I can't wait till next week's box-office report so I can see how Pixar's Wall-E holds up with audiences. Early reports struck dire ticket-selling notes for this futuristic tale of a garbage-compacting robot, WALL-E (for Waste Allocation Load Lifter: Earth class), who was left on Earth to clean up the mess we made of it. Words like gloomy, sorrowful, dystopian and dull filled the air. And yet this groundbreaker in the art of animation swept in with $62.5 million to hit the No. 1 spot. That's puts it behind only The Incredibles ($70.5 million), Finding Nemo ($70.3 million) and Monsters, Inc. ($62.6 million) in the Pixar pantheon of nine consecutive opening-weekend winners. Second place went to the R-rated Wanted, taking in $51.1 million to show that some trash (the sexy, jolting, fun kind like Wanted) also has a place at the multiplex and should be spared being tossed in the dumpster by the G-rated WALL-E. It's quite a weekend when two non-sequels representing the scariest word in Hollywood—originality—can rack up such huge numbers. But here are the questions of the day for those of you've seen WALL-E:

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Every week, Peter Travers lets you know what opening films deserve your hard-earned box office dollars. Click above to see whether or not Pixar's WALL•E and the Angelina Jolie-fronted assassin flick Wanted passes the Rolling Stone film critic's test.

• Review: Wanted (3.5 stars)

Watch every episode of our weekly Peter Travers video podcast by subscribing via iTunes (when prompted, click “Launch application”). Every Friday, a new episode will be delivered to your iTunes. [If you don’t have iTunes, download it here.]

[Video: Jennifer Hsu]

George Carlin's death on Sunday at seventy one reminds me of how much scrappy fun it was to see him anywhere. Yes, that includes movies. Many of them bad movies. Many of them merrily mocked by Carlin himself. But in a DVD week that gives us such flabby newbies as 10,000 B.C., Definitely, Maybe, and The Spiderwick Chronicles, we could do worse than punch a few Carlin movies into our DVD players to see the man in action again and hear his distinctive, hypocrisy-shattering comic voice. I'm thinking now of 1989's Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure in which Carlin played Rufus, the guitar-jamming guru (if only the Love Guru had a fraction of his wit) who arrives from the future to help Alex Winter's Bill and Keanu Reeves' Ted. Read his first words and you can hear him saying them:

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Look, it's bad enough for the career of Mike Myers that The Love Guru lost the weekend box-office battle to Steve Carell and Get Smart, but look at these numbers: Get Smart took in $39.1 million to Love Guru's $14 million. That's a beating, mister. What makes it worse for Myers is that Guru wasn't even a close second to Smart. Kung Fu Panda, the animated kids flick that won't die, took the No. 2 spot with $21.7 million, amassing $155.6 million in just three weeks. And No. 3 went to The Incredible Hulk with $21.6 million, repping a huge slip of 61percent from its debut. There is some solace there since Ang Lee's Hulk in 2003 dropped 70 percent in its second week. But face it Hulk fanboys, your giant green rage hero is on the wane. At least Guru beat The Happening, which plunged 67 percent to gross $10 million and take the No. 5 spot before hitting the fast track to DVD oblivion. Make no mistake, the story here is Mike Myers. Is the failure of The Love Guru merely a slip or a sign of dire things to come?

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Dueling comedies open this weekend — Steve Carell's Get Smart and Mike Myers' The Love Guru — but one is far from funny. Who's a better foil: Justin Timberlake or Anne Hathaway? For Peter Travers' full report, watch the video.

• Review: The Love Guru (.5 stars)
• Review: Get Smart (2.5 stars)

Watch every episode of our weekly Peter Travers video podcast by subscribing via iTunes (when prompted, click “Launch application”). Every Friday, a new episode will be delivered to your iTunes. [If you don’t have iTunes, download it here.]

[Video: Jennifer Hsu]

Are they kidding with these DVD releases:

Fool's Gold, starring Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey in what still gets my vote as the worst romantic comedy of the year.

Welcome Home, Roscoe Jenkins, another career crusher for the once-funny Martin Lawrence.

So I Married An Axe Murderer, a special edition of the laugh-free1993 farce that has no other purpose except to prove that Mike Myers once made a movie as bad as The Love Guru.

My suggestion is that we all pay homage to Stan Winston, the special effects master who died on Sunday at 62, by grabbing a few DVDs that represent his best animatronic creations. You could start with the movies that won him his Oscars. That would be Aliens in 1986, Terminator 2: Judgment Day in 1992 and Jurassic Park in 1993. Winston's T-Rex in that blockbuster made movie history. But it might be more of a tribute to watch a Winston film on DVD that never won the attention it deserved.

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Can we talk? Not about The Incredible Hulk—we all knew that the mean green machine would take the No. One spot at the box office. The big news was The Happening, reviled by critics and preceded by the worst buzz imaginable, ostensibly driven by moviegoers who felt burned by everything M. Night Shyamalan directed after The Sixth Sense in 1999. Me, I got way into Unbreakable, and also liked Signs and a lot of The Village. It was Lady in the Water, two years ago, that drowned Shyamalan in the poison tide of audience and critical backlash. The box-office performance of The Happening was supposed to reflect the bile. Here was a chance for ticketbuyers to stay away in droves as karmic payback for Shyamalan's failure to please with Lady in the Water. And just look what happened:

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Watch every episode of our weekly Peter Travers video podcast by subscribing via iTunes (when prompted, click “Launch application”). Every Friday, a new episode will be delivered to your iTunes. [If you don’t have iTunes, download it here.]

Where do you look for something to knock you out of your summer-movie funk? Not The Incredible Hulk, which looks like a giant green beach ball — even with a rage bug up its air hole. And not The Happening, featuring Mark Wahlberg as a science teacher scanning the skies for an airborne virus when the real mystery is how many times M. Night Shyamalan thinks he can go back to the Sixth Sense well.

Time to go interactive. That's right, me the movie critic is actually telling you to switch to video games until Hollywood makes more exciting movies. Spawned by Rockstar Games over three and a half years with a crew that topped 1,000 and a cost that tickled $100 million, Grand Theft Auto IV has been raking it in since its April 29th debut ($500 million in its first week alone; no film or music launch beats that).

Now, after my total immersion in GTA IV on PlayStation 3 (it's also released on Xbox 360), I'm here to tell you why. It's a hell of a game (maybe not the Citizen Kane of the form, like many game reviews claim), and in terms of action, thrills, imagination and innovation, GTA IV has it all over the pablum currently passing for ingenuity at the multiplex. (Note to the moral hand-wringers: Yes, GTA IV is brutal, bloody, debased, debauched and likely to corrupt the innocent after, say, 400 hours of play. But let's keep the innocent out of this.)

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It's big news when an animated movie aimed at tykes cuts into Adam Sandler's fan base and whups his ass. That's what happened this weekend when Kung Fu Panda, with Jack Black doing the voice of a roly-poly Chinese bear, took in $60 million from 4,114 theaters, leaving Sandler's You Don't Mess With the Zohan to eat its dust with $40 million from 3,462 theaters. OK, $40 million is nothing to blow hummus at, it's only the fifth Sandler movie to debut at that mark (The Longest Yard is the No. One Sandler opening at $48 million). But who could have guessed that 71 percent of the Panda audience would be over 17 and that 51 percent would be over 25? Also, Panda won much better reviews, 85 percent favorable according to the rottentomatoes Website, as opposed to 35 percent favorable for Zohan, starring Sandler as a Mossad agent who chucks commando work to cut and style hair in New York. Sharp idea for a comedy with a sting—and Sandler is quite good in it— but oh the sloppy execution. Now that Sandler is stuck with a panda's sloppy seconds, it might be time to consider a few questions: Is Sandler talented?

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