With a worldwide box-office gross of $360 million, Fox's "Alvin and the Chipmunks" landed among the top 10 money-earning movies of last year. So it's not surprising that there's talk of a sequel. Don't expect Jason Lee to be involved, though.

"I don't know if I'm going to do that. I think I'm going to leave the first one alone," says the "My Name is Earl" star, who played the Chipmunks' de facto dad, Dave Seville, in the live-action version of the vintage cartoon. "I definitely want to do more film work, but the kind of thing I haven't done in a while — or something I haven't done yet. I want to do something very character-driven. I loved working with Cameron Crowe on 'Almost Famous' and 'Vanilla Sky, and Lawrence Kasdan on 'Mumford.'"

Lee notes that he was on track to do a feature of that ilk last summer, "which would have been awesome," but his plans were thrown a curve by the writers' strike. So was the "My Name is Earl" schedule, which contributed to the show winding up with some offbeat episodes — even by "Earl" standards — in which Earl was in a coma.

Now, "It's good because we're back to the list this season," notes Jason of Earl's famous karma list of wrongs for which he needs to atone. "Not that we ever really left the list, but there were a lot of really different things going on — Earl going to prison, 'Bad Earl' quitting the list, Earl in a coma. All that stuff was a lot of fun. We started it because, at the end of season one, we started thinking, 'Are we giving enough to the audience to invest in?' With a show like 'Dexter,' for example — which is my favorite show — you have to watch every single episode, or you miss something. So we thought of doing it in a more serialized way. But now we've come full circle doing something new every week so fans never know what to expect."

MEANWHILE: With guest stars including Seth Green and David Arquette,

"Earl" creator Greg Garcia believes, "We're doing episodes that are better than we've ever done. I just wish more people were watching it. It seems like everything in TV is down a little bit," he observes. "Earl" started its new season a couple weeks ahead of its companion show in the 8 p.m. hour, NBC's new "Kath & Kim." "In one way it shows respect for us, that they started the season double pumping with 'Earls' — but in another way, well, you want to be on when people are watching," Garcia says. "But I'm not complaining about it. This is just the nature of the business."

THE BIG SCREEN SCENE: Dominic Cooper, who is best known for his performance in the critically acclaimed play "The History Boys," is quickly becoming the newest British "It Guy" as he recently starred in "Mamma Mia" and is now on screens playing Keira Knightley's steamy love interest in "The Duchess," in which Ralph Fiennes also stars. Cooper also just wrapped the movie "An Education" with another legendary British performer, Emma Thompson. And, he tells us, "I may do a play with Helen Mirren at the end of the year, but I'm not sure yet. It'd be great to get back on stage."

The 30-year-old actor admits he never expected to be working alongside some of the world's most respected actors at this point in his career. "It's one of those things that's ingrained in you at drama school, that you might not work, and when you do find work, it might not always be with incredible people."

He notes that observing the greats is an education in itself. Critics have heaped kudos on Fiennes' performance as Knightley's cold, distant husband in "The Duchess," for instance, and Cooper is definitely on that bandwagon. "Ralph brought that character to life and made him so truthful. On paper I used to read that character and think, 'How could he treat his wife like that?' The way in which Ralph plays him, you in some ways have sympathy for him — and I found it astounding that he could achieve that. You just learn a lot when you're working with people like that."

PURR-FECT TIMING: Jack McBrayer, whose earnest 'n' sunshiny NBC page character, Kenneth, is one of the highlights of "30 Rock," is doing double duty of late in the big screen "Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore" with Chris O'Donnell. Announcement stories refer to Jack and Chris as the movie's two leads, but Jack tells us, "I have a small little part as a not-so-great magician, the owner of one of the cats. I was in Canada shooting for a couple of days, and I'll go back again in November." Right now, he has his hands full with the multi-Emmy-winning Tina Fey show. "There's a lot of fun stuff coming up this season," he says. And recalling Emmy night, he says, "We're so proud of the show that we do. Everybody was in very high spirits that night, from all the awards and from all the high spirits we had ingested."

ENDQUOTE: His intense "Battle in Seattle" movie now launched, actor-cum-filmmaker Stuart Townsend laughs that maybe for him it'll be "a romantic comedy up next. No, I have a few projects in development — seven ideas I have that are very different from 'Battle in Seattle.' A couple of them are non-political, though in some ways they're socio-political. We live in a political world, like it or not."

With reports by Emily Feimster.

To find out more about Marilyn Beck and Stacy Jenel Smith and read their past columns, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

COPYRIGHT 2008 MARILYN BECK AND STACY JENEL SMITH

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