Five or six years after they propelled films like "Anchorman" and "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" to box-office success, Paul Rudd and Steve Carell are teaming up again in July's "Dinner for Schmucks," for which a trailer was released this week.

A remake of the French comedy "Le dîner de Cons" (a hilarious movie we happened to watch in French class?), the film is about a group of colleagues who host a monthly dinner during which they compete to see who can bring the biggest idiot to the meal.

In the film, Rudd plays Tim, a man seeking a promotion who learns that to secure a job bump, he will have to attend said ethically dubiousdinner. When he literally runs into Barry (Carell) -- a dork with a bad haircut who likes to drink Silk-brand milk straight out of the carton while watching animal programs on TV -- he thinks he's got his man. That is, until his friend finds out about the plan, and, not surprisingly, disapproves. There's also another schmuck, played by Zach Galifanakis, who apparently reads minds and sports a creepy beard.

It's nearly impossible not to laugh when Carell is playing zany, awkward characters (think "Virgin"). Rudd also seems to be reprising a role he knows well: the well-meaning straight man  (think "I Love You Man"). The two character types do seem a bit tired at this point, and we want to dismiss the film as more of the same easy fodder -- but the trailer still leaves us hopeful. Maybe it's Carell's full-on commitment to playing a weirdo or the wild card that is Galifanakis,  but based on the trailer, we're buying a ticket.

-- Amy Kaufman

Photo: Paul Rudd and Steve Carell star in "Dinner for Schmucks." Credit: DreamWorks.

DreamWorks announced this afternoon that it would be turning the big 2009 summer read "The Help" into a film.

Kathryn Stockett's New York Times bestseller is a triptych that tells of the relationship between black housekeepers and their white employers in 1960s Mississippi (two of the central characters are housekeepers and a third is a young white woman who returns home after college to find her childhood housekeeper has left). A childhood friend of the author, Tate Taylor (also a star of Sundance hit "Winter's Bone") initially acquired the rights, wrote the screenplay and will direct, while Chris Columbus is one of several producers on the film.

Hollywood has a long history of taking the racially charged South and mining it for compelling drama, from "Gone With the Wind" to "Mississippi Burning" to "The Color Purple." Some more contemporary stabs such as "Beloved" were mixed, but with "The Blind Side" becoming one of the biggest sleeper hits of 2009, you pretty much can't go wrong in Hollywood these days pitching a story situated in that general realm.

-- Steven Zeitchik