Inglourious Basterds Tagged Articles at Cinematical

In what could be read as a big "nyah, told you so" press release, The Weinstein Company would like you all to know that Inglourious Basterds has not only grossed over $108M* in North America but has now out-earned Pulp Fiction, which was previously Tarantino's biggest money-maker to date.

But what's strange is that TWC is giving some of the credit to "an innovative marketing plan. The film was the first to make use of Twitter and other social networking sites in such a direct fashion, even involving Twitter in the film's LA premiere," according to the press release.

Harvey Weinstein is even quoted as saying, "It was great working with Biz Stone at Twitter on Inglourious. It took the campaign to another level."

Okay, what have I missed? How was the Inglourious campaign different from any other of the studios' use of Twitter or Facebook to promote movies through links, contests, and meet-ups? I don't even recall seeing anything on Twitter about it, other than the normal studios using Twitter to cross-pollinate coverage.

Nicolas Cage told reporters at the Toronto International Film Festival that he decided to drop out of Michel Gondry's adaptation of The Green Hornet because he wasn't satisfied by the way his character, the Green Hornet's nemesis Chudnofsky, was written. According to Cage, the character lacked "humanity" and any sort of background as to why he was a bad guy, and that he "wasn't interested in just being just a straight-up bad guy who was killing people willy-nilly."

It's a bit hard to take Cage's explanation seriously, since he was at the festival to promote his new movie, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, directed by Werner Herzog. As Eugene Novikov wrote in his review of the movie, Cage's character is the self-serious yet off-the-wall type we've come to expect from the actor.

Bad Lieutenant has several of the year's highlights, including a tour de force in which Lieutenant McDonagh stops a pair of youngsters on their way home from a club, confiscates their drugs, snorts them, and has sex with the girl while forcing the guy to watch. (You have to imagine this performed in a full-on Nic Cage-ean fury for the full effect.) He's one bad Lieutenant indeed, though the movie makes clear that he has an honest streak: he'll pocket all the dope he can, but -- unlike his partner, played by Val Kilmer -- he stops short at, say, murdering a drug dealer in "self-defense" to pocket his money.

He also points a gun at a grandmother, smokes crack, and hallucinates an iguana. Let's not forget his tour de force of beating up women in the absolutely unnecessary remake of The Wicker Man. But a comic book character bad guy -- no way!

Instead, Christoph Waltz from Inglourious Basterds will be taking over. Ironically enough, Waltz's ability to bring an eerie humanity to his character Col. Hans Landa (aka the Jew Hunter) won him the Best Actor award at Cannes and has Oscar watchers already placing bets on a Supporting Actor nomination. Although I'll miss Nic Cage's hysterical outbursts in The Green Hornet, chances are good that Waltz will be a better baddie.

When Nicolas Cage stepped down as the villain of Michel Gondry's The Green Hornet, we and others started kicking around names of those actors that we'd most like to see become the bad guy opposite Seth Rogen's masked crime-fighter, and if Deadline Hollywood's Nikki Finke is to be believed -- and for once, I hope that she is -- the vacancy left by Cage will be filled by none other than the AICN-suggested Christoph Waltz.

The 52-year-old Austrian actor is best known for his scene-stealing turn as Col. Hans Landa in Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, for which he won the Best Actor award at this year's Cannes Film Festival and for which he's a likely contender for this year's Best Supporting Actor Oscar. That was a villainous performance both fierce and playful, which sounds like just the thing that a Michel Gondry-helmed serial-based action-comedy. (And at this moment, isn't it fitting how much more interesting he and we might find this rumor to be over facts?)

If this is true and the shoot goes according to schedule, we should be looking to see The Green Hornet in theaters around December of 2010.

I always trust that there are far more references crammed into a Tarantino film than I could ever acknowledge, and the extra wink-wink workings of Inglourious Basterds made that all but a guarantee. Luckily, the "video store nerds" (their words) over at Seattle's Scarecrow Video not only have their own extensive and ongoing catalog of films that are either referenced or given homage in Basterds, or are just fitting companions, but they've all been placed in their own section in the store, which just really makes me more jealous of the locals than anything, seeing as all the independent video joints in my own neck of the woods have either gone belly-up or have scaled back their selections.

(Really, it's a shame. Netflix may be convenient, but it will never have that personal touch -- a note that Scarecrow's lengthy list happens to conclude on.)

Do you guys and girls agree with like-minded recommendations like Black Book? (I do.) Is there anything you think is missing? (Comment away, here or there.) And more than anything, what one film do you have a hankering to see, or see again, in the wake of QT's latest?

After just a few short years in Hollywood, Eli Roth has managed to create a genuinely multifaceted career, not only as a writer and director, but a producer, and most recently, actor as well. After a few small roles in his own films and a brief appearance on both sides of the camera in Grindhouse (he not only directed the fake-trailer Thanksgiving but played one of the guys getting Jungle Julia drunk in Death Proof), Quentin Tarantino enlisted Roth to play Donnie Donowitz, also known as "the Bear Jew," in his WWII opus Inglourious Basterds. If appearing in a second Tarantino film wasn't enough, this time he's sharing the screen with a literally international cast, headed up by none other than Brad Pitt, with whom he shares the majority of his screen time.

Cinematical recently spoke to Roth in an exclusive telephone interview, where he acknowledged his good fortune thus far. In addition to talking about his role in Inglourious Basterds, Roth talked at length about how playing Donowitz rekindled his creative fire behind the camera, and he also reflected on what makes the horror in horror movies last once they've left the screen.

Cinematical: In Hollywood, directors don't usually say, "what I really want to do is act."

Eli Roth: I'm actually at a photo shoot, so I'm going from director to actor, now a model, and what I'll end up as is a waiter.

If not everyone loves Inglourious Basterds, at least we all agree on one thing: it's pretty dense, and it probably needs more than one viewing to pick up all the little layers and jokes and nuances. MTV.com has assembled a list of five interesting factoids, that, even if they're not in the movie itself, are pretty revealing.

1. Possible sequel. As of now, Tarantino has pretty much filmed all of the crackpot projects he has ever announced over the years, with the exception of two Elmore Leonard novels (Freaky Deaky and Bandits) and his prequel The Vega Brothers, which would "reunite" Michael Madsen's Vic Vega (from Reservoir Dogs) and John Travolta's Vincent Vega (from Pulp Fiction). In reality, it doesn't look like any of those things is going to happen, but actor Omar Doom revealed that Tarantino has some "500 leftover pages" from Basterds, and could very well do a prequel explaining the origin of Aldo Raine and his group. I'd see that, just to hear Brad Pitt pronounce the word "Nah-zees" again.

As pleased as I am at the box office success of Quentin Tarantino's ambitious, pretty terrific Inglourious Basterds, I wonder how many of the folks who saw it this weekend knew what they were getting into. Its clever, funny marketing campaign aside, the movie is two and a half hours of mostly talking, mostly in foreign languages. Movies that fit that description do not have $37.6 million opening weekends. We should know by next weekend whether or not people were duped (and I should say that it's not clear -- the movie is plenty exciting despite, or perhaps in part because of, all the gabbing). For the moment, Inglourious Basterds, "artfully" misspelled title and all, is easily Quentin Tarantino's biggest opening.

Robert Rodriguez, Tarantino's occasional partner in crime, also had a movie opening this weekend -- the kiddie 3-D adventure Shorts. With $6.6 million, Shorts actually wound up being a personal worst for Rodriguez, who has never had a movie open in wide release to weaker numbers. (The similarly low-profile The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lava Girl did roughly twice the business.) And the non-descript, poorly reviewed Post Grad joins a growing list of late-summer total non-starters, with $2.8 million on 2000 screens.

Julie & Julia continues to perform well for Sony. Aside from holding up nicely in general, it's doing well during the workweek -- and, after three weeks, is at three times its opening weekend gross. The Ugly Truth has also acquitted itself, now having surpassed Katherine Heigl's previous effort as a leading lady, 27 Dresses.

The full top 10 after the jump.

Like the rest of the entries in Quentin Tarantino's eclectic filmography, Inglourious Basterds is a pastiche of different influences combined in some kind of cinematic bouillebaise, and somehow made original in that unholy union. Appropriately, the film also came together in disparate parts over several years, which is why Basterds is as much a deconstruction of genre conventions as it is a rousing tale right out of the same war-torn landscape as classics past and present. According to Tarantino, however, making the film wasn't merely an assembly of ideas, but a bit of movie mountain-climbing that was essential for him to see what's on the other side.

Cinematical recently sat down with Tarantino for a roundtable interview at the film's press day, where he discussed the process of giving birth to Basterds. In addition to discussing the general dynamics of his creative process, Tarantino talked about what war movie moments he did and didn't want in the film, and examined the way in which even doing interviews allows him to look at his own work differently. Cinematical's questions are noted.

Was this movie worth the wait for you, taking the time over so many years to develop it into what it became?

Starting with a gobsmacked VHS screening of Reservoir Dogs way back in '92, I've seen every Quentin Tarantino movie dozens upon dozens of times, but Inglourious Basterds is the first I will have seen only once before writing about it. Like the absolute best entries cinema history has to offer, his work demands repeat viewing, as much to catch all the in-jokes, references and homages as to see their cumulative, strikingly original impact. All of which is why I can only try to sufficiently deconstruct, classify and characterize Tarantino's latest, a wartime opus whose shortcomings upon first viewing are as immediately recognizable as the fact they will after many more of them prove to be virtues, ultimately creating a singular tribute to WWII movies done in the writer-director's signature, genre-bending style.

While the star of the film is really the story, there are three characters who cement together Inglourious Basterds' unwieldy but surprisingly even-weighted chapters. First, there's Colonel Landa (Christoph Waltz), a Nazi officer who earned the nickname "the Jew hunter" thanks to his indefatigable, shoe-leather-and-shark's-grin persistence. Next, there's Shoshanna (Melanie Laurent), one of Landa's few targets who escaped, who lives under an assumed name and manages a French cinema. And then there's Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), an American soldier who recruits a rabid team of Jews to hunt down Nazis and strike fear with their exploits.