That fellow was sentenced to a half year of incarceration for burning a DVD of Mike Meyers' epic dud of a comedy last year. Yates got a hold of the movie at the Burbank duplication company that was hired by the studio to cut promo reels for talk shows. When Yates was caught, in true American fashion he started blaming everybody else:

When confronted, Yates accused co-workers and Paramount employees of putting the contraband copy on the Internet. But videotaped footage showed Yates making the unauthorized copy of "The Love Guru" at work before leaving the building and then going into his car, Assistant U.S. Attorney Erik M. Silber said. Yates subsequently blamed his grandmother, saying that he showed the movie at her birthday party and she then gave it away to a cousin who gave it to a friend who was the former roommate of the man who is believed to have uploaded the movie, but has not yet been charged. In his plea agreement, Yates confessed to making a copy of the comedy and later distributing it to others.

Oh, oh dear. So the terrible leaking of The Love Guru was all Gramma's fault. Paramount was happy with the verdict, as, who knows!, had the terrible DVD not leaked online and been downloaded by sad weirdos 85,000 times, the film could have been a box office smash! Oh stealer of dreams, Jack Yates! Seriously, though, that really sucks dude. Shouldn't have stolen from work, sure. But six months in the clink? And for that movie? Pretty brutal.

In other piracy related news, a mother of four in Minnesota was just slapped with $1.92 million in fines for illegally downloading 24 songs off of Kazaa and then sharing them with other people.

"There's no way they're ever going to get that," said Thomas-Rasset, a 32-year-old mother of four from the central Minnesota city of Brainerd. "I'm a mom, limited means, so I'm not going to worry about it now."

Wait, she's from Brainerd? I know how she can get the money! Have someone kidnap one of her kids or something and then get the ransom money from her rich ex-husband and then have it all crumble around her as Frances McDormand foils everyone's plans and then finally get arrested in a sleazy North Dakotan motel. The perfect crime.

Don't do that file share shit guys! They're cracking down!

As we learned in our interview with founder John Wilson, the Razzies balloting process is hardly a tossed-off affair involving copious amounts of alcohol and a dartboard with M. Night Shyamalan's face on it. Rigid, pre-Christmas deadlines squeezed late write-in favorite The Spirit out of the race—but Hollywood produced enough steaming turds in 2008 to ensure the awards ceremony would be a gripping affair nonetheless.

The spoof-making team of Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer are competing against themselves in the Worst Picture for 9/11 tie-in Disaster Movie and Meet the Spartans. Rounding out the category: M. Night Shyamalan's Attack of the Killer Ferns, Paris Hilton's The Hottie and the Nottie, Guru, and In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale, the latest videogame adaptation from the Cecil B. DeMille of bad, Uwe Boll.

In the acting categories, Chihuahua-mill-matron Hilton was a double-nominee for her starring work in Nottie and supporting work in Repo: The Genetic Opera, making her the Kate Winslet of this year's race. The stars of The Women — Annette Bening, Eva Mendes, Debra Messing, Jada Pinkett Smith and Meg Ryan — share a nomination. Cameron Diaz earned two nominations: one as Worst Actress in What Happens in Vegas, and another as one-half of Worst Screen Couple for the same picture. Eddie Murphy, Al Pacino , Jessica Alba, Verne Troyer and even Academy Award winner Ben Kingsley (one of Guru's seven nominations) were also recognized for either knowing better, or not.

And in the Worst Prequel, Remake, Rip-Off, or Sequel category, dark horse candidate Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull pulled a stunning upset, Razzie voters apparently agreeing with the South Park guys' assessment that the botched and completely unnecessary sequel amounted to a Spielberg/Lucas-perpetrated gang rape of a beloved screen icon.

Winners are announced Feb. 21. The full list of nominees follows:

WORST PICTURE

* Disaster Movie
* The Happening
* The Hottie and the Nottie
* In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale
* The Love Guru
* Meet the Spartans

WORST ACTOR

* Larry the Cable Guy, Witless Protection
* Eddie Murphy, Meet Dave
* Mike Myers, The Love Guru
* Al Pacino, 88 Minutes and Righteous Kill
* Mark Wahlberg, The Happening and Max Payne

WORST ACTRESS

* Jessica Alba, The Eye and The Love Guru
* The cast of The Women (Annette Bening, Eva Mendes, Debra Messing, Jada Pinkett-Smith and Meg Ryan)
* Cameron Diaz, What Happens in Vegas
* Paris Hilton, The Hottie and the Nottie
* Kate Hudson, Fools' Gold and My Best Friend's Girl

WORST SUPPORTING ACTOR

* Uwe Boll (as himself), Uwe Boll's Postal
* Pierce Brosnan, Mamma Mia!
* Ben Kingsley, The Love Guru and The Wackness
* Burt Reynolds, Deal and In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale
* Verne Troyer, The Love Guru and Uwe Boll's Postal

WORST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

* Carmen Electra, Disaster Movie and Meet the Spartans
* Paris Hilton, Repo: The Genetic Opera
* Kim Kardashian, Disaster Movie
* Jenny McCarthy, Witless Protection
* Leelee Sobieski, 88 Minutes and In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale

WORST SCREEN COUPLE

* Uwe Boll and Any Actor, Camera or Screenplay
* Cameron Diaz and Ashton Kutcher, What Happens in Vegas
* Paris Hilton and either Christin Lakin or Joel David Moore, The Hottie and the Nottie
* Larry the Cable Guy and Jenny McCarthy, Witless Protection
* Eddie Murphy and Eddie Murphy, Meet Dave

WORST PREQUEL, REMAKE, RIP-OFF OR SEQUEL

* The Day the Earth Blowed Up Real Good
* Disaster Movie and Meet the Spartans
* Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
* Speed Racer
* Star Wars: The Clone Wars

WORST DIRECTOR

* Uwe Boll, 1968: Tunnel Rats, In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale and Uwe Boll's Postal
* Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, Disaster Movie and Meet the Spartans
* Tom Putnam, The Hottie and the Nottie
* Marco Schnabel, The Love Guru
* M. Night Shyamalan, The Happening

WORST SCREENPLAY

* Disaster Movie and Meet the Spartans
* The Happening
* The Hottie and the Nottie
* In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale
* The Love Guru

WORST CAREER ACHIEVEMENT

* Uwe Boll

• 2008 Razzies

It's a tough question, but the emboldened Zed wasn't backing down in a press release tossed over the Defamer transom:

Recently, there has been a surge in interest in Sanskrit tattoo designs and symbols among Hollywood and other celebrities. [...]

Rajan Zed has urged Jessica Alba and other celebrities who carry Sanskrit tattoos to go beyond the fashion statement and indulge in serious study of rich philosophical thought, which Hinduism provides. He offered to gladly provide the resources the serious seekers among celebrities need for their study and research. [...] Hollywood celebrities needed to have more patience and go beyond the superficial because Hinduism concepts evolved over thousands of years and needed deep study.

We don't doubt it. As Zed goes on to note, "Sanskrit is considered a sacred language, the language of the gods. Tattoos go back in history to at least since Neolithic times." Alba, Tommy Lee, Rihanna and other namechecked members of the Sanskritted Elite would absolutely do well to figure out what is they're getting into, lest a curse like the one that doomed Love Guru — for which Alba is already doing a few thousand years in Hell — befall their poor choices in skin adornment. And don't forget, gang: Stephen Baldwin is always around for counsel, too, should you decide on a bigger, more contemporary cover-up.

Oh, but for the old times, as Guru's singular tank job, critical enmity and shocking Myers implosion provoked a reconsideration of sorts for the spirituality kingpin, who seems to have overcome his immunity to wisdom in the bitter months since Guru's release:

“The Love Guru didn’t work well because Mike Myers addresses a teenage audience, and he was trying to mix it up with metaphysics,” Chopra told MTV News. “Humor mixed with spirituality can work, if it’s done well. But frankly speaking, this was not a good attempt.” ...

“I think what he could have done was have been a little less gross about some of the jokes [which were added later],” Chopra said. “And some of the spiritual themes, they could have shown more the lighter side. He was almost too serious in his deprecation. He needed more humor.”

Read: He needed humor — anything to mitigate the lesbian elephants. No worries, though! Everyone involved will have a few thousand years to figure out how to improve the concept for next time.

• Why Did ‘The Love Guru’ Bomb? [MTV Movies Blog]

And what of claims made by Shrider, like that she nearly drowned the Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me star in a romantic bubble bath?

"There's no incident like that. She's coming up with things and telling media anything to make it interesting. I haven't seen everything she's done...The things she says just aren't true," he adds.

Must be awkward, then, considering the former couple still live together.

"She's still in the house," Troyer says, noting that he's taking legal action to force her out, but their situation "makes it even harder, to, you know, not strangle her."

But... how would that even work? Anyway, Troyer's pulling through with the help of friends, family and his lawyer, as well as by continued (if "dehydrated") work on films including Heath Ledger's unfinished final project, The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus. Recalling the late actor's troubled time on set ("He couldn't sleep because he was so wrapped up in the character of Joker in Batman. ... Throughout our shoot it was the same way"), a misty-eyed Troyer nevertheless insisted Ledger was not suicidal — anything but, really, with a Ledger heart sketch eventually making the rounds as the default Parnassus crew tattoo. Troyer pointed out his own on his right hand, conveniently obscuring the small Guru Pitka likeness he drunkenly had inked during production on The Love Guru. Thank God those days are behind him.

• Verne Troyer Talks Sex Tape, Heath Ledger's Death [Yahoo!]

We instantly dispatched a small army of white-coated interns to retrieve a representative cross-section of the Mike Myers-moviegoing population from a number of outdoor shopping plazas, and, once they had signed their releases, hooked them up to some highly advanced vital-sign-measuring equipment. (We'd like to take a moment to once again reassure the test subject who observed, "But this is just a beer helmet attached to a first generation iPod," that the similarities are purely cosmetic.) The preliminary results of our study, compiled and edited by Gawker Intern Anna Peele, are above, with our final findings set to be published in the September issue of Scientific American, in a report entitled, "From Sha-wing to Elephant Dung: The Law of Diminishing Mike Myers Comedy Returns."

• Watch Video

WHAT'S NEW: As per tradition this June, it's another new release "duel" with an essentially foregone conclusion: The already-beloved (except among fat people and the GOP) Pixar entry Wall-E is ready to go at No. 1, with the bloody Angelina Jolie/James McAvoy destiny-caper Wanted lagging some miles behind with its R-rating. Crap-allergic audiences who stayed away from last week's openings may nudge Wall-E toward the high end of its projected $55 million opening. The same can be said of the male-skewing Wanted, which will surpass $40 million without much trouble. At least we hope so for Disney and Universal's sakes, as both films will vanish into Hancock's booze-smelling shadow in T-minus five days and counting.

Also opening: The Matthew Broderick gerund dramedy Finding Amanda; the Irish-drunks-at-a-wake comedy Red Roses and Petrol; and the 19th-century Catherine Breillat/Asia Argento clash The Last Mistress.

THE BIG LOSER: None of this weekend's new releases will underachieve that much, but The Love Guru may be the first film ever to drop 100% from its opening weekend. Get Smart won't age well, either.

THE UNDERDOG: A hybrid of stage readings, archival footage and interviews, Trumbo isn't going to blow any minds in illuminating the troubled life and times of its blacklisted novelist/screenwriter namesake Dalton Trumbo. That said, his story (adapted from son Christopher's off-Broadway play) is as concentrated an account of the blacklist's havoc as any we've seen, and the actors gathered to monologue his correspondence from the era — including Brian Dennehy, Joan Allen, Paul Giamatti and particularly David Strathairn — do well by their subject's moody talent. At the very least, Nathan Lane's stirring five-minute paean to masturbation is a YouTube hit in the making.

FOR SHUT-INS: This week's new DVD releases include Roland Emmerich's steaming pile of 10,000 BC; the dark, dark Colin Farrell hit-man comedy In Bruges; the Oscar-jilted, animated coming-of-age story Persepolis; the underrated rom-com Definitely Maybe; and the desperately awaited "Magical Musical Edition" of Xanadu — complete with soundtrack! (Razor blade sold separately.)

So what's your outlook for the weekend — lovesick robot or bullet-curving megastar? Or some other new, nifty treat altogether? Are you the one person in the country who'll dare to drop $11 on The Love Guru? Or is it an all-Xanadu weekend? Let us know — we can help!

1. Get Smart - $39.2 million
The middling-at-best TV adaptation claimed the weekend essentially by default, but it also fell almost $1 million short of the $40 million opening it needed to trigger its principals' rumored sequel clauses. Will Warner Bros. call it even and commission a script by lunch? Is Anne Hathaway renegotiating with her bad-boy paramour for further "publicity consulting" in 2010? Will Steve Carell meet Don Adams at the Get Smart 2 premiere? Only time will tell!

2. Kung Fu Panda - $21.7 million
The ursine pugilist enjoyed one last top-five weekend before Pixar's Wall-E comes along on Friday to show him what true box-office violence looks like.

3. The Incredible Hulk - $21.5 million
It might look underachieving, but don't worry! A 61% drop is exactly the kind of declining potency Bruce Banner has been searching for all these years. In a couple of weeks it'll be like none of this ever happened to him.

4. The Love Guru - $14 million
What more can we say? His karma was huge.

5. The Happening - $10 million
Manoj's Mint experienced an even steeper plunge than Hulk, driving the stroppy writer/director/profit-participant to challenge Mike Myers to a winner-take-all Bad Idea Marketplace showdown in which next weekend's lower performer flees theaters by noon Monday. We hear Paramount is said to be considering it.

Honorable Mention — 16. Kit Kittredge: An American Girl - $223,000
A few weeks after its previous release — the foreign-language epic Mongol — opened at $27K per screen, the penultimate Picturehouse film Kit Kittredge swung a staggering $44,600 per-screen average in the five cities where American Girl has retail outlets. That should hopefully make the box-packing around the office feel like it's going a little quicker.

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. ...

[I]t's not that I object to the idea of, say, witnessing elephants copulate on the ice in the middle of a Stanley Cup hockey match, or seeing a dwarf sent flying over the same ice by the shock of defibrillator paddles. But it will never be enough simply to do such things. They must be done well.

Yikes! And that's not even all — after the jump, a Times reader purporting to have been a Guru extra chimed in with his own commentary about the hot elephant action and hockey-rink schadenfreude that made the film an even more refined brand of awful:

The article said "The rule seems to be that no one may upstage him and all must adore him." That is 100% true. We were not allowed to stand too close to him during a break in case we heard what he said. He could never remember his lines and some scenes were shot 50 times. When he was on the elephant on the ice we felt so sorry for the poor animal (both were female) that many people hoped he would be dumped and stepped on. Being in an ice rink from 7AM until 2AM is COLD.

Point taken, "iansinger" (and we apologize in advance that for your candor you'll never work as an extra again). We could likely have moved on from and maybe even embraced Guru's staggering anti-humor, but surely the cosmos — or at least the American Humane Society — will not stand for elephant sex abuse. This calls for revised credits — something disclaiming, "No animals were harmed in the making of this film, except those exploited in girl-on-girl pachyderm trysts and the ice-rink extras forced to watch." Cold, cold indeed.

• Just Say 'Mariska Hargitay' and Snicker [NYT]

WHAT'S NEW: For the second consecutive week, a pair of critical underachievers square off at the multiplex. But while the noisy, mostly terrible Get Smart is something of a masterpiece compared to The Love Guru, we expect both to lock in for decent opening frames; estimates below $40 million seem conservative for Smart, and Guru, almost-unilaterally loathed as it is, will still pull around $22 million from teenagers not knowing any better. Watch out, though, for Kit Kittredge: An American Girl, the first film based on the popular doll brand; opening in limited release in markets featuring American Girl stores, this will eventually pull every 10-and-under girl (and her mother) into a theater near you.

Also opening: The Santa Monica parking ticket romance Expired and the arranged-marriage-in-London drama Brick Lane.

THE BIG LOSER: We may not actually have one this week, though were taking early wagers on The Love Guru's second-week plunge. We'll even sweeten the deal: Winning bets on anything less than 70% pay double!

THE UNDERDOG: The first weekend of the L.A. Film Festival offers a pretty diverse assortment of programming — and, alas, quality — but we'd be derelict in our underdog-reporting duties if we didn't single out the tiny, riveting Thai entry Wonderful Town (Saturday at 7 p.m., AMC Avco 4). Aditya Assarat's story follows a big-city architect dispatched to oversee a luxury hotel project in the ruins of the 2004 tsunami; culture clash and doomed romance ensue to ultimately shocking degrees, but Assarat's handle on melancholy (as well as the rich, hazy inland landscapes) thwarts the potential for melodrama. This will likely return in limited release from its distributors at Kino, but why wait? Plus it will make you that much cooler when eventually recommending it to latecoming friends.

FOR SHUT-INS: New DVD's include Michel Gondry's sweding buddy picture Be Kind Rewind, the must-not-have Mashew McConauhdgrl/Kate Hudson collaboration Fool's Gold, Alison Eastwood's mildly underrated directing debut Rails and Ties, the Martin Lawrence offering Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins, and Grant Gee's extraordinary, anecdote- and interview-heavy rock documentary Joy Division.

So are you getting Smart this weekend, or are you sucking it up for 100 minutes with Guru Pitka? Any LAFF recommendations we should take in? Will Be Kind Rewind be more ironic than ever on DVD? Be honest! Share your plans, and look us up if you're planning a Westwood festival sojourn.

The Love Guru is so relentlessly juvenile as to merit a new twist on the PG-13 rating — one that strongly cautions not only those under 13 but anyone much above it, too. ... Opening opposite Get Smart isn't ideal, but coupled with lingering affection for the Austin Powers series, this might just be dumb enough to at least hold its own.

After the jump, a reflective Mike Myers redoubts to Inside the Actors Studio to answer every question on Earth except the one about what went wrong.

That's not entirely true; he also spent more than two minutes eluding the simple query, "How do you productively wear so many hats?" The rambling, New Age-y reply could function as its own performance art if it wasn't so mortifying, which actually got us thinking: If we find out later that this whole Love Guru episode thing was just some post-ironic celebrity reinvention, we're going to be pissed.

• 'The Love Guru' [Variety]
• 'Inside the Actors Studio' [Bravo]

''He was emotionally needy and got more difficult as the shoot went along,'' [Wayne's World director Penelope] Spheeris says. ''You should have heard him bitching when I was trying to do that 'Bohemian Rhapsody' scene: 'I can't move my neck like that! Why do we have to do this so many times? No one is going to laugh at that!''' To manage Myers' moods, Spheeris put her daughter in charge of making sure he had whatever snack he needed at any given moment: ''To this day, I have this image of her sitting on this little cooler, looking at me, like, 'Mom, I f—-ing hate you.'''

But then came Austin Powers, and like a snaggle-toothed, chest-haired phoenix, Myers soared back into the hearts of his worst enemies:

''I hated that bastard for years,'' says Spheeris, who believes Myers dissuaded Paramount from hiring her for Wayne's World 2. ''But when I saw Austin Powers, I went, 'I forgive you, Mike.''' She pauses, voice choked with emotion. '''You can be moody, you can be a jerk, you can be things that others of us can't be — because you are profoundly talented. And I forgive you.'''

Though she also adds, "Maybe he could open, like, a children's hospital to clean up his rep. He's got to do something pretty quick," so there's a bit of a ways to go still. But those whom Myers has helped make rich — the Jeffrey Katzenbergs, Jay Roaches and Lorne Michaelses — are a little more sanguine, all readily admitting that Myers' skill comes with strings attached, and all apparently prepared to forgive the sitar-rocking, Troyer-baking Love Guru ancillaries that have Myers facing a future of hell. And that's just in Hollywood — don't even get us started again on the whole Hindu-curse part of the equation.

[Photo Credit: Getty Images]

• Mike Myers: Man of Mystery [EW]

boomp3.com



Once again, actress Jessica Biel appeared to be lost and despondent after arriving at LAX on Tuesday afternoon. While not as shell shocked as the last time we saw her, Biel wondered if she would be able to function out of in a Los Angeles without David O. Russell engaging in existential conversations and asking if she could float the producers a loan to keep the film going for a few more weeks. In addition, it was overheard that Biel had been struggling with coming up a great fake response when long time boyfriend Justin Timberlake asked for her opinion on his new movie The Love Guru. Biel said, "He seems so happy about it and I don't ruin it by saying something stupid. "

[Photo Credit: Bauer-Griffin]

• WATCH VIDEO

Alba, who has yet to offload the rights to Honor's first photos, nevertheless did Paramount a huge solid by keeping the openings of both her womb and her new film The Love Guru — opening everywhere June 20! — in the closest possible proximity. Expect our first sun-kissed, blobby look that week, followed by rough calculations of how Alba's imminent thousand-year Hindu curse impacts little Honor. Here's hoping Vishnu goes light on her.

• Jessica Alba and Husband Cash Warren Welcome Baby Girl [US Weekly]

Joining in this campaign is the Spiritual Science Research Foundation, whose editor Sean Clarke has outlined the spiritual consequence for being associated in the movie. Based on an afterlife demerit point system, those involved with making the movie can anticipate residence in the second region of hell for 1,000 years. Watching it for entertainment would carry its share of consequences, too.

As baffled others are quick to point out, anti-Love Guru spearhead Rajan Zed has not yet seen the movie, though Paramount reportedly promised him an early preview that he pledged to take advantage of. Still, we are deeply troubled by the 1,000 years of damnation facing beloved figures like Myers, Alba and particularly Verne Troyer, whose one-two punch of Postal and The Love Guru (not to mention his mortifying Surreal Life stint prior to that) seems like a millennium of personal and professional hell no Hindu demerits could possibly outstack.

And anyway, if a real-life love guru can get out of a molestation rap in Texas for $10 million, surely the stars can bargain with someone in this crowd who has some afterlife influence.

• Hating the Love Guru [Eye Weekly]

boomp3.com


Star of the upcoming film The Love Guru, Verne Troyer had the limo ride from hell on Monday afternoon. At first, the limo driver thought Troyer was the talking baby from the eTrade commercial and asked if he had any hot stock tips. Troyer explained that he was an actor, prompting the driver to ask him if he ever had been a Vin Diesel impersonator. At the trip progressed on, the driver asked if Troyer had met anybody famous during his acting career like that guy from The Sopranos or that girl from Dancing With The Stars.

[Photo Credit: Bauer-Griffin]

Father Charles T. Durante, a Catholic priest well respected in northern Nevada for his various community outreach efforts, in a statement, said, "...it is important that we respect those parts of every faith tradition which are held especially sacred. I applaud Paramount Pictures for being open to the request of Hindu leaders to preview this film and listen to any concerns that may arise for them..."

Rabbi Jonathan B. Freirich, a well known Jewish leader in parts of California and Nevada, in a statement today, stressed, "While The Love Guru appears to be a funny take on New Age spirituality, it seems like it may portray many Hindu practices in a less than sensitive light...it would be appropriate for the producers of The Love Guru to make efforts to assure the religious communities of the United States that they in no way wish to make any general statements about Hinduism."

It's a little late for that, according to one of Zed's more incensed allies, who yesterday told Toronto's Eye Weekly: "Gurus don't exist to fix your love life. ... From what I could tell this movie will only help to spread ignorance." Meanwhile, America's outraged, pan-spiritual dwarf community is expected to speak out soon against the egregious mishandling of old Myers chum Verne Troyer, subject in the trailer alone to "shrimp" jokes, hockey injuries and stand-ins for an Oscar statuette. Insult, meet injury.

• Hindus get some non-Hindu support... [Yahoo! India]
• No love for Mike Myers? [Eye Weekly]