Daily Loaf

Be sure to check out Curt Holman’s review of QT’s updated Inglourious Basterds, and CL’s Movies & Television site for all the latest movie news and reviews.

Peter Hooten’s current résumé lists a project titled Voices From Sandover at the very top of the section titled “Film.” A verse-video collaboration between Hooten and influential American poet James Merrill, the film — which Hooten both produced and costarred in — remains one of the 59-year-old retired actor’s proudest accomplishments.

“I felt really good and I worked a long time on it,” Hooten says, lingering over a double espresso and chocolate cake in the dining room at the Sarasota Ritz-Carlton. “And I got really good people together. And we shot it in Cambridge; it was the right atmosphere. … It’s not mainstream, but God, it was a labor of love. So who’s going to see that? But it will be in the libraries when Inglorious Bastards goes bye-bye. Nobody’s going to remember anybody for that.”

Quentin Tarantino, no doubt, disagrees.
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[Editor's Note: This review is by CL Atlanta's Curt Holman. Also check out Cooper Levey-Baker's interview with one of the stars of the original Inglorious Bastards. And for news and reviews of all the summer's biggest movies, go to CL's Movies & Television site.]

Hipster filmmaker Quentin Tarantino refuses to explain the intentional misspelling in the title of his weird World War II epic Inglourious Basterds. The titular Basterds apparently care no more for spell-check than they do the rules of war. Dashing, drawling Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) leads a squad of eight Jewish-American G.I.s into occupied France with the sole purpose of killing as many German soldiers as possible. The idea is that the “disemboweled, dismembered and disfigured bodies” will freak out Hitler’s high command.

The Basterds aren’t just guerillas but wartime terrorists who scalp their victims and never hesitate to kill, torture or deny medical care to fight the “Natzis.” At first, Tarantino seems to present an inflammatory apologia for torture and prisoner abuse, a la 24. Inglourious Basterds arrives in theaters in the midst of an American health care debate that’s hurling Nazi metaphors and swastikas around like blunt instruments. Will town-hall meeting protesters take up the film’s symbolism and call themselves Basterds?

Maybe not, for Inglourious Basterds isn’t the movie it’s sold as, or initially seems to be. Sorting out Tarantino’s intentions for his bold, eccentric WWII fantasy is like defusing a meticulously crafted time bomb that could be either a dud or a high explosive.

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Quentin Tarantino fanboys are drooling over the director’s latest opus, the Brad Pitt World War II epic Inglourious Basterds, which hit’s theaters Friday. Tarantino is the ultimate film geek, famous for having worked at a video store in the days before Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction catapulted him onto the A-list of Hollywood filmmakers. It’s that geek side that is fully on display in this YouTube video posted yesterday, which has QT picking his 20 favorite films since 1990. Tarantino’s #1 is the obscure Japanese film Battle Royale by director Kinji Fukasaku. After that, 2-20 are arranged alphabetically (though Dazed and Confused might be considered #2.) CL contributor Kevin Hopp is currently combing the Blockbuster in search of some of these titles, and he’ll have more on this list next week.

Video after the break …

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2009 is already halfway over, and the fall movie season (with all the originality and Oscar-bait it has to offer) is just around the corner. What follows is my list of the 25 films I’m most interested in seeing in the second half of 2009. Read all the way to the bottom for some honorable mentions and films that flat out didn’t make the cut, despite the big-name talent behind the production. (I’m looking at you Scorsese and Apatow.) Then let me know in the comments what you’re looking forward to seeing in the next six months.

Read on for the my 25 most anticipated films of the rest of 2009.

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Here’s the second trailer for Quentin Tarantino’s World-War-II-As-A-Spaghetti-Western offering Inglourious Basterds, and it’s far superior to the original teaser trailer. Inglourious Basterds opens August 21.

I’m the guy on the left

Even now, I’m not quite sure how I managed to get into a screening of Quentin Tarantino’s new war epic. The theater was overbooked for the two available screenings and people were pushing the security guards in an attempt to get in.

Needless to say, I didn’t have a ticket. But I do have friends. Somewhere between the American Pavilion and the fact that I have become friends (over pints of Guinness of course) with Margit Pfeiffer, the film’s dialogue supervisor, I managed to get into a special screening.

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Anybody else slightly perturbed by the accent?

Rumors have been kicking around for some time that Quentin Tarantino is planning to recombine the excellent Kill Bill: Vol. 1 & 2 into one complete film on DVD. Of course, that was before the director ditched the continental 48 for Europe to shoot this summer’s Inglourious Basterds starring Brad Jolie. Fortunately, QT has gone on the record again, stating that Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair will be a reality, and that the filmmakers have even gone back and added a brand-spankin’ new, 7 minute anime sequence to the film. Though there’s still no release date (Amazon has a link to product they claim has been “discontinued by the manufacturer”), expect to see this package drop sometime right before the release of Basterds. It’s called corporate cynergy, yo!

Click below for more of today’s news from Tinseltown…

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… or at least you ought to try and see when you have some free time and the inclination to stretch your cinematic imagination. On the eve of a new year of discovery and hype (Sundance starts tomorrow, January 15th), it’s as good a time as any to see for yourself why indie filmmakers and distributors still pin their hopes on the festival that got its improbable start in the snowy mountains above Salt Lake City, Utah. Between Netflix and Blockbuster and your local library, you should be able to find most of these.

John Lurie and Richard Edson go to Florida in Stranger than Paradise

Sundance really hit its stride in 1985. Before that it was called the Utah/US Film Festival and hadn’t yet been sponsored by Robert Redford and the Sundance Institute. In 1985 it got a new name and gave the world an introduction to two of the most prolific and exciting filmmaking teams. Jim Jarmusch brought his second feature (following the largely unheralded debut film Permanent Vacation), and introduced the world to his own peculiar take on America in Stranger than Paradise. The Coen brothers (Joel and Ethan) stunned audiences with their visceral take on pulp film noir in Blood Simple. Their ability to create intensity through memorable images – a shovel dragging on the pavement, shafts of light that stab through the darkness as bullets penetrate the walls that shelter a terrified Frances McDormand – signaled the emergence of a powerful new team of storytellers. Read the rest of this entry »

As today is my last here at the Loaf, (you can reach me at anthonyjohn71@yahoo.com) this may well be my final Reel Projections (I know, boo fucking hoo, the end of an era). But rather than cry in my beer (which I really don’t like to drink these days, anyway, and after Benjamin Button, I’ve pretty much dried out my tear ducts), I’ll go out with the shiny, happy enthusiasm that made men admire me and women want me.

So let’s get this might-be-a-farewell party started with the hands-down best trailer I saw last night before the screening of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (did I mention you should bring your hankies?). OK, that’s not saying much, since most of the other 29 trailers were, how do you say, fucking horrible. But The Proposal, yet another rom-com starring the rom-commiest of actresses, Sandra Bullock, was a breath of fresh, frothy air. See if you agree:

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Back in the day, films like Shaft, Foxy Brown and Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song styled funkalicious jazzy soundtracks, tough black heroes and heroines and corrupt white cops and politicians. A new genre was born, both celebrating and exploiting black culture, targeting urban African-American audiences with its style and subject matter. Some of the best of these films have become cult favorites, and have influenced new filmmakers such as Quentin Tarantino, whose Jackie Brown paid explicit homage to the genre he’d grown up on and loved.

Shaft was remade in slick Hollywood style by John Singleton (Boyz ‘n The Hood) in 2000, featuring Samuel Jackson in the title role. But for the original low budget style and campy flair you had to go to the bargain bin DVD versions, until now.

Scott Sanders’ blacksploitation spoof Black Dynamite premieres this year as one of the “Midnight” category films at Sundance. If the trailer below is anything to go by, the funky magic and excitement appears to be back. Black Dynamite looks hilarious and hotter than TNT: Read the rest of this entry »

First things first: Pinup girl Bettie Page dies at 85.

Just imagine how good the movie will be: Feast your sore eyes on the ass-tastic poster for the upcoming The Unborn, which was written and directed by David S. Goyer, whose writing credits include The Dark Knight, Batman Begins, the Blade trilogy and Jumper. I could say a few dissertation-worthy things about this poster as an example of our culture’s ambivalent feelings toward female sexuality and evil. But why get all serious on a flick that features Gary Oldman as a Rabbi performing an exorcism and a character whose last name is Hardigan, which, if you ask me, is truth in advertising right there. “Evil will do anything to live.” And I want to be bad. So very, very bad.

Sounds great! Majel Barrett-Roddenberry, widow of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, will voice the computer of the Enterprise in the upcoming Star Trek film. Which I found of interest only because it permits me to include a Star Trek update in this post.

How did the Hollywood glitterati react to the Golden Globes nominations? Variety has their thoughts here.

ScreenRant rants about the Dark Knight snub at the Golden Globes and Cinema Blend chides awards givers about overlooking the Batman. (Money quote: The Golden Globes are “a vague entity run by a strange and mysterious European shadow organization.”)

Speaking of Dark Knight: It’s breaking more records.

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Spoilers alert! io9 has the latest scoop on Watchmen, Star Trek and Transformers 2.

Nazi-killer looks: Brad Pitt as the rugged lead in Quentin Tarantino’s WWII flick, Inglourious Basterds (yes, it’s really spelled that way).

Bond doesn’t do Norse code: Daniel Craig says he turned down the lead in the upcoming Marvel Comics flick, Thor.

Samuel L. Jackson gets more Fury-ous: Jackson’s character Nick Fury, who appeared at the end of Iron Man, will reportedly have a larger role in Iron Man 2.

More bucks for Chuck: Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Haunted is heading to the big screen; gets a director.

A Frost-y reception: Ron Howard’s Nixon/Frost gets mixed reviews at the London Film Festival. Or does it?

Bastards! Quentin Tarantino’s WWII flick gets a name change.

Boldly go: Very cool pics from J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek.

and here’s an in-depth preview of the new film.

Touch of Grey: Porn star Sasha Grey cast as lead in Steven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience.

Great Scott: Ridley Scott (Blade Runner, Alien) to direct big-screen version of sci-fi novel The Forever War.

Who ya gonna call? Writers/producers for The Office are reportedly at work on a sequel to Ghostbusters

Tarantino’s WWII drama Inglorious Bastards is already stirring up controversy.

Looks like he’s walking: De Niro leaves Mel Gibson starrer, Edge of Darkness

Check out the trailer for Kevin Smith’s Zack and Miri Make a Porno