Dog days or flick finds? What to expect from the movies of August

Starting off with some funny, the banner above that welcomed the cast of "Community" back to the set this week for the filming of season three, and was tweeted by star Joel McHale, pretty much perfectly captures the comic spirit of the show, as do two of its upcoming multi-episode guest stars.

In season three, the great Michael Kenneth Williams, aka Omar from "The Wire," will join the show as Greendale's new biology teacher (I'm laughing at that already), and in potentially even better casting, John Goodman will play the vice dean of the School of Air Conditioning Repair, the only program at Greendale that gets any kind of good recognition.

Great news all that, and keep an eye out for the return of "Community" on Sept. 22, but here today its otherwise all about the movie slate for August, a month that gets a bad rap, but still often delivers some comedies that are, if you'll forgive the truly groan-worthy pun, august. Here's a look at some of what's coming up in the next month.

Aug. 5: "The Change-Up"
For a truly funny guy, Jason Bateman has managed to make some seriously wretched "comedies" since "Arrested Development" ended, and it certainly doesn't look like this frat-boy "Freaky Friday" of sorts also starring "Green Lantern" Ryan Reynolds will do anything to change that course.

Aug. 5: "Rise of the Planet of the Apes"
When exactly did the term "prequel" become the go-to idea when movie producers are lacking anything resembling an original thought? I can't pinpoint it, but even with engaging stars such as James Franco and Freida Pinto (from "Slumdog Millionaire"), I really can't see this one as being anything but one of the most unintentionally funny movies of this summer.

Aug. 10: "The Help"
In what I think will be one of the gigantic sleeper hits for the rest of this year, Emma Stone leads the cast of this flick based on the very popular novel by Kathyrn Stockett, which I read and mostly enjoyed. She plays Eugenia "Skeeter" Phelan, an awkward Southern socialite who organizes the black maids of 1960's Jackson, Miss., led in the movie by Viola Davis, to tell their stories.

Aug. 12: "30 Minutes or Less"
For that perfect combination of clever and just plain crude, director Ruben Fleischer's follow-up to "Zombieland" should be the flick to look out for this August. In it, Jesse Eisenberg gets a bomb strapped to his chest by unsavory characters Danny McBride and Nick Swardson and is forced to rob a bank. And hijinks will surely ensue.

Aug. 19: "One Day"
I've probably seen the trailer for this flick starring Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess more than any other this summer, but that hasn't made it look any more appealing. Granted, I'm not the target audience for romantic comedies like this one about two college friends who agree to meet for one day each year of their lives. It is, however, from "An Education" director Lone Scherfig, so here's hoping I'm wrong about this one and it turns out to somehow be a winner.

Aug. 26: "Our Idiot Brother":
If the entire secret to making funny movies would be simply to stock them with funny people, this flick somehow starring Paul Rudd, Elizabeth Banks, Zooey Deschanel, Emily Mortimer, Adam Scott and Rashida Jones would be an automatic success. And if director Jesse Peretz lets Rudd be truly funny as the titular "Idiot," I'm betting it will be.

Aug. 31: "The Debt":
By far the most serious wide-release movie of the month could also be a surprisingly big hit, with Joel Madden directing an espionage thriller about a trio of retired Mossad agents (Helen Mirren, Tom Wilkinson and Ciaran Hinds) who find a celebrated 1966 mission in which they tracked down a Nazi war criminal called into question. Exactly my kind of spy games.

DVD review: "Community" season one

While watching the sometimes uneven but often very hilarious first season of NBC's Community on DVD, I had to wonder: Why don't more TV shows aiming for the funny take on college?

Teen shows often avoid it like the plague. Judd Apatow and his crew found gold - if for only one season - with Undeclared, the natural successor to Freaks and Geeks. But not until Joel McHale and his Spanish study group at Greendale Community College entered NBC's Thursday night lineup last fall has a show so successfully tapped into the contradiction that our four years or so of "higher learning" are often the silliest and most hedonistic time of people's lives.

Watching the first six or so episodes of Community, last fall and again back-to-back on DVD, I really wasn't sure NBC had a winner on its hands. One of the show's biggest assets on paper was also - at least to me - its biggest early problem: A little Joel McHale goes a long way.

His character, a former lawyer booted from his profession because he had a fraudulent college degree, has all the often-misplaced ego that he should have, but McHale just doesn't have the comic chops to make his Jeff Winger much more at all than a one-dimensional wise ass. The character would be much funnier if, like Jason Bateman's Michael Bluth on Arrested Development, he were more comically unaware of the fact that he's the king of crazy in a group that has tons of it.

It's when Community really became more of an ensemble production and tapped into all of its comedic assets - and the genuine geek bona fides of at least two of its stars - that the show really got into its groove. By the time Abed's (Danny Pudi) Dark Knight rescues McHale and a rather disastrously high Chevy Chase (dressed, naturally, as the Beastmaster) from a collapsing fort of tables and chairs at Annie's (Alison Brie) Halloween/Day of the Dead party in episode six ("Introduction to Statistics"), you knew this was like nothing else on TV right now in all the best ways.

From this turning point, Pudi's Abed and Donald Glover's Troy get a lot more screen time, and are naturally just very funny together. They also give the show its genuine geek appeal, making its frequent pop-culture spoofs hit their target much more often than they miss. It all comes together perfectly in season one when the two of them are serenading their rogue lab mouse, naturally named Fievel, to the strains of "Somewhere, Out There," as Senor Chang (the riotously funny Ken Jeong) is trying to salsa dance his way back into his ex-wife's heart to the Celtic sounds of Greene Day. This close to episode 10, "Environmental Science," is pretty much comic perfection.

And the women of Community more than hold their own in all this madness. Brie's Annie plays up her young eagerness, and finds a natural counterpart in Gillian Jacobs' prematurely jaded Britta, while Yvette Nicole Brown's Shirley turns what could have been a stock character - the overly religious black woman - into one who gives as good as she gets when the barbs really start to fly.

As the show progressed, creator Dan Harmon kept injecting it with more and more genuine political incorrectness, giving it an edge sorely missing from so much of what passes now for situational comedy. That reaches its height in the "Basic Genealogy" episode, in which Abed's darkly veiled Muslim sister gets called, in short order, a black ghost and then Phantom Menace (it's OK to admit, that's very funny), and later, in a game of Pictionary, Pierce (Chase) draws about the most offensive thing you can think of for the word "windmill." It's all so incredibly wrong that it works just right.

Community hit its real season one peak, however, with the "Modern Warfare" episode, which manages to sharply skewer just about every sci-fi/action movie cliche you can think of in the space of 22 minutes or so. From the early moment when Pudi utters the line, "Come with me if you don't want paint on your clothes," you know (or at least I did) this will be the funniest prime time moment of the 2009-10 TV season. If you've never seen this show, which has risen to the top of NBC's Thursday lineup in my book, this one episode would make the perfect introduction.

Chief among the extras in this set are the commentaries featuring cast members for every single episode, only a few of which I've had the time to get through so far. Another feature that works very well is the outtakes featured on each disc. Rather than the usual clips of characters breaking out in giggles in the middle of their lines, they spotlight the natural give and take of some truly funny people and what most makes Community a real winner: What NBC has on its hands, for as long as it wants to keep it on the air, is a genuine comedy troupe on top of its game.

And does the mojo continue into season two? So far, solidly yes. The show bagged the quickest and perhaps biggest laugh of the new season by having Glover wake up in his Spider-Man pajamas to open the season, and last week's zombie episode "Epidemiology" was as fall-down funny as the pilot for Frank Darabont's The Walking Dead was utterly terrifying (and watching them back to back, as I did on the DVR, is a real trip.) The bottom line: Community is much more fun than I ever remember college being, and well worth tuning in for every Thursday night or on DVD.

In honor of Henry Gibson, and one whale of a good night of TV

You know, it's funny the things you learn about people only after they die. Take Henry Gibson, who just died at age 73 after a short battle with cancer.

In my case, it's not that we're both great actors (though I would certainly argue that he was.) It's that we're both proud graduates of the Catholic University of America. For a school with no particularly famous drama department, I'd say it's at least a bit of an accomplishment that it can count Gibson, Bob Newhart and Ed McMahon (and surely some other stars I'm forgetting) among its alumni (in fact, just a quick bit of research reveals we can also claim Susan Sarandon, Jon Voight and, perhaps best of all, John Slattery of "Mad Men" too.)

But back to Mr. Gibson. Since death comes in threes (with Patrick Swayze and Mary Travers of Peter, Paul and Mary also dying this week), I suppose it had to happen, and of the three his death saddens me most of all. Though I suppose he's best known as a fixture on "Rowan and Martin's Laugh in," he went on to more than 100 TV and film roles, most notably in four of Robert Altman's '70s films, and "Nashville," easily one of my favorite flicks, in particular.

Gibson made a lot of his living playing for laughs (he was even half of a comedy duo called The Hillbillies while at CUA), and he easily could have done that again for the key role of Haven Hamilton in "Nashville." But though Hamilton gets plenty of laughs in the flick, it's the pride he brought to the role that made it ring true.

He was also, in one of the iconic roles in children's movies (at least to me) the voice of Wilbur in "Charlotte's Web" (the delightful cartoon, not the remake I still haven't bothered to see), and in one of his silliest but still memorable roles, he played the (as it's actually credited) "Head Nazi" in "The Blues Brothers." R.I.P. indeed, Mr. Gibson.

OK, enough of that. In much more happy news, it seems that the writing/directing team of Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck have set their next project, and they're about to bring Zach Galifianakis along with them.

Boden and Fleck gained a bit of instant fame with their much-lauded first feature, "Half Nelson," but in my book they did much better with this year's "Sugar." The drama about a Dominican baseball player trying to make it to the Major League spent most of the first half of this year as my favorite flick of 2009, before being knocked from its perch first by "The Hurt Locker" and then by "Inglourious Basterds." A quick Amazon check reveals that it's available on video now, and I really can't recommend a rental any higher than I do this one.

But on to the new stuff. "It's Kind of a Funny Story" will be about a teenage boy who is sent to a mental institution after struggling with depression. There, he's put in the adult ward, where he meets all kinds of characters (Galifianakis included) and even girl to flirt with (Emma Roberts.) Sounds a little meh to me, but I have full faith in this duo, so I can definitely say bring it on.

Switching gears a bit, to TV, I was more than a little happy to see that Jay Leno managed to lose 36 percent of his audience in one night, but also not surprised to find out that NBC still tried to pitch this as "good" news, just proving that they will leave this hopefully quickly sinking vessel out at sea until the last deck chair has fallen overboard.

On a much more pleasant TV subject (though still largely NBC), this would have to be my favorite TV night of the fall season. On NBC, I don't think I'll bother to tune in for the "Saturday Night Live" clip show that will start the night at 8, but after that you can definitely count me in for the returns of "Parks and Recreation" and "The Office" (hearty huzzah!) and then the premiere of "Community" with Joel McHale and, somehow, Chevy Chase. As you can see from the clip below, word of Pam's pregnancy starts to flow around "The Office" tonight, along with a slew of other crazy rumors. In short order, Pam and Jim will apparently try to run off for a quiet wedding at Niagara Falls, but after Michael gives everyone a long weekend off, find they're nowhere near alone. Comedy bliss.

And best of all tonight will be the return of "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia," easily my favorite TV sitcom of the moment. In tonight's episode, "The Gang Exploits the Mortgage Crisis," Frank, Mac and Dennis try their hand at real estate, while Dee arranges to be a surrogate mother for a wealthy couple. And Charlie? Who knows, but I can't wait to find out.

As promised, I'll close with this NBC preview of tonight's "The Office" season premiere. Peace out.