Screenhead

Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds is ruling the box office this week.  It appears everyone is enjoying this film.  And, I am quite impressed with Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince is still in the top ten after opening over two months ago. 

 Results:

1. Inglourious Basterds
$53,703,427 — $53,719,188

2. District 9
$25,522,506 — $80,113,277

3. GI Joe
$16,405,435 — $124,436,382

4. The Time Traveler’s Wife
$14,024,899 — $41,448,148

5. Julie & Julia
$13,304,097 — $63,592,388

6. Shorts
$8,695,352 — $8,695,352

7. G-Force
$5,845,587 — $108,955,542

8. Harry Potter And The Half Blood Prince
$5,031,277 — $291,791,652

9. The Ugly Truth
$4,122,772 — $84,160,222

10. The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard
$4,092,388 — $12,629,819

(Source)

I found the strangest thing today–an alternate poster for the recent Tarantino release of Inglourious Basterds.  And frankly, strangely…it was better.

Everyone who compares this to the old Star Wars posters or the old Indiana Jones posters…well, they’re right.  There’s no two ways about it.  Frankly, Tarantino’s original marketing push for Inglourious Basterds was a cheap come-on by comparison.  All that nonsense with Brad Pitt smirking and bloody baseball bats…it was a joke. Especially given that this new poster manages to encompass so much of what the film offered: the explosions, the running, the subterfuge…all of the things that really made Inglourious Basterds interesting.

But then, the new poster was so very typical of Quentin Tarantino.  No subtlety…going straight for the gore factor…really, looking at it all it’s not surprising that they would have eschewed the better, somewhat more subtle look for the “go for the throat”  posture of the actual release.

Sadly, that’s all neither here nor there–the poster as-is definitely worked; people went to see the movie in huge numbers.  But oh…what might have been.

Bad news: it only represents nineteen percent of all tickets sold online in the last few days on Movietickets.com.

The next competitors are tied for second, as District 9 and G-Force are running neck and neck with eleven percent each.

Ouch.

Look, we all knew District 9 was going to be a big deal.  It’s one of the first truly original movies to come our way this summer, based only vaguely on a short film by the original director.  There was just no way it wasn’t going to be big.  Meanwhile, along comes yet another brain fart from Tarantino, who’s clearly stuck in the seventies, doing REMAKES no less and being so transparent about them that he’s MISSPELLING THE TITLE to make it look slightly less obvious.

But considering the fact that Tarantino’s getting a run for his money from gerbils who are on like week four of their theatrical run?  That’s just a low blow.

Like Marmite or World music, you either love or hate Quentin Tarantino movies. Especially recently, when his films reek of self-indulgence due to his singular vision and overwhelming confidence as a film-maker. But if you give into Tarantino’s vision, you’ll find yourself lost in a fascinating and entertaining world of references and downright coolness. Kill Bill merged kung fu with spaghettis westerns and revenge flicks to make a thoroughly thrilling film that was accessible even to those unfamiliar to the genres. And now Tarantino has taken a stab at the almost forgotten action war genre with his strangely misspelt Inglourious Basterds.

The Basterds are a group of mainly Jewish tough-guys led by Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), whose mission is to murder and scalp as many Nazis as possible. But the Basterds mettle is tested when they become involved in a plot to destroy a French cinema that will host the premiere of an SS film, attended by the likes of Goebbels and Hitler himself. And while the cinema’s owner, Shosanna, a Jewish girl in disguise, is hatching her own plot to destroy the heads of the Nazi party, she must avoid the steely smarts of Colonel Hans Landa, a man who earned the nickname The Jew Hunter and who is most likely to uncover the plots of both her and the Basterds.

Lately Tarantino has been seemingly attempting to revive long lost sub genres of cinema, such as the poorly made gore of Grindhouse cinema, or blaxploitation movies (Jackie Brown). WWII action seemed like a genre that isn’t worth reviving, an insultingly “entertaining” view of the most horrid period of the last century. Even its best examples, such as The Dirty Dozen, are forgettable at best. Yet the downright dour tone of all recent WWII films are not only too heavy but predictably so, and none of them coming close to the brilliance of Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. But how does Tarantino manage to make an enjoyable without appearing irresponsible to the families of concentration camp survivors? He does this by being Tarantino. Inglourious Basterds constructs a world, not of the real 1940’s in Europe, but rather an imagined TarantinoWorld, where everyone knows their cinema, where Mexican standoffs are a dime a dozen, and where our history is rewritten so drastically that it seems preposterous to be offended by its attempt to entertain. Read the rest of this entry »

Everyone remember when Robert Rodriguez was talking about some really really awesome sci-fi flick he was planning to do called Nerverackers in Trouble?

Yeah…um…that’s gone now.

Seriously, it’s just vanished; future distributor Dimension Films pulled Nerverackers in Trouble from its release calendar, which pretty much means it’s either gone or delayed so far out that it might as well be gone.

Though that doesn’t mean it may not come back at some point, or under some new studio or any of the hundreds of other possible scenarios that this business generates on any given day like so many chess matches.  I’m actually hoping that’s the case, because Rodriguez’ s stuff is actually pretty good, and for all the times he’s been compared to Quentin Tarantino, all I can say is, none of Robert Rodriguez’s pieces sucked out loud.  Tarantino, meanwhile, cannot say the same.

Two words: Death. Proof.

So we’ll keep an eye on Nerverackers In Trouble, so that hopefully one day we’ll be able to announce that neither they, nor their movie, are in trouble any more.

Before you start wondering how I get incredible access to all the very latest movies that haven’t even come out yet, you should pay close attention to one thing–the spelling of the above title.  This is not Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds”, this is the ORIGINAL “Inglorious Bastards”, from 1978.

Yes, the guys at Severin Films have jammed a very large straight pin in the massive gas sack that is Quentin Tarantino’s ego and sent it whizzing all around the room by presenting, clearly, the fact that Tarantino’s version is really a remake, though as we’ll discover, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

This version, the ORIGINAL version, revolves around a group of criminals who would receive the death sentence in a World War II Allied prison camp, but instead break out, with the plan to shoot their way into Switzerland, but instead find themselves neck-deep in a suicide mission.

After only about ten minutes in, I was positively enamored with this movie.  Sure, a war movie is generally at least kind of good–there aren’t that many BAD war movies, though they do exist–but this one is a class all by itself.  There’s plenty of action, and more than enough comedy to go around.  These guys are flat-out great; they may have been examples of the very worst the army had to offer, but they really knew how to get a job done.  They’ve got thieves and killers and compulsive gamblers, but when it comes time to do a job, they really know how to get it done.

Even better, there will be a variety of adventures for our inglorious bastards to slog their way through, and they will approach them all with a style all their own.  It’s downright amazing what these guys are going to get into, and it’s actually even more amazing how they get out of it.  More than once I found myself grinning, chuckling, and muttering at my TV, “Those magnificent, inglorious bastards”.

I think they saw me coming when they titled this thing.  I really do.

Despite the fact that this movie is over thirty years old, it’s aged well.  Clearly some remastering has been done in the DVD translation, but the effects aren’t half bad, the props are downright authentic and the set designs and background are top-notch and absolutely realistic.

In fact, I’m hard pressed to say anything BAD about this movie.  Believe me, I’ve gone over this with a fine-tooth comb and I’m having a hard time finding anything wrong.  Oh, sure, by TODAY’S standards, the whole thing’s somewhat lesser-grade, and maybe it was a good idea for Tarantino to go and slap a fresh coat of paint on this one with some modern, updated effects tech and some more explosions.  A potato-masher grenade explosion really shouldn’t look like a gust of compressed air firing up from the ground.

Despite this, there’s absolutely no way such a thing will ever get in the way of you enjoying this movie.  If you have even the vaguest enjoyment of war movies, then you’re going to go nuts over this one.

Inglorious Bastards is a fantastic war movie that aged well over the years, and is more than deserving of a remake that I personally have high hopes for.  And around here, it’s SO good that it’s going to get a clean ten out of ten.  There’s just nothing wrong with it worth noticing.

I enjoyed watching the International trailer for Inglourious Basterds. Now I have a good feel for the movie.  The humor might not be for everybody but it looks like a fun movie to watch if  you don’t take it too seriously.

Entertainment Tonight’s film clip of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds is so far the best one I have seen yet.  ET grants the wild, horrific comedy lots of viewing time and worth the watch just to get a better feel for the film.

So far this is my favorite one-sheet of Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds.  It’s sharp with the red characters in the background and Brad Pitt with his cohorts in real color of dark green.

I like the pacing of this trailer better than the first one.  Tarantino is written all over it.  The quality is poor toward the end, but it is brutally edited.