"Good teacher ... he really seems to care. About what, I have no idea."

Earlier this morning I was Twittering (Tweeteling? Tweeting?) about how much it has to suck for those kids going back to school today. Not sure what the days are in your city or state, but here in New York today marked the first day of school for kids across the city. After a long, hot summer, some kids might look forward to a little structured learning (nerds!), while others simply adore showing up to a new year of school in whatever slick, expensive outfits their parents bought for them last month during that dreaded "We're going to the mall to buy you new clothes and you're going to shut up and like it" sorta trip.

In honor of this glorious time of the year (it'll be alright freshman -- just get through the first couple of weeks, and it's smooth sailing from there), your friends at Cinematical want to share a clip from one of our beloved back to school flicks called, well, Back to School. Chances are you will get at least one nutty teacher this semester (or next), and so in order to feel better about the whole thing, watch Sam Kinison at work here. Guaranteed your teacher ain't half as crazy as this lunatic.

How many days until winter break?

Summer blockbuster season kicked off the first weekend of May for North America, but in other parts of the world it's just getting started. Egypt is defending its cinema turf against the pending Hollywood invasion by unleashing more than two dozen locally-produced films into theaters. It's not just "locals vs. Hollywood," though. Egypt Today says that the two largest local distributors are battling each other, both hoping to lure audiences with comedies: Al-Arabia with Karkar and Oscar/El-Nasr/El-Massa with the big-budget ("a whopping LE 27 million," or about 4.7 million US dollars) Morgan Ahmed Morgan. The latter film stars Adel Iman, in his late 60s and still hugely popular, as a wealthy businessman who never attended college. He goes back to school to impress his children and meets a lovely lady professor ... wait a minute, this sounds suspiciously like Rodney Dangerfield in Back to School! Chalk up another remake (albeit an apparently unofficial one) to the global blockbuster madness.

Speaking of unofficial remakes, I thought I spotted another one when I read that actor/singer Hani Ramzi would be starring in An Officer and Four Cats. It sounded like some strange cross-breed romance in which the Egyptian Richard Gere would cradle four felines in his arms and carry them triumphantly out of a factory -- until I learned that "The 4 Cats" is a Lebanese girl group of singers. Hmmm. (Actually, they look pretty hot. I'd probably go watch this one.) Without knowing the quality of the films, I'm rooting for audiences to support local cinema for the sake of diversity, if nothing else. Only six or seven foreign titles will be released during the Egyptian summer, according to Variety, and they face their own challenges. For example: how will The Simpsons Movie be received, since the original series has never aired there? One thing is fairly certain: Evan Almighty "probably won't see release in Egypt due to local touchiness over religious subject matter," which may be the understatement of the year.

He wasn't directly associated with the movies, but Kurt Vonnegut was a literary icon whose work and persona often carried over into the cinema, even when he wasn't actually involved. The author, who wrote some of America's funniest and most poignant pieces of fiction and non-fiction, died Wednesday night in New York City, and I have to say that I'm more broken up about it than I have ever been with any celebrity's passing. His wife, photographer Jill Krementz, said that he had fallen several weeks ago and suffered irreversible brain injuries.

A few of his books were made into movies, despite the fact that his prose is more about telling than it is about showing, thereby making his works unlikely candidates for the visual medium. Surprisingly, some, like Slaughterhouse-Five and Mother Night, are terrific. Unfortunately, others, like Breakfast of Champions and Slapstick (Of Another Kind) are completely wretched. There have been others, mostly based on short stories, mostly made-for-television and mostly unavailable. And there have long been talks of adaptations of the novels Cat's Cradle, which Leonardo DiCaprio is trying to make, and Sirens of Titan, which Mother Night screenwriter Robert B. Weide has been interested in for many years.

One of the most random links Vonnegut had to the movies, though, came with the Rodney Dangerfield guilty pleasure Back to School. The writer made one of the most memorable cameos ever, appearing as himself in a sequence in which Dangerfield's character gets an "F" on a paper about Vonnegut. The joke: Vonnegut himself was paid to write the paper. Also, interestingly enough, Back to School co-star Keith Gordon went on to direct Mother Night. Another strange connection came in the late 1990s, when a lot of so-so teen movies were explicitly referencing Vonnegut or his books. I can only remember this definitely being done in Varsity Blues, Disturbing Behavior and Can't Hardly Wait, but I could swear there were more.

Starting in 2008, movies are going to get a whole lot cheesier. At the beginning of that year, a new tax incentive in Wisconsin will draw film productions to the state in hopes of building a stronger movie industry there. With one of the more generous breaks out there, Wisconsin will be competing with other states that have benefited from such programs -- and they seem to work. After Louisiana offered an incentive, Hollywood produced a great number of movies there (think of how many New Orleans-set films you saw in the past few years).

Aside from being attracted to the savings, though, filmmakers don't have a lot to look forward to in Wisconsin. There is a lack of soundstages, a lack of crews and a lack of good hotels. Plus, I hear it gets so cold in parts of the state that they have school closings on low temperature days. There have been some memorable films shot in Wisconsin, of course: Back to School; Mr. 3000; The Omen II and III (aka Damien and The Final Conflict, respectively). Well, producers, at least remember the state if you have any scenes calling for a surplus of dairy cows.