THE movie of 2009

I haven't been this excited for a movie in a very, VERY long time.

I got my hands on a copy of the script (authentically! not from the interwebs!) about five months ago. It is everything you think it is. It's a stunning piece, absolutely ludacris. It is exactly that, Tarantino doing the normally sober and sepia WWII period film. A group of renegade American soldiers, under Brad Pitt's extremist wing, just go berzerker on the Nazis. In violence that echos Tarantino's own precedent with Pulp Fiction's basement samurai Bruce Willis massacre, the weenie platoon just terrify the opposition with fucked up survival choices, battle scars, and the All-American Baseball Bat. With it's swervy structure and devil-may-care mood it feels like you're driving on an Italian hillside at 115kmh , smoking cigarettes out the window. Every once in a while a really exhilarating action scene would show up, a real gun-under-the-table stunner, and with the man's imaginative casting choices, there's creative possibility in the dialogue that I can barely begin to imagine.

This movie's gonna be awesome. I get more excited with every casting announcement. It stars Brad Pitt as a Texan Bin Laden, BJ Novak, Samm Levine of Freaks and Geeks awesomeness, Mike Meyers (Are you for real? Yes, yes I am) , Maggie fucking Cheung as a wizened cinema-owner, and um, Cloris Leachman. I'm not even gonna get started on the other actors since I know that there'll be hidden notes in their resumes as time reveals them (like Chiyaki Kuriyama echoing Battle Royale in Kill Bill). And amazingly enough, Eli Roth, director of Hostel and Cabin Fever, in a major supporting role as the manaically unhinged Mr. Blonde of the team. This was probably the best idea since can openers.

The incredible thing about reading an as yet unseen Tarantino script is that throughout the whole thing, you have pretty intense doubts. You can't help it. The shit is weird. But it's genius weird. You can feel it. You feel that there's something there, you just don't understand it because you're not him. It's the only script I've read that I trusted the writer entirely on. I could tell that only he knew what was really going on, and that I couldn't even come close to really getting it. Only Charlie Kaufman could do the same.

Sometimes it really pays to trust the writer. In this case reading it is not enough. I'll just have to wait and see the movie, and hopefully experience it anew!