The 2009 Bait & Switch award goes to this film, hands down. If you saw the trailer (that I refuse to link) and expect this to be a Tarantino action deal with Brad Pit killing ze Nazis, walk away. Brad Pitt isn’t even really a lead role in this. Instead, you get Mélanie Laurent trying to kill Hitler through hours of cloak ‘n dagger shit. Granted, Brad Pitt, Eli Roth, ‘n the rest are trying to kill Hitler also so there’s some crossroads style later, but only much later. The antagonist in the cloak & dagger stuff is super-detective Jew hunter Nazi Christoph Waltz, who appears to be very good at foiling plots.

That’s about it, really; hours of planning to kill Nazis with surprising lack of actually killing Nazis. It’s Valkyrie 2: Blood on the France as told by The Hardy Boys but the action is removed in place of laughing at Brad Pitt’s goofy accents. It’s a polished work as Quentin Tarantino is still very good at his craft. However, Tarantino is always the wild card of the industry and will always do whatever the hell he wants despite what the marketing team tricks you to expect. One of Tarantino’s strong attributes is the flow and detail of the conversations through many of his characters. Unfortunately, two-thirds of the film is subtitled in French and German, so much of that charisma is lost unless you’re trilingual or down with the foreign film scene.

Inglorious Basterds is not a bad film. Still, I honestly cannot recommend it in theater. DVD it when the opportunity arises. In the beginning, Brad Pitt says to something like seven people that all of them owe a hundred Nazi scalps. I was treated to images of four scalps. Somebody sure as hell owes me six hundred ninety-six scalps. My friend who we call “Life Coach” joined up on this and tells me he’s a pretty heavy Tarantino fan but this is the most mediocre movie he’s done. To tell you the truth, I got so bored I can’t even recall how the movie ends. Yeah it was 3am and I was fairly hammered. Either way, harsh times.

Max Brooks’ World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War is one of my all-time favorite novels. It takes multiple firsthand accounts of the fictional [but inevitable] zombie war and strings them together into an incredibly fascinating narrative showing how a zombie invasion could [definitely will] devastate our society. The news that Brad Pitt was going to take a break from collecting babies with Angelina Jolie so that his production company, Plan B, could produce a movie based on the book was enough to cause me to shit myself with glee. But today we have more news from Variety via Ain’t It Cool.

First up is the news that the movie will be written by one of our favorite comic authors J. Michael Straczynski. In addition to penning a few of the best comics runs of the last several years (Silver Surfer: Requiem, The Twelve), Straczynski has also written for awesome TV shows like He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, The Real Ghostbusters, Babylon 5, and films such as The Changeling. Having someone of Straczynski’s skill writing the script for World War Z is definitely cause for excitement.

Today, director Marc Forster announced that he will be sitting behind the camera for the film. Unfamiliar with his work? Forster’s latest film released today: Quantum of Solace. Forster has also directed such films as Stranger Than Fiction and Finding Neverland.

This is shaping up quite well indeed and, zombie nuts that we are, we’ll be posting updates about World War Z as we stumble upon them. In the meantime, hit the above link and pick up the book if you haven’t already. It really is a fantastic read.

We’re obvious Coen Brothers fans here at Robot Panic and as such, we’ve been waiting to see Burn After Reading with some excitement. It always strikes me that the Coen brothers bring out some of their most interesting (or at least, risky) work right after their most acclaimed work. The Big Lebowski followed Fargo, The Man Who Wasn’t There behind O’ Brother, Where Art Thou and now Burn After Reading follows on the heels of their Best Picture winner, No Country For Old Men. With their latest, the Coen Brothers have delivered a film that gives the same “WTF?” feeling as Lebowski but sadly seems to have none of the lasting charm. At least…for now.
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