Premiere May 20 - “Inglourious Basterds”

I blogged earlier and now, it's coming:

“THIS ain’t your daddy’s World War II movie,” Quentin Tarantino said with a grin, standing on a street corner here that had been scrubbed of 21st-century signposts to become the set of “Inglourious Basterds,” his new film about a band of Jewish-American soldiers on a scalp-hunting revenge quest against the Nazis...Mr. Tarantino calls “Inglourious Basterds” his “bunch of guys on a mission movie.” Judging by the script, it should have the crackling dialogue, irreverent humor and stylized violence that are hallmarks of his work.

“You’ve got to make a movie about something, and I’m a film guy, so I think in terms of genres,” he said. “So you get a good idea, and it just moves forward and then usually by the time you’re finished, it doesn’t resemble anything of what might have been the inspiration. It’s simply the spark that starts the fire...I just wanted to tell my story and have the same freedom I would have telling any story. I want the act of writing to be so fulfilling that I have to question do I want to even make the movie.”

...Not that he’ll change the title. “Basterds should be spelled with an e,” he said. “It sounds like it has an e.” He shouted, “Basterds! Basterds!” in what sounded like a Boston accent: more “BAS-tids” than “BAS-terds.” (As for the spelling of “Inglourious,” Mr. Tarantino said: “I can’t tell you stuff like that. It’s a movie thing.”)

...The screenplay is loaded with movie references and jokes, and intrigues involving actors and film premieres. Hitler’s minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, is portrayed as a typical studio chief. (“People write about the horrible anti-Semitic films,” Mr. Tarantino said, “but most of the 800 movies he made were comedies and musicals.”) And it is safe to say, without spoiling the history-bending penultimate scene, that cinema saves the world.

...The Basterds — the film’s Jewish soldiers, given their nickname by the Nazis — hadn’t made the trip to Paris, but their presence could be felt in the grown-out “basterd haircut” (short on the sides and in back, long on top) that Mr. Tarantino was sporting. “The Basterds don’t have the luxury of being soldiers,” he said. “They have the duty to be warriors, because they’re fighting an enemy that’s trying to wipe them off the face of the earth.”

Mr. Tarantino, who was born in Tennessee, said his childhood revenge fantasies centered more on the Ku Klux Klan. “But it’s all the same,” he said. “Once the Basterds get through with Europe, they could go to the South and do it to the Kluxers in the ’50s. That’s another story you could tell.”

Not to mention a shelved subplot about African-American soldiers stuck behind enemy lines. “I have a half-written prequel ready to go if this movie’s a smash,” he said.