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Our industry sources have checked in today with word on a number of major upcoming Paramount DVD and Blu-ray Disc releases. Here's some of what you can look forward to (and when to look for them)...

The Love Guru (DVD & Blu-ray) - 9/16
Iron Man (DVD & Blu-ray) - 9/30
Indiana Jones IV (DVD for sure, Blu-ray undecided) - October
Kung Fu Panda (DVD & Blu-ray) - 11/18
Tropic Thunder (DVD & Blu-ray) - December

Here's a glimpse at some of the catalog Blu-ray titles on the way from Paramount and DreamWorks...

Anchorman: Legend of Ron Burgundy - 9/23
Old School - 9/23
Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd - 10/21
Stardust - December
Into the Wild - December

Also, we've learned that 20th Century Fox is working on the following titles for Blu-ray Disc release before the end of the year (or early in 2009 - these are in addition to catalog BD titles that we've mentioned previously)...

Daredevil: Director's Cut
Firefly: The Complete Series
The X-Men Trilogy
The Planet of the Apes Collection
The Deception
Jewel of the Nile: Special Edition
Dude, Where's My Car?
What Happens in Vegas

We'll post more information on these titles as it becomes available. As always, keep in mind that these titles and dates are unofficial and are subject to change until they're actually announced by the studio.

The last time Mike Myers starred in a comic film creation all his own, the entirely forgettable "Austin Powers in Goldmember," the flick opened to a stellar $73 million weekend at the box office. That was six years ago and as we just learned over the weekend, a lot can change in that kind of time.

"The Love Guru" opened on Friday to the kind of reviews usually reserved for movies starring Larry the Cable Guy, not to mention an embarrassing 4th-place finish. Perhaps no one sunk the knife deeper than A.O. Scott in "The New York Times" who called it, "an experience that makes you wonder if you will ever laugh again." Wonder if Myers turned and mugged for the camera after he read that one.

So this begs a few questions, the key one being…what the hell happened? Did Mike Myers suddenly become unfunny? Did our collective taste change? Is his new comic creation a little too familar (I'm going with this one)? Or is Justin Timberlake to blame?

Laugh all you want but the Timberlake curse seems to have some power to it? Eagerly awaited follow-up from the maker of "Donnie Darko"? That would be "Southland Tales," the film that spurred a Cannes audience to boo and boo and boo some more. The follow-up to the universally hailed "Hustle & Flow"? That'd be "Black Snake Moan," the project that tied Christina Ricci to a radiator. And now this!

George Carlin mourned as a counterculture hero

By KEITH ST. CLAIR – 1 hour ago

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Acerbic standup comedian and satirist George Carlin, whose staunch defense of free speech in his most famous routine "Seven Words You Can Never Say On Television" led to a key Supreme Court ruling on obscenity, has died.

Carlin, who had a history of heart trouble, went into St. John's Health Center in Santa Monica on Sunday afternoon complaining of chest pain and died later that evening, said his publicist, Jeff Abraham. He had performed as recently as last weekend at the Orleans Casino and Hotel in Las Vegas. He was 71.

"He was a genius and I will miss him dearly," Jack Burns, who was the other half of a comedy duo with Carlin in the early 1960s, told The Associated Press.

Carlin's jokes constantly breached the accepted boundaries of comedy and language, particularly with his routine on the "Seven Words" — all of which are taboo on broadcast TV and radio to this day.

When he uttered all seven at a show in Milwaukee in 1972, he was arrested on charges of disturbing the peace, freed on $150 bail and exonerated when a Wisconsin judge dismissed the case, saying it was indecent but citing free speech and the lack of any disturbance.

When the words were later played on a New York radio station, they resulted in a 1978 Supreme Court ruling upholding the government's authority to sanction stations for broadcasting offensive language during hours when children might be listening.

"So my name is a footnote in American legal history, which I'm perversely kind of proud of," he told The Associated Press earlier this year.

Despite his reputation as unapologetically irreverent, Carlin was a television staple through the decades, serving as host of the "Saturday Night Live" debut in 1975 — noting on his Web site that he was "loaded on cocaine all week long" — and appearing some 130 times on "The Tonight Show."

He produced 23 comedy albums, 14 HBO specials, three books, a couple of TV shows and appeared in several movies, from his own comedy specials to "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure" in 1989 — a testament to his range from cerebral satire and cultural commentary to downright silliness (and sometimes hitting all points in one stroke).

"Why do they lock gas station bathrooms?" he once mused. "Are they afraid someone will clean them?"

He won four Grammy Awards, each for best spoken comedy album, and was nominated for five Emmy awards. On Tuesday, it was announced that Carlin was being awarded the 11th annual Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, which will be presented Nov. 10 in Washington and broadcast on PBS.

Carlin started his career on the traditional nightclub circuit in a coat and tie, pairing with Burns to spoof TV game shows, news and movies. Perhaps in spite of the outlaw soul, "George was fairly conservative when I met him," said Burns, describing himself as the more left-leaning of the two. It was a degree of separation that would reverse when they came upon Lenny Bruce, the original shock comic, in the early '60s.

"We were working in Chicago, and we went to see Lenny, and we were both blown away," Burns said, recalling the moment as the beginning of the end for their collaboration if not their close friendship. "It was an epiphany for George. The comedy we were doing at the time wasn't exactly groundbreaking, and George knew then that he wanted to go in a different direction."

That direction would make Carlin as much a social commentator and philosopher as comedian, a position he would relish through the years.

"The whole problem with this idea of obscenity and indecency, and all of these things — bad language and whatever — it's all caused by one basic thing, and that is: religious superstition," Carlin told the AP in a 2004 interview. "There's an idea that the human body is somehow evil and bad and there are parts of it that are especially evil and bad, and we should be ashamed. Fear, guilt and shame are built into the attitude toward sex and the body. ... It's reflected in these prohibitions and these taboos that we have."

Carlin was born on May 12, 1937, and grew up in the Morningside Heights section of Manhattan, raised by a single mother. After dropping out of high school in the ninth grade, he joined the Air Force in 1954. He received three court-martials and numerous disciplinary punishments, according to his official Web site.

While in the Air Force he started working as an off-base disc jockey at a radio station in Shreveport, La., and after receiving a general discharge in 1957, took an announcing job at WEZE in Boston.

"Fired after three months for driving mobile news van to New York to buy pot," his Web site says.

From there he went on to a job on the night shift as a deejay at a radio station in Fort Worth, Texas. Carlin also worked variety of temporary jobs including a carnival organist and a marketing director for a peanut brittle.

In 1960, he left with Burns, a Texas radio buddy, for Hollywood to pursue a nightclub career as comedy team Burns & Carlin. He left with $300, but his first break came just months later when the duo appeared on Jack Paar's "Tonight Show."

Carlin said he hoped to would emulate his childhood hero, Danny Kaye, the kindly, rubber-faced comedian who ruled over the decade that Carlin grew up in — the 1950s — with a clever but gentle humor reflective of its times.

Only problem was, it didn't work for him, and they broke up by 1962.

"I was doing superficial comedy entertaining people who didn't really care: Businessmen, people in nightclubs, conservative people. And I had been doing that for the better part of 10 years when it finally dawned on me that I was in the wrong place doing the wrong things for the wrong people," Carlin reflected recently as he prepared for his 14th HBO special, "It's Bad For Ya."

Eventually Carlin lost the buttoned-up look, favoring the beard, ponytail and all-black attire for which he came to be known.

But even with his decidedly adult-comedy bent, Carlin never lost his childlike sense of mischief, even voicing kid-friendly projects like episodes of the TV show "Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends" and the spacey Volkswagen bus Fillmore in the 2006 Pixar hit "Cars."

Carlin's first wife, Brenda, died in 1997. He is survived by wife Sally Wade; daughter Kelly Carlin McCall; son-in-law Bob McCall; brother Patrick Carlin; and sister-in-law Marlene Carlin.