The James Logan Courier

By Roger Moore
The Orlando Sentinel (MCT)

Mike Myers goofs it old school with "The Love Guru," his first non-Shrek role in ages, a film that flies in the face of all that is Apatow in today's screen comedy.

It's vintage Myers, with an outrageous, broadly played character borrowed from Peter Sellers, silly makeup, bad puns, innuendo, the occasional pause for song and dance and Myers' ongoing obsession with little people. But is there still a place in filmgoers' funny bones for winking farce in an age of raunchy, explicit "Nerd gets the girl" laughers such as "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" and "Knocked Up"?

Here, the Canadian cut-up taps into America's yen for spiritual advisers, from Dr. Phil to Oprah to his old friend Deepak Chopra in a punny put-on about an American born guru (Myers) trying to crack the saturated U.S. guru market. Wearing a beard, sporting a Canadian-by-way-of-Calcutta accent, Myers' Guru Pitka is all about riding catch phrases and pithy acronyms to happiness.

By Robert W. Butler
McClatchy Newspapers (MCT)

Apparently there are two actors named Steve Carell.

One appears in sharp-witted, humanistic "small" movies like "Little Miss Sunshine" and "Dan in Real Life" and the occasional smart comedy blockbuster like "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" — not to mention starring in "The Office," one of TV's edgiest comedies.

The other Steve Carell makes overinflated summer gobblers in which more attention is paid to the special effects than to the script — turkeys like "Evan Almighty" and now "Get Smart."

Carell would seem the perfect choice to reprise the role of '60s TV's Maxwell Smart, bumbling secret agent for a shadowy government agency known as CONTROL. Few actors so embody endearing ineptitude.

And every now and then you get a flash of what "Get Smart" might have been if Carell had cut loose — or if writers Tom J. Astle and Matt Ember (working with the characters created by Mel Brooks and Buck Henry) or director Peter Segal (a veteran of Adam Sandler films) had gotten off their duffs and actually broken a sweat at being clever

Courier Staff Report
Iri Maruki was a Japanese artist noted for creating, with his wife Toshi Maruki, The Hiroshima Panels, a series of paintings which portray the horrific consequences of the destruction of that city by an American atomic bomb. Iri Maruki's father, uncle, two nieces and many friends died in the bombing.

Maruki was the eldest son in the Maruki family. Born in Hiroshima on June, 20, 1901, with a port-wine stain over the right half of his face after his mother fell down a flight of stairs in their small village home, he escaped military service in the war against China. Later, he survived the Great Kanto Earthquake in 1923. He also survived the American saturation fire raids on Tokyo near the end of the Second World War.

After the raids, with the Allied invasion of Okinawa looming, he attempted to rejoin his family in Hiroshima, but lacked the necessary papers to board the already full trains and so he was still in Tokyo when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.

See the Hiroshima Panels, free from the Maruki Gallery.