Inglourious Basterds: The Comic?

If only! But some crafty artist has gone and created these beautiful covers in the style of Jack Kirby. There's definitely potential for the film to make a great-looking comic series.

Inglourious Basterds is out on DVD and Blu-ray a week from now!

Roger Corman Receives Oscar!

Fans of B-movies will be pleased to learn that director/producer Roger Corman (83-years-old but still looking well!) received an Academy Award at the Oscar Governor's Ball on Saturday night for lifetime achievement. Longtime fan Quentin Tarantino gave an affectionate, charismatic speech, and Corman alumni Jonathan Demme presented the award to the influential low-budget filmmaker. Some big faces in the audience, including Steven Spielberg, George "I Devoted My Life to Star Wars" Lucas, Ron Howard and Jack Nicholson, who all in one way or another have crossed paths with Corman. The ceremony was untelevised but you can watch footage over here. Actress Lauren Bacall and cinematographer Gordon Willis also received awards.

Trailers for a few Corman titles we stock:

A Bucket of Blood (1959)


Little Shop of Horrors (1960)


Premature Burial (1962)

Hitler Finds Out Avatar Trailer is Crap

The blogosphere is currently rife with dissenting opinions on the Avatar preview/trailer, and also lots of Tarantino/Inglourious Basterds chatter - so why not, sort of, kinda, combine the two? This is another one of those Downfall parodies that seem to pop up every time there's widespread disappointment in the media about some major event (more Hitler spoofs here). As far as it goes, it's not bad, with some good lines: "Cameron has spent too much time underwater and has taken the Hollywood opiate of putting technology before story!".



Also, if you want more Tarantino/Basterds-related reading material, check these links out: QT's Top 20 Grindhouse Movies & Spaghetti Westerns; Five Things You Should Know About Basterds; interesting piece about Basterds' structure.

The Good, the Bad & the Inglourious

The initial word wasn't too promising. When Quentin Tarantino's epic WWII flick Inglourious Basterds premiered in Cannes back in May, the response from critics was kinda lukewarm. Now on general release - and post-editorial tweaking - the critics are still divided, but it's definitely getting way more praise than before. I caught the film yesterday afternoon, and found it on the whole, terrific. While he's yet to repeat something on the level of the Reservoir Dogs/Pulp Fiction one-two punch (how can he?) or the quiet restraint and maturity of Jackie Brown (still his best IMHO), this big, bold, audacious movie is a notch above Kill Bill Vol. 1 & 2 and Death Proof in terms of his artistic progression.

There remains plenty of gleeful, geeky ol' QT adolescence on display, but generally it isn't as gratuitous this time round. All the movie references and in-jokes - from German director Pabst to Italo B-movie genre hack Antonio Margheriti - do serve their purpose to drive the plot forward and aren't solely there to flaunt his encyclopaedic knowledge of cinema. And maybe more so than any other film of his career, his film obsession manifests itself within the narrative in a most literal way that's thrillingly inspired, indulgent and insane at the same time.

If there's one thing Tarantino's proven to be particularly deft at, it's destroying our expectations, or at least destabilising the traditional movie-going experience. The trailer sells Basterds as a gung-ho, action-packed WWII movie. It's not. It's a freakin' art movie, with lotsa subtitles and protracted scenes of nothing but talking, and more talking - but the talk is truly fantastic: poetic, rich, zingy and peppered with lines that act like little time bombs waiting to detonate. It also appears Brad Pitt is leading the action, but he pops in and out throughout, in a manner that's not what you'd normally associate with a lead actor. There's nothing quite normal about the film. But it is some of the most fun I've had in a theatre in a while.

Christoph Waltz's performance? Scene-stealing joy. The third chapter with Melanie Laurent's character, her theatre, meeting Daniel Bruhl, etc? Really magic stuff, Tarantino working on another level - maybe my favourite portion of the film. The opening farm sequence and the "celebrity head" sequence in a basement bar? Shit my pants. Ok, it's not all perfect: I cringed every time Pitt was on-screen doing his OTT redneck schtick. In fact, I cringed whenever ANY of the American cast were on-screen (Eli Roth! Gah!); is the great divide in quality/style of acting between the Euros and the Yanks an intentional thing? And the ending seems a bit rushed to allow any sort of lingering emotion to sink in - pity since there's a death in the climax that's a real shocker and quite heartbreaking.

There's so much in this film; so much that is great, and so much that is squandered greatness. But such is Tarantino. As long as he's got final cut (which is what? as long as he's with the Weinsteins?), he's going to continue to confound, irritate and entertain us with these crazy, personal art films that look like genre exercises but are not.

Tarantino's Top 20 Films Since 1992

This is an interesting little clip of Quentin Tarantino listing the Top 20 films he's seen since he started making movies. Judging by the clips that play underneath him, this looks like it was filmed around Death Proof time. Initially it seems like a largely mainstream/populist/US-centric list - with a few expected Asian festival favourites like The Host and Battle Royale - and that Tarantino hasn't seen that many movies - but thinking about it now, most of those films do fit in with the kind of genre stuff he's grown up with and been influenced by. A couple weird curveballs in there (Lost in Translation? Dogville?? - which he believes to be one of the "greatest scripts ever"). I liked his bit about Speed - I'm with him 100% there. Unbreakable is an interesting pick too; for all the critical drubbing M. Night gets, I think it's his best film, and really underrated IMHO. A few more sleeps before Inglourious Basterds opens!!

Trailer: Inglourious Basterds

The new international trailer for Quentin Tarantino's defiantly mispelled WWII flick Inglourious Basterds has hit the web, and it looks fab, though it may be a misleading representation of the film itself. This trailer reveals much more varied footage than previously seen - including some neat cinema scenes (which apparently play a huge part) - and makes it look like a rollicking good ol' men-on-a-mish adventure in the vein of The Dirty Dozen. But online chatter since its lukewarm Cannes debut indicates the film's actually more dialogue than action (not that surprising really, since dialogue's always been QT's thing). Anne Thompson of Variety noted on her blog that Basterds is "an art film, not a calculatedly mainstream entertainment", while the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw said in his one-star review that "everything is just so boring". My love affair with Tarantino ended a while back, but I must admit that this trailer got me a little excited: