Today! Because if I don’t pick up this phone right here, you may very well get all four, and if you get all four, you’ll end the war – tonight –
Inglourious Basterds (2009)
Directed by Quentin Tarantino (x4)
Starring Brad Pitt (x3), Melanie Laurent, Christoph Waltz (x2), Eli Roth, Michael Fassbender (x2), Diane Kruger, Daniel Bruhl (x2), B.J. Novak, Mike Myers (x2), Til Schweiger, Gedeon Burkhard, Jacky Ido, Omar Doom, Denis Menochet, Julie Dreyfus, Martin Wuttke, Lea Seydoux (x3), Samuel L. Jackson (x9)
Every Tarantino movie is an event, but Inglourious Basterds was something special. It was his first full length movie in five years – skipping the whole gimmicky Grindhouse thing, which was fine. I mean, come on, you don’t count Four Rooms when jumping from Pulp Fiction to Jackie Brown, do you? Of course not! So it had been since the second part of Kill Bill in 2004 – the rare Tarantino film that didn’t make this list – and this one was coming in a summer. How weird was that? Figure, Quentin hadn’t had a film with serious awards attention since ’94, so to take this movie out of the season for statues and drop it into August – that had to be something else, right? And man, it was.
Was it ever
Now last year, going into the summer, I did say – to those who would listen, which weren’t many folks – that I thought you’d see seven movies gross over $200 million, and six of them actually did – TDK, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Iron Man, Wall-E, Kung Fu Panda, and Hancock. The one that didn’t was the surprising disappointment Prince Caspian from the Narnia series. So, with this as rousing proof that for once I sort of knew what I was doing, I would like to impart that onto this summer’s crop of films as well. 
