It's official! According to Variety, the School of Rock band is getting back together. Jack Black is returning to reprise his role as Dewey Finn, Richard Linklater will be sitting in the director's chair again, and Mike White is writing the script. Talk of a sequel has been flying for weeks, so this really comes as no surprise.

In School of Rock 2: America Rocks, Finn will lead a group of summer school students on a cross-country field trip that delves into the history of rock and roll. Expect lots of cameos as the students study the roots of blues, rap, and country. I'm putting my money on B.B. King already and Snoop Dogg. Maybe Bono and Bruce Springsteen, too. (Actually, that would be pretty cool.)

I'm of two minds on this. I was surprised at how much I enjoyed the first movie; in fact think it was probably the first Jack Black movie I actually liked. But does it really lend itself to a sequel? While it's encouraging that the entire team is coming back, we all know that's never a guarantee of comedic success. How many awesome comedy sequels can you name?

Plus, there was that whole story about White weeping as he wrote the script. I'm still weirded out by that. Barring a fiery schoolbus crash, or the children discovering that Britney Spears was allowed to cover the Rolling Stones, why would you shed tears? Hmm. I think my official position has shifted from lukewarm to DO NOT WANT. What about you?

Back in May, Jack Black was chillin' in Cannes, talking about Angelina's twins, and then letting loose some surprising news: a script was written for School of Rock 2. He didn't say much else, so it seemed like one of those early Arrested Development rumors -- something that could be great, but was so vague that it could easily be nothing more than a rumor or a hope.

But it's not! Defamer reports that on Sunday, School of Rock writer Mike White was part of a screenwriting panel at LAFF with Catherine Hardwicke and Craig Gillespie. He said: "I actually just completed a draft of what's potentially the sequel [to School of Rock], and I'm still, like, crying as I'm writing the script. I try to come at it from a personal place..."

Wait. A sequel -- a real sequel -- has been written, and it made him cry? He wouldn't say what it's about, but that he just turned it in, and doesn't know if it will even get made. Perhaps they were just tears of personal happiness, but he did go on to discuss his writing process and said: "But at least now I have a better sense of what it was we created -- what worked and what didn't. I can kind of reboot it." Reboot? What!?

What say you? Are you ready for a rebooted School of Rock?

Today YouTube launched a new section of its site titled The YouTube Screening Room, which it calls a "platform for films from around the world to find the audiences they deserve." Here, they will showcase four short films every two weeks and will even offer an occasional feature. Some of the films have been previously screened at film festivals and some have been nominated for or have won an Academy Award. But others will be premiering on the site. Apparently, the filmmakers will be paid a percentage of YouTube's ad revenue based on views and each film will also feature a "Buy Now" button so that you can purchase that film or other films.

Today's debuts include Are You the Favorite Person of Anybody?, a 2005 short written by Miranda July (Me and You and Everyone We Know), directed by Miguel Arteta (The Good Girl) and starring John C. Reilly, Mike White and July. I've embedded it above for your viewing pleasure. The other three are The Danish Poet, which won the Oscar for Best Animated Short in 2007, Love and War, which is a stop motion opera from Sweden, and Our Time is Up, which was nominated for Best Live Action Short in 2006 and which stars Kevin Pollak.

Something in the water over in France has got Jack Black loose-lipped. First he lets it out that Angelina is indeed having twins. Now, according to film-industry.biz, he's claiming there's a sequel to School of Rock in the works. There's even a script already written, and Black is anxious to return to the role of music teacher Dewey Finn. But it's not a done deal just yet. As he explained from the Cannes Film Festival: "In a few weeks we have to decide if we go through with the project or not."

I may be one of the few people who didn't love the original School of Rock, but then, I'm one of those curmudgeonly fellows who can't stand Jack Black in anything. Of course, after watching his Eddie Murphy parody in the awesome new R-rated trailer for Tropic Thunder, I'm starting to think he could do some right in the film world. Or, maybe he has that one really funny moment and a whole lot of obnoxious moments, as usual.

Thanks to the wonderful Whit Stillman, we've gotten lots of elite Manhattanites in the eighties. Younger folks have acted like 40-year-olds in Metropolitan, and young yuppies have pulled the last little bits of dancing wonder from The Last Days of Disco. But now the whole rich eighties scene is switching coasts and coming from the hands of Mike White.

The Hollywood Reporter has posted that Scott Rudin and Miramax are bringing Sean Wilsey's high-society memoir called Oh the Glory of it All to the big screen, with Mike White signed on to produce and adapt it. Glory focuses on Wilsey's strange youth in San Francisco during the 1980s, tracking "his journey from dubious role models to a tour of boarding schools and an Italian 'therapeutic community.'" His father was a strict and distant man who drove Wilsey to rebellion, a man who divorced Wilsey's mother to marry her best friend. His mother, meanwhile, was the belle of the social scene, a woman who entertained everyone from movie stars to Black Panthers and inspired a character in Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City. But she also proved to be devoid of certain motherly traits, like, say, keeping her son safe -- she attempted to convince him to commit suicide with her.

Obviously, this is retro dysfunction at its finest, one that could make for a very funny movie in the hands of White, as long as there are actors to pull it off well. So, who would you cast?

It seems to be the time of questionable lawsuits. Last week, Scott Weinberg posted about the Canadian author, Rebecca Eckler, who is suing Judd Apatow for similarities between her book and his latest -- Knocked Up. Now, Mike White is getting sued for his recent Year of the Dog. It seems that his former friend, Laura Kightlinger, says that the idea came from her, although the claim seems a little weak. She's filed suit alleging that she gave him a script called We Are Animals (about a woman who loves rescuing cats), which became his doggie film.

Now, if you caught James Rocchi's interview with White in April, you might remember where the writer/director says that he got his material -- a stray cat he had inherited who had died: "this cat's death just totally spun me out in a way that I totally did not expect... I just thought, 'Well, that's an interesting idea for a movie premise -- somebody who has a relationship with a pet, and the loss of that changes their life in a way.'" If this is the case, I can't see her script being the source, unless he follows her plot closely. However, White says: "They are totally different scripts. I know there is a similarity in the sense that (the female leads) both have pets that they care about, but beyond that, everything she is saying that is similar seems like a real stretch to me." Meanwhile, Kightlinger's lawyer says: "There was an expectation that if she told him her idea and he was going to use it in some way, she would be paid and she would also be involved in the project." So, they'll continue going through a he-said, she-said with broken ex-friend egos, and potentially some undisclosed settlement.

In Mike White's directorial debut, Year of the Dog, Molly Shannon plays Peggy – a cube-stuck, quiet woman whose main source of joy is her beagle, Pencil ... who dies. White's best known for broad screenplays (he wrote School of Rock, and co-wrote Nacho Libre), but his scripts The Good Girl and Chuck and Buck have a smaller-wrought, more intimate feel to them. In many ways, Year of the Dog is a bridge between the two seemingly separate threads in his work. White, in person, is unassuming and mild; talking about his work, though, the level of thought he puts into his scripts becomes slowly and firmly apparent. Cinematical spoke with White in San Francisco. The technically-minded can download the entire interview here.

Cinematical: Year of the Dog came out of a pretty personal place for you -- The inciting incident being a stray cat had been living in your backyard literally dying in your arms. How long a relationship did you have with this cat?

Mike White: A couple years -- I had sort of inherited it when I moved into this house that I had bought. And I didn't have any animals up to that point -- I mean, when I was a little kid, I did -- I didn't even really realize how attached I had become to this cat. Over the years it sort of became my pet; it had come in, slept with me -- I was really just super-stressed, and kind of over-worked, and under-slept, and this cat's death just totally spun me out in a way that I totally did not expect. I just had a really emotional reaction to it, and it just gave me the idea – later, after the dust had settled – I just thought, "Well, that's an interesting idea for a movie premise – somebody who has a relationship with a pet, and the loss of that changes their life in away."

Cinematical: And you're not a psychologist, but obviously, you've thought about this to a certain degree – do you think that people put a lot of emotion into their relationship with their pets, because culturally, we're not supposed to it with work?

MW: Right. I think a lot of people do ... In the movie, people put a lot of their eggs in different ... I mean, Peggy's boss is really into his job, the parents with the kid, her friend at work who's obsessed with her boyfriend. ... Whether it's animals, or -- with animals, because they are a source of affection and because the relationship is relatively uncomplicated – there's not a lot of the bargaining that goes on in human relationships, and the needs of animals are pretty simple: being fed, and ...

Cinematical: Pick up the poop. ...

MW: Right. I think the movie – while it does sort of take her animal passion or animal love seriously, it also does gets into her projection on to the animals in her life and how some of it is a little absurd and kind of misguided at some points, too.

Maybe you're related to one or perhaps you just dealt with one at a recent dinner party, but they're all over the place these days: the animal people. The ones who'll throw speeches at you about animal rights this and cruelty-free that -- and if you're someone who really loves chowing down on a cheeseburger or a chicken salad, those folks can sometimes come off as obnoxious, pious and fairly insufferable. But y'know, those people do have their heart in the right place -- and more often than not they're absolutely right about certain important things. What Mike White's Year of the Dog does is give you a little perspective into how an animal lover can transform into a fairly militant activist.

What seems trivial and silly to one person might be really important to another, and who are we to dismiss someone else's fiery passion? Plus, c'mon, who doesn't love dogs? Admirable for the way in which it's both snarky and sincere, Year of the Dog looks and feels like a fairly standard "situation" comedy. Molly Shannon plays a lonely-yet-chipper single woman who is clearly past her romantic prime, and one who spends her nights doting on a beautiful little doggy called Pencil. But when her beloved canine ingests some poison during a late-night pee-pee run, poor Peggy is beside herself with grief. It's a testament to writer/director Mike White's talents that Peggy's miseries are shown as humorously tragic, but also simply, plainly painful.

I was not one of the many who were bowled over by the slow, curveball charms of Napoleon Dynamite. Sure, Napoleon Dynamite was fun and quotable and had a certain lunatic bravery to it. But Napoleon Dynamite was also plotless and meandering, and had a little of that back-and-to-the-left feel to it --  as if it was looking down on its characters, as opposed to looking out through them. The nice thing about mixed and incendiary indie debuts is that they usually lead to subsequent films, where you get a sense of if the director/writer/star has, in fact, more than one movie in them. So it is with Nacho Libre, the second film from Napoleon Dynamite's director and co-writer Jared Hess. Hess is back behind the helm here, and this time around he and regular co-writer (and wife) Jerusha Hess even have the benefit of a script polish by Mike White (Chuck and Buck, School of Rock) for their film. Is Nacho Libre a worthy follow-up to Napoleon Dynamite? Well, part of answering that question involves how worthy you think Napoleon Dynamite is in the first place. ...

Jack Black stars as the kindly, dim and warmhearted Ignacio, a monk-in-training at an abbey/orphanage in rural Mexico. Ignacio makes meals for the orphans out of scraps, and is pretty much low man on the abbey's totem pole in terms of duties: He doesn't even rate conversation time with the new cute nun, Sister Encarnación (Ana de la Reguar). Ignacio has but one dream: To be a luchador, a masked wrestler. And once it dawns on him that he can wrestle and use the money to buy the orphans better food, well, bring on the tights. ...

The stars in Hollywood aren't the only ones who get face-lifts. Paramount Classics is having so much work done, you probably won't recognize it after today. The art-house division of Paramount Pictures, founded by the studio in 1998 to compete in the booming indie-film market, had a big shake-up last fall that resulted in different leadership. Now John Lesher, the company's new president, is announcing his decision to break up the division and rename it Paramount Vantage. The old label is not going away completely, though. Paramount Classics will exist within Paramount Vantage mostly for the acquisition and distribution of foreign films and documentaries. The new company will be handling the rest of the art-house category including low-budget comedies and horror films. Its first release will be Babel, which is premiering at Cannes this month and comes out in theaters this October.

As much as the changes sound confusing and unnecessary, Lesher's plans are pretty smart. The name Paramount Classics -- it always seemed to imply its films are old -- was a bad idea on the part of Paramount, which built the division from scratch while most studios were buying existing indie-film distributors. Also, as a major player in the art-house market, the company has never seen the level of success that its competitors have, and starting fresh with a new name could distance Paramount Vantage from its weak past. Already on deck for distribution are new films from Noah Baumbach, the Coen brothers, Paul Thomas Anderson and the directorial debut of Mike White.