Quentin Tarantino loves Japanese stuff almost as much as he loves railing eight balls, so it’s no surprise that he got recruited by Softbank for a series of Japanese cell phone commercials. As always he’s a ball of sweat and nervous energy and a lot of fun to watch — video’s after the jump.
“Inglourious Basterds” is set to open in Japan on Nov. 20, around the time the commercials are expected to begin airing. The quirky “White Family” commercials, which feature a talking-dog father and an older brother character played by American Dante Carter, have been a hugely successful for Softbank, and about 60 have been made so far. Tarantino, a longtime Japanophile, is to appear as “Uncle Tara-chan,” dressed in a black kimono — a new addition to the unconventional family in a country where the nuclear family remains very much the norm. [THR]
Haha, get it? It’s funny because the West is frivolous and shameful. Anyway, I don’t know why no one’s done the obvious thing and cast Tarantino in a coffee commercial.
QUENTIN TARANTINO: Hi. I’m Quentin Tarantino here for Illy brand espresso beans. But you know what? They don’t need me to tell you how good their f-cking coffee is. You’re the ones who buy it, you know how f-cking good it is, okay? When Bonnie goes shopping, she buys sh-t.
BONNIE HUNT: It’s true! I’m such a klutz!
QUENTIN: But when you buy coffee, you wanna f-cking taste it. And that’s why you come to us.
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(Squinting at the guy on the left, Pitt thought, “Pfff, you think you can sneak an Asian stand-in past me? I bang my girlfriend in front of a Cambodian kid.”)
Waiter? I’ll have a kickass movie with my 8-ball, please.
Inglourious Basterds is the tongue-in-cheek WWII epic Tarantino would’ve written in ’95 or ’96 if he’d been doing more coke back then. Which is to say it’s classic Quentin –- ballsy, bloody, eccentric, with multiple interconnected stories coming together just so –- but not without the excessive talk that almost ruined Kill Bill 2 and made Death Proof his least enjoyable movie to date. (I’d rather date Jackie Browne, she puts out). The dialog isn’t excruciatingly mundane this time, but just because the words are smart and thought provoking doesn’t mean there couldn’t have been less of them. Tarantino is a savant in the way that he can nail certain aspects of human nature, even within an intricate, whacked-out plot (without being able to spell! How the hell does he do that?). But at times it feels like he deals with self-editing the way an autistic deals with spontaneity.
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(This is gonna be a hell of a bris)
Inglourious Basterds predictably took the top spot with $37.6 million, but unpredictably took in quite a bit more than expected and earned Quentin Tarantino his biggest international opening weekend so far, according to Nikke Finke. The film has already earned back approximately half of it’s budget. I kind of wish I didn’t want to see this movie, so I could recycle my own joke and say, “I can’t wait to nazi this.”
District 9 dropped almost 50% in it’s second week, earning $18.9 million. It has now grossed 2.5 times its original budget. G.I. Joe dropped 44% in its third week, taking in $12.5 million. It’s now earned back almost 70% of its budget. I kind of want to see this in the cheap theater so I can feel like Luke Wilson in Idiocracy. I’ll just feast my eyes at the human panoply surrounding me and then raise my fists and yell, “I am the king of the windowlickers! Bring me shiny things and gobstoppers, peasants!”
Among the other films opening last weekend, Shorts opened at #6 with $6.6 million, Post Grad was #10 with $2.8 million, and My One and Only opened on four screens with a per screen average of $15,175. IFC sent Five Minutes of Heaven to only one theater last weekend, where it earned $5,200. Liam Neeson reportedly called IFC’s receptionist to leave a message: If you send my film to more screens next weekend, that’ll be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you. But if you don’t, I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you.
(full top 10 below)
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~ robopanda [picture by Shark Robot T-shirts]
CinemaBlend and TrailerAddict posted eight new clips from Inglourious Basterds. I’ve embedded a few below. The first two clips feature Christoph Waltz’s creepily charismatic performance as a Nazi detective nicknamed “Jew Hunter”. He won Best Actor (or “Bestest Acter” as Tarantino would say) at Cannes for this role. And on the other end of the potential-Oscar-winner spectrum, we have Mike Myers in prosthetic makeup doing a British accent in the third clip. I just can’t get enough of Mike Myers in prosthetic makup doing an accent. He should have played Virginia Woolfe in The Hours, not Nicole Kidman.
~ robopanda
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