Inglorious Bastards

Bit of a surprise this week: I was emailing with a client in London about work-related stuff when it occurred to me that it was past midnight his time. So I asked him what he was doing, working so late. And the answer I got was this:

Deadlines.

MRS. HIMMELSTEIN
Good. A basterd's work is never done.

This seemed funny in a sort of cryptic way, until I looked up and noticed there was an attachment. And in the attachment was nothing other than the complete screenplay of Quentin Tarantino's new flick, Inglorious Bastards (or Inglourious Basterds, as Mr. Tarantino likes to spell it). The Mrs. Himmelstein line turned out to be a quote from the script, which the gentleman I was emailing with very kindly attached to his email so yours truly would get the joke. I was floored. I mean, this is a movie that's going to premiere at Cannes in May and not going to be released stateside until August. Vanity Fair is going to publish parts from the script in May, as an exclusive. So I was hyperventilating about this thing on my screen and I emailed him back saying - ok, I'm assuming this is confidential and I'm supposed to delete it? And he goes, naa, it's pretty widely available. So I checked online, and indeed it seems the script was leaked a while ago and there are reviews of it on several websites. Which is why I feel it's ok for me to mention this publicly, and also to disclose that yes, indeed, I went ahead and read the whole thing, all 157 pages of it.
Now I'm no fan of Mr. Tarantino, although I will confess that the screenplay of Pulp Fiction was the first thing I purchased on my first trip to LA when I was still scoping out grad schools out here. But I think he's gone way downhill since then, so I'm not one of the disciples who've been waiting for this for the decade that it has been floating around. But it was a good read. Full of Mr. Tarantino's trademarks, of course: insane, over-the-top violence and that verbal logorrhea that can be both really funny and really exasperating. It's set during WWII in German-occupied France and chronicles the exploits of a group of ass-kicking American-Jewish motherf***s who are out to personally take revenge on the Nazi regime by killing (and scalping, mind you) as many Nazis as they can get their hands on, all while discussing German film of the 1930s vs. German film under Goebbels. In the end, after spectacular shoot-outs, fires and explosions, it seems most everyone ends up dead. You'll have to see it for yourself to find out if Brad Pitt's character survives...
All I will say for now is that I agree with the commentator on one of the websites reviewing the script who said:

Quentin Tarantino spells like a third grader. Just sayin'.