You want to know what people are saying about Tarantino’s script for Inglorious Bastards? Take a look!

Harry Knowles from Aint It Cool News:

This is a film about sacrifices and noble causes, about restoring possibilities to stories instead of limits. And it’s about making an audience scream in elation. SCREAM. Audiences will scream, clap and cheer by the end of the film - Oh - and it is absolutely worth the wait. So happy.

Okay, so sometimes it’s hard to objectively gauge Harry’s reaction, he has a tendency to get easily excited.

NY Mag snatched a copy of it and said this:

We’ve Got Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Inglorious Bastards’ Script and it is exactly as batshit over-the-top insane as we hoped.

And finally, Latino Review dropped this minor praise:

Hands down, the script was the most enjoyable read of the year for me so far. Again, a masterpiece. Killer dialogue, excellent execution, and master craftsmanship by Tarantino.

Surprise, surprise. It’s a good script!

Nerd With Words is a spoiler-free zone, so don’t worry about plot points getting ruined in the future. You can click on the links above at your own risk, but no one’s really giving out too much info, aside from a plot summary.

Okay. The Dark Knight is coming. I get it. Comparisons to the other Batmovies will inevitably come up, which means jokes about Batman And Robin aren’t far behind. But please. Can we all just agree to stop making “Nipples on the Batsuit” jokes? I was scrolling through a Peter Travers retrospective on Rollingstone.com, where he casually mentions Tim Burton and Joel Schumacher, and feels the need to add a parenthetical reference to the infamous milk dispensers:

If Tim Burton lifted the DC Comics franchise to gothic splendor and Joel Schumacher buried it in campy overkill (George Clooney’s Batsuit had nipples), then Bale and director Christopher Nolan — the mind-teasing whiz behind Memento and Insomnia — deserve credit for resurrecting Batman as Bruce Wayne

The problem here is that the nipple joke is the automatic go-to for a Batman and Robin joke. It’s just that I’ve heard it 9000 times since 1997. Even I’m not above a nip slip, as evidenced in my “Five Worst Comic Book Movies” post where I wrote: “If you ever wanted a manual on how to kill a successful movie franchise, B&R gives it to you the step by step (Step One: Put Nipples On Everything).” But dammit folks, we’ve got to band together! We’re better than this! I get it. There are so many horrible things in Batman and Robin, it’s easy to point to to one, er, two perky problems (and maybe even give them a little tickle): Nipples on the Batsuit. Sadly, there are 30 other reasons why that movie sucks, and they all come before nipples.

It’s kind of shocking that nerds never had a problem with Superman wearing skin-tight, form-fitting, package-accentuating tights, but they’ll get all up in arms about a couple of bumps on plastic. There seems to be a displacement of homophobia here. Shouldn’t you also be mad at the X-Men, who could be construed as an allegory for homosexuality? Are you still in denial about how Sam and Frodo kept warm on the trek to Mordor?

Anyway, let’s just all acknowledge that yes, there were nipples on the Batsuit, and no, it doesn’t need to be brought up every single time Schumacher-era Batman is talked about. Instead, why not talk about Robin? What a homo!

The Hollywood Reporter has finally confirmed what bloggers have been shooting their blogwads over: Inglorious Bastards is officially in production. Anyone who’s a fan of Tarantino knows this is one of those projects he’s been talking about since, like, Pulp Fiction. Inglorious is a WWII-era Tarantino movie. Just imagine what that would be like! Over the years, there’s been a revolving door of actors Tarantino has said he wants in the movie (including Sly Stallone, Adam Sandler, Eddie Murphy, and, I don’t know, let’s just say Cuba Gooding Jr. as the token “Tarantino career-revival recipient”). Well, none of those actors are involved, and it was essentially QT talking his usual bullshit. By the way, I did just call him QT, but only because the one time I met him (in a brief, gotta-brush-this-guy-off encounter), he was actually wearing his own Grindhouse T-Shirt with a QT/RR (Robert Rodriguez) logo on the back. Who wears a shirt with their own name on it?? Q-Fuckin-T, that’s who.

Anyway, the fact that this movie is finally being put in motion is great news for everyone on the planet. Tarantino is one of the great directors of our time, but he always seems sidetracked by his own obsessions, using his immense talents for material that doesn’t really deserve the Tarantino treatment. A movie about a murderous stuntman? Uh, sure. Death Proof is a genuinely fantastic movie, making Rodriguez and Planet Terror look utterly ridiculous in the process. My friends and I always joke that Rodriguez was like, “Hey, Q, let’s make a grindhouse movie. We’ll intentionally make terrible movies and run them back to back!” Then Tarantino went off and actually made a good movie, pissing off Rodriguez. “Dammit Quentin, I thought we were going to have bad acting and fake missing reels! You didn’t tell me you got Kurt Russell!”

With Inglorious Bastards, he has a chance to get back on track and make a real film, not just an homage to a long-dead genre. I have to be careful though, because Kill Bill was just as homage-y as Death Proof, and Kill Bill Volume 2 just recently overtook Pulp Fiction as my favorite Tarantino movie. Having just seen it again a few days ago, I’m convinced it’s his best. There’s such a deliberate pacing to that movie. I can only describe it as speeding towards a conclusion, but in no particular hurry. We get long blocks of fascinating dialogue that inform us about each character without feeling long-winded and expository, and each scene adds layers of complexity to the final showdown. He’s got the confidence to end the movie with a half hour of conversation, and 12 seconds of a fight that’s been building up for 3.5 hours. Sure, he gets sidetracked easily, but you can’t deny that when he delivers, he delivers big.

Tarantino has such a handle on his craft that sometimes it’s frustrating to hear him talk about all the strange tangents he wants to take his filmmaking. But I don’t feel like he’s ever let me down with a movie. Yes, even Death Proof, which I find strangely addicting. Now that we’re finally seeing a long-discussed project come to life, I’m confident his best years are ahead of him. And come next May, when he promises the movie will be finished, I have a feeling Inglorious Bastards will be wrestling with Kill Bill for that top spot.

With The Dark Knight less than two weeks away, Batman fever is reaching critical mass. The Batmobile and the Bat Pod are currently on tour for all to stare at, but they’ve taken precautions so nerds like me don’t get too close. My correspondent in Cleveland sent along this video and shows that his excitement is not bound by retractable rope.

PS - The Bat Pod is tiny!

These could be the greatest commercials ever made.

“Take it from Billy Dee.”

“Billy Dee says time to drop cable like a three foot putt.”

How dare Will Smith make me do more work this week!

Hm. This is some weird news. You may have heard that Guy Ritchie is preparing to reboot Sherlock Holmes, but Variety is now reporting a SECOND Sherlock Holmes, spun as a comedy reuniting Sacha Baron Cohen and Will Ferrell. It is, of course, being produced by Judd Apatow. Cohen will play Sherlock Holmes and Ferrell will play Watson. I really have no idea what to think of this. I wouldn’t call this inspired casting, because it just seems like they’re throwing together two funny guys in a genre/franchise that doesn’t fit them at all. Then again, it could surprise, although I’d much rather see them play original characters. What exactly will make this a Sherlock Holmes movie? Will Ferrell doesn’t seem like a Watson at all. And what’s up with Ferrell’s attraction to remakes/reboots? It just seems like a waste of his talent. Look at this list of movies he’s done: Curious George, The Producers, Land of the Lost, Bewitched, Starsky and Hutch, and now Sherlock Holmes. That’s a long, uninspired string of films. It would be fairly elementary to assume Holmes will be added to that list.

I caught Wanted last night. I feel like I can safely stand by the Dad With Words’ recommendation. It’s a pretty fun movie with gratuitous violence, an Angelina Jolie butt shot, and Morgan Freeman calling James McAvoy, “Motherfucker.” In terms of action, it’s somewhere in between The Matrix (without the quasi-spiritual BS) and Shoot ‘Em Up (without the winks to camera). Aside from McAvoy’s character, everyone in the movie is as thin as the paper their dialogue was printed on. I don’t even know why Common was in this movie. All he did was hand someone a gun and get shot in the face. Angelina Jolie had roughly ten lines in the movie, a silent assassin whose job is to simply look HOT, albeit rail thin. If you turn your brain off, you may not notice that the plot is uber-silly. The minute you start asking questions like, “Why would anyone follow a Loom Of Fate?” things unravel pretty quickly. But if you just focus on James McAvoy’s transformation from Office Weiner to Wanted Assassin, you’ll find a pretty relentless action movie with a likable main character. There are great moments, like any time the word “train” comes into play. The training sequences were great, as was the train sequence, although I was having minor flashbacks to Jurassic Park: The Lost World for some reason. I’m talking about the big train sequence, not the 12 other smaller train sequences. There are lots of trains in this movie. They could have called this movie Trained and it probably would have made more sense. Regardless, if you’re looking for something to tide you over before Hellboy next week and The Dark Knight the week after, Wanted is a good palate-cleanser.

Also, bonus points for using a Nine Inch Nails song prominently.