka gets "attacked by a rooster, a real rooster" during the movie. In this context, I was retrospectively less pleased to read that "The Love Guru" was partially inspired by the deaths of Myers' father, George Harrison, and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

Allowing yourself to get attacked by a rooster is an odd sort of tribute to the deceased, isn't it?

Understandably, there were people besides me who also bristled at the idea of "The Love Guru," concerned, perhaps, about this bizarre relationship between roosters and reverence. But Reshma Dordi, host of Showbiz India TV, was quoted in the Economic Times as saying that, "Actually it is quite like a Bollywood masala film. It has comedy, drama, romance, a little action and song and dance like most Bollywood films."

Yeah, I thought after reading that, but aren't most Bollywood films about things besides pseudo-spiritual leaders brokering the love lives of rich white people? This is when I realized it wasn't the linkage of Myers' unfunny slapstick and Hindu traditions that had been nagging at me but the connection these two Bollywood-lite films have to the business of boning. Sex always sells, but in Bollywood-lite, the sell is really hard.

"The Love Guru" and its counterparts seem to reduce an entire culture and a rich filmmaking tradition to inaccurate accents, pedestrian plotlines and colorful set design. The notion of Bollywood (and, to some extent, India) in these movies becomes little more than an excuse for dance numbers, a weakened foundation that crumbles under the weight of Western exoticization, desire and exploitation.

Jimi Mistry did some interviews after "The Guru." In a sad foreshadowing of things to come, he was asked for the best sexual wisdom he could impart.

"The Guru has one piece of advice," he told Hollywood.com in 2003. "Lie back and think of India."

But you know what? Five years have passed. It's time to get up and think of something else.

Tags: THINGS OF IMPORT