The director has been working on Inglourious Basterds — which opens today — for over a decade and critics say that, in all that time, he didn't come up with any meaningful message. The flick has all the trademarks of a Tarantino film: Witty dialogue; copious film references; strong female leads and extreme violence (though not as much as you'd expect). But then there's the outrageously revisionist plot for a World War II movie — it completely disregards history.

It's obvious from the trailer that Tarantino has taken some liberties in inventing the Basterds, a Jewish-American group of soldiers who scalp Nazis, but the film also requires viewers to ignore that they actually know how and where Hitler died, and it wasn't in a movie theater in Paris. The film takes place during the first year that the Nazis occupied France, and follows Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent), who flees to Paris and becomes the owner of the aforementioned movie theater after watching the Nazis kill her family. Meanwhile, lieutenant Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) leads the group of Jewish-American soldiers to perform bloody executions of any Nazi they come across. Later, the Basterds join a German actress (Diane Kruger) who is actually an undercover agent, and try to kill the top leaders of the Third Reich in Shosanna's theater.

Though Tarantino took a huge risk by turning Jewish-Americans into brutal butchers, critics say the film never takes any responsibility for toying with one of the most horrific events in human history. The Holocaust is actually never referenced, since that would snap viewers out of the weird imaginary world where the only message is "it's fun to watch Nazis die." (The film's misspelled title is a reference to the mediocre 1978 Italian film Inglorious Bastards, which was a remake of The Dirty Dozen, but it has nothing to do with either movie.) Basterds references spaghetti westerns and the soundtrack is equally anachronistic, with David Bowie's "Cat People" playing during a climactic scene. Viewers who come to the theater expecting Tarantino to have some respect for a war in which 50 million people lost their lives will be disappointed. But if you're willing to suspend your sensitivity and knowledge of history and enjoy Tarantino's fantasy of getting back at a cartoonish version of the Nazis, critics say Basterds will be one of your favorite films of the year.

Below, we take a look at what the critics are saying:

The Chicago Sun-Times

Christoph Waltz deserves an Oscar nomination to go with his best actor award from Cannes. He creates a character unlike any Nazi - indeed, anyone at all - I've seen in a movie: evil, sardonic, ironic, mannered, absurd... Shosanna, played by Laurent as a curvy siren with red lipstick and, at the film's end, a slinky red dress. Tarantino photographs her with the absorption of a fetishist, with closeups of shoes, lips, a facial veil and details of body and dress. You can't tell me he hasn't seen the work of the Scottish artist Jack Vettriano, and his noir paintings of the cigarette-smoking ladies in red.

After I saw Inglourious Basterds at Cannes, although I was writing a daily blog, I resisted giving an immediate opinion about it. I knew Tarantino had made a considerable film, but I wanted it to settle, and to see it again. I'm glad I did. Like a lot of real movies, you relish it more the next time. Immediately after Pulp Fiction played at Cannes, QT asked me what I thought. "It's either the best film of the year or the worst film," I said. I hardly knew what the hell had happened to me. The answer was: the best film. Tarantino films have a way of growing on you. It's not enough to see them once.

The Miami Herald

Basterds isn't so revolutionary or so finely crafted as Pulp Fictionwas, but it crackles with the same energy and imagination and chutzpah — with the sheer, humongous pleasure of a great filmmaker firing on all cylinders, including a few new ones you didn't even know he had... A complaint often leveled at Tarantino is that his movies are about nothing more than other movies, and this one is no exception: From the spaghetti-western undertones of the opening scene set in the French countryside and the self-conscious voiceover narration by Samuel L. Jackson to the apocalyptic (and, I should note, outrageous) finale inside a movie theater, Inglourious Basterds is suffused with Tarantino's combustible love of cinema. But unlike, say, Kill Bill, in which there was little going on other than the referencing of other films, Inglourious Basterds stands as an expertly crafted and gorgeously shot (by Robert Richardson) piece of moviemaking in which plot and character are at the foreground.

Pitt plays Raine as broadly as he played the gym instructor in Burn After Reading, and the comic performance initially seems to clash with the seriousness of the rest of the movie, until you develop a feel for the volatile mix of laughs and horror Tarantino is after. Part of the beauty of Inglourious Basterds is the speed and suddenness with which Tarantino can shift gears, as he does in a long, suspenseful sequence inside a tavern in which a rowdy drinking game turns serious — and then gets worse — when a German major makes a surprise entrance.

Time

The scalping is appropriately detailed, and several guns are pointed at the tender areas of adversaries. But this is a 2 1/2-hour war movie without a single scene on the front lines. No long tracking shots of soldiers in foxholes or marching across an open field with a chorus of rifle fire. Fans of the operatic violence in Pulp Fiction and the Kill Billmovies eager for a thick new slab of steak Tarantino will be disappointed. ... Most of the film, though, reminds you that Tarantino may be a world-class director but what he really wants to do is write. Here the most explosive confrontations are verbal - long dialogues, often admirably tense and usually in French or German. (It's basically a foreign-language film.) The chats take the form of interrogations. A German officer probes; a Resistance fighter evades.

The Village Voice

Given its subject and the director's track record, Inglourious Basterdshas less mayhem than one might expect. There's nothing comparable here-either as choreographed violence or virtuoso filmmaking-to the D-Day landing that opens Saving Private Ryan. (But neither is there anything as false, sanctimonious, and emotionally manipulative as the rest of Spielberg's movie.) Inglourious Basterds is essentially conceptual and, as with any Western, all about determining the nature of permissible aggression. Operating like a cross between the Dirty Dozen and a Nazi death squad, the Basterds take no prisoners-designated "survivors" are shipped back to Germany, swastikas carved in their foreheads to spook the brass.

Reel Views

With Inglourious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino has made his best movie sincePulp Fiction. He has also made what could arguably be considered the most audacious World War II movie of all-time. If you think there are rules for this sort of motion picture, guess again. And it's not just that Tarantino is using the spaghetti western as his template; it's that the sheer unpredictability of where all this is going makes it compelling from beginning to end. Even the film's occasional artistic flourishes (such as chapter titles and out-of-period music pieces) work within the context of what Tarantino is trying to accomplish. This is clearly an attempt by the director to expand his range and step outside of the comfort zone in which he has worked for the majority of his career.

Variety

Inglourious Basterds is a violent fairy tale, an increasingly entertaining fantasia in which the history of World War II is wildly reimagined so that the cinema can play the decisive role in destroying the Third Reich. Quentin Tarantino's long-gestating war saga invests a long-simmering revenge plot with reworkings of innumerable genre conventions, but only fully finds its tonal footing about halfway through, after which it's off to the races. By turns surprising, nutty, windy, audacious and a bit caught up in its own cleverness, the picture is a completely distinctive piece of American pop art with a strong Euro flavor that's new for the director.

The Boston Globe

Yet you come away amused and unmoved, and that wasn't the case with, say, Kill Bill, where by the end Uma Thurman had assumed an exhausted, hard-won majesty. For the first time in a Tarantino movie, the women's roles feel underwritten, and most of the men don't get enough screen time.

It's obviously too much to expect a clever kid - which at 46, Tarantino still is - to grapple with history in any meaningful sense. For all that, the movie's pop-art shallowness feels forced. Inglourious Basterds is an entertainment but an uneasy one; it represents 153 minutes of bravura stalling, after which its creator loses interest and walks away. Tarantino may be the most talented filmmaker in America who prides himself on having absolutely nothing to say.

Hollywood Reporter

The film is by no means terrible — its two hours and 32 minutes running time races by — but those things we think of as being Tarantino-esque, the long stretches of wickedly funny dialogue, the humor in the violence and outsized characters strutting across the screen, are largely missing... The film lacks not only tension but those juicy sequences where actors deliver lines loaded with subtext and characters drip menace with icy wit. Tarantino never finds a way to introduce his vivid sense of pulp fiction within the context of a war movie. He is not kidding B movies as he was with Grindhouse nor riffing on cinema as with Pulp Fiction and the Kill Bill films. Tarantino has been quoted as saying of Inglourious Basterds, "This ain't your daddy's World War II movie." In fact, it pretty much is. His scalp-hunters are any Dirty Dozen on a mission, the bread and butter of war movies. The major difference is that some fine European actors simply aren't given enough to do.... in your daddy's war movies, men and women often did undergo interesting transformations. So perhaps Tarantino is right.

The A.V. Club

Inglourious Basterds is a film years in the making and hours in the watching, but it seems designed to inspire mere minutes of reflection. Quentin Tarantino's long-discussed World War II movie-it's been in the works in one form or another since Jackie Brown-features some thrilling action sequences, in which Tarantino's gift for dialogue gets honed to a razor-dangerous edge, and some seamlessly integrated reflections on cinema's role in shaping and reflecting history. But its moments of greatness-and there are more than a couple-feel weirdly disconnected, stuck in a movie that doesn't know how to put them together, or find a good way to move from one to the next.

The Washington Post

From the admittedly breathtaking opening sequence, which in its meticulous staging, pacing and acting pays loving homage to the work of Sergio Leone, to the Grand Guignol of a climax set in a Paris cinema, Inglourious Basterds isn't about history or war, or people and their problems, or anything of substance or meaning. It's a movie about other movies. For all its visual bravura and occasional bursts of antic inspiration, it feels trivial, the work of a kid who can't stop grabbing his favorite shiny plaything. To the degree that viewers share Tarantino's obsessions — with cinema, music and bloody, ritualized violence — they will enjoy Inglourious Basterds, which undoubtedly possesses its share of grace notes.

The New Yorker

Whether the Basterds are Tarantino's ideal of an all-American killing team or his parody of one is hard to know. Very little in Basterds is meant to be taken straight, but the movie isn't quite farce, either. It's lodged in an uneasy nowheresville between counterfactual pop wish fulfillment and trashy exploitation, between exuberant nonsense and cinema scholasticism.

Inglourious Basterds is not boring, but it's ridiculous and appallingly insensitive-a Louisville Slugger applied to the head of anyone who has ever taken the Nazis, the war, or the Resistance seriously. Not that Tarantino intends any malice toward such earnest people. The Nazis, for him, are merely available movie tropes-articulate monsters with a talent for sadism. By making the Americans cruel, too, he escapes the customary division of good and evil along national lines, but he escapes any sense of moral accountability as well.

The Los Angeles Times

Also getting in the way is Tarantino's inevitable self-indulgence, his willingess to please himself by choosing movie moments over genuine emotion, making a point of having Frenchwoman Shosanna, for instance, say, "We respect directors in our country." As it goes on and on, Inglourious Basterds feels increasingly like the kind of hollow, fanboyish cinema that is all the rage these days... Despite nods to notions like Jewish revenge and the power of cinema, the director has paid so much attention to the film's peripherals he has neglected to provide a center worth embracing. You can raise B pictures to A picture status, as Tarantino has made a career out of doing, but giving them A picture value is not so easily done.

Salon

There's been a lot of buzz – some of it coming from people who have actually seen the movie, and some coming from the always-more-vocal ones who haven't – about Tarantino's hyper-fictionalization of World War II conflict. Some have asserted that he's trivializing the seriousness of the Holocaust. It bears mentioning that even though Inglourious Basterds addresses "the hunting of Jews" by Nazis, its subject is most certainly notthe death camps or the mechanized slaughter of Jews. (And in a tense, beautifully sustained opening scene, Tarantino acknowledges – briefly but succinctly – the horror of the fate of the Jews under the Third Reich.) Even beyond that, though, in some minds the idea of Jews banding together aggressively to kick Nazi ass is itself offensive. By now almost everyone has forgotten, with good reason, last year's dreary Defiance, which is based on a true and inherently compelling story about real-life Jewish brothers who brutally fought the Nazis. But I see Tarantino's movie more as a manifestation of the kind of crude moral justice that fiction – if not fact – can allow us. To me, the aggressively fictional "Jews vs. Nazis" conflict in Inglourious Basterds is analogous to "Santa Claus vs. the Martians," an easily readable bit of cartoon shorthand for good vs. evil. Come on – you know whose side you'd be on.

The New York Times

Too often in Inglourious Basterds the filmmaking falls short. Mr. Tarantino is a great writer and director of individual scenes, though he can have trouble putting those together, a difficulty that has sometimes been obscured by the clever temporal kinks in his earlier work. He has also turned into a bad editor of his own material (his nominal editor, as usual, is Sally Menke) and seems unwilling or incapable of telling his A material from his B. The conversations in Inglourious Basterds are often repetitive and overlong and they rarely sing, in part because the period setting doesn't allow him to raid his vast pop-cultural storehouse. A joke about Wiener schnitzel just doesn't pop like the burger riff in Pulp Fiction

Slate

If Inglourious Basterds is offensive-and in spots, it's wildly so-it's not because Tarantino tries to bring Hitler and comedy together. That's been done before-by Charlie Chaplin, Ernst Lubitsch, and others-back when the wound of the war was much fresher. The queasiness comes in when the movie unproblematically offers up sadistic voyeurism as a satisfying form of payback. As he's trying to extract information from a German soldier, Brad Pitt's character speaks a line that could function as the movie's motto: "Watching Germans get beat to death is as close as we get to going to the movies." Tarantino's radical rewriting of the war's ending is audacious and perversely enthralling. But if Inglourious Basterds were about something more than the cinematic thrill of watching Nazis suffer, it could have been a revelation.

Look, Jamie Lee Kirchner is within her rights to drag this vinyl leggings trend out to its bitter, painful, inevitable end. I mean, I get it: comfortable and beautiful! But in hundred degree weather? That's commitment.


Emmanuelle Chriqui: I can see your knish through your fly. That is all.


Seriously, I'm working on my aversion to purple, I really am. Would I like Kiera Chaplin's dress if I didn't hate the color? Tell me! Be my eyes!


And I'm already lovin' social Fabiola Beracasa's Park Avenue eccentric: how much more would I love it if I didn't see "Duncan-dancing -wizard" every time I saw aubergine?


Jennifer Esposito's looking seriously busy here. Not in the
"industrious" sense, although I'm sure she has a wonderful work ethic.


Whereas I love Alexa Chung's iteration: it's like asking your bridesmaids to just dress in the same color palette, except one has amazing style and the other finds the whole thing an ordeal and just goes into a store blindly and asks tremulously, "do you have anything in...teal?"


Melanie Laurent channels Mad Men. If Mad Men were costumed by Tim Burton. At which point Johnny Depp would show up and his character would have some random quirk he'd decided on - like he'd always be sucking on an enormous lollipop or crocheting.


Really, Agyness Deyn? Ironic Rocky Horror? Because I feel like we were doing that in middle school, both earnestly and ironically, regardless of whether we were into RHPS. And even then I sensed that we were on very, very thin ice.


Kinda dig Gina Gershon's earthy accessories with an LBD - but the whole thing is rendered a bit odd by said accessories' inevitable "matchy" quality.


If you said had "enormous chain suitable for use by one of those giant Playmobils," I wouldn't cotton to it. And yet, Rachel Roy kinda makes it work!


I think anything that makes you look like you might be heading back from a luude-heavy swinger's weekend the Esalen Institute on Route 1 circa '76, like everything Frederique Van Der Wall is wearing, is kind of a good idea.


In other news, Padma Lakshmi looks stunning. Moving on.


I love Melissa George's frock. In fact, I love anything you can describe as "dowdy" plus "positive adjective." Let's go with "glam."


You know I love me some Emma Roberts, but don't tell me the super-low jean is coming. Because I was at my parents' house and I found an old pair form circa '03 and those bad boys had, like, a 1" zipper, and obviously I'm fresh out of low-rise undies nowadays and I remembered why no one sat down for three years.


One nice thing about Julia Stiles: when you see her IRL - like on the street, I don't hang out with her - she looks like a real person. No furtive glances or baseball-cap-and-sunglasses-indoors-don't-look-at-me-why-aren't-you-looking-at-me?! shenanigans. I mean, an attractive person and everything, that's not code, but...normal.


Y'know, I can live with alien chic. Whatever. Do it, Michelle Monaghan. But this sandal trend is exactly like the orthopedics my grandmother wears, and not cool orthopedics, either.


Yes, Diane Kruger's boxy number's chic as all git-out. But the shoes? Look like security anklets.

[Images via Getty]

Angelina Jolie channels Lara Croft - or Megan Fox - and it looks really uncomfortable in all kinds of ways. Not that, as her PR flacks would remind us EVERYONE IN THE WORLD DOESN'T STILL WANT TO SLEEP WITH HER STRAIGHT MEN GAY MEN LESBIANS STRAIGHT WOMEN BOW DOWN!


Yeah, everyone kinda misses the Buffalo 66 look. But there's something to be said for Christina Ricci just embracing Blythe Doll.


I'm sure we've seen this dress before (yay!), but - maybe because of her loyalty to former employer Kaiser Karl - when I picture Diane Kruger it's always in something like this: feather-embellished and fuzzy and haute.


Okay, I don't think Jenna Fischer's Grecian is the most flattering on her, although if she'd worked in a more structured fabric, it could have succeeded. Sometimes it seems like, instead of angels and devils, she's got a little "dowdy monster" on her shoulder whispering bad fashion advice.


Okay, so, I always love me some slightly-mature Valley of the Dolls, and Carla Gugino's rocking it. You will notice I am making no objection to the grape hue. I am working on it. I even - get this - just got a vintage bike with a carriage the color of Beaujolais Nouveau. It's called "The Sophisticate." And since my nom de guerre is "the petite sophisticate," it's like the universe was telling me that it was time to put aside my purple issues and move on.


I'm actually very interested to see what happens when Maria Menounos lifts her arms: does it suddenly skew poncho? Skirt? Or mini?


Do I love this corset action? No. Does it feel a little "romanticized bordello?" Yes. Does Melanie Laurent look stunning? You betcha.


See, I think I could like Jessica Lowndes' frock if my eye weren't distracted by her equally shiny accessories - which I just want to pick up in my beak and hoard in my nest.


Sue me. I love Bridget Fonda's 50's bohemian. You just know she cooks with garlic and likes folk music.

[Images via Getty]

Okay, despite the bandage-spawn fatigue, gotta say that Diane Kruger's working this futuristic iteration!


I was scared of Xenia Seeberg's Stevie-Nicks-at-Playboy-Mansion look even before she assumed this...position.


Actress Jennifer Ulrich demonstrates why the exposed zipper screams "2009."


I almost want to ask Nadine Warmuth: why wear such an easy, comfy-looking frock and then such wickedly uncomfortable shoes?


What woman among us wouldn't wear Yvonne Hoelzel's crisp ensemble? I'm not saying it would look as good, but I don't like "facts."


Hannah Herzsprung makes this simple tunic look like a million bucks. Which, in the current climate, I guess means quite a bit again.


Uh oh! Anna Thalbach is wearing a suspiciously similar dress! Good thing she had a belt to throw on. Recently I was at a wedding and it turned out three women were sporting the same (lovely) frock. One of them took a look around, darted out, and came back an hour later wearing something else.


Nora Tschirner: Hef called, he wants his loungewear back. Because the line was busy, Louis XIV couldn't get through to demand his shoes.


Jana Pallaske is looking seriously deco-futuristic! Can't you see Elsa Lanchester rocking this? Or Flash Gordon's nemesis? Make of this what you will.


Aww, now I'm imagining designer Michael Michalsky painstakingly detailing his jacket in his room. While listening to Pat Benatar.


Dresses that do the "breast-sling" thing make me seriously nervous. Dennenesch Zoude is less neurotic, more awesome.


Even though it looks like an Anarchist is about to leap out and denounce Brad Pitt's suit lining, he's cool as a cuke.


Where was Katja Riemann coming from? The gym? The boudoir? A Chaplin movie? The set of The Wild Bunch?


[Images via Getty]

[Berlin, July 28. Image via Getty]

The Good: Some people don't like Angie's reliance on neutrals, but come on, this is truly elegant!


The Good:Diane Kruger totally has a 1950's-level talent for working formalwear (hey, she wasn't a Chanel muse for nothing! Or, you know, Helen of Troy.)


The Good: Do the Dita!


The Good: Elsa Zylberstein's demure white has a chic, Cassini-esque vibe (I'm channeling Lucky here.)


The Good: Robin Wright (Penn?) mixes romance and modernity, pulls it off like a charm.


The Bad: Sharon Stone is wearing a mullet. Although it's neither "business"-appropriate, nor "party"-fun.


The Bad: Zoe Bell shows that the quickest way to spoil the softness of a 20's silhouette, is with harsh maquillage, a choker.


The Bad: Is it just me, or do the proportions of Paris Hilton's dress look super awkward? What would we like to see her wear? I'm thinking Rodarte...


The Bad: Joss Stone's totally got the height to rock a mini like this, but is this not a touch Roxy by Quiksilver?


The Ugly: It is a testament to Hofit Golan's sartorial impunity that Phoebe Price was relegated to a distant shot in which only her large hat was visible.


What Say You? Curious to hear what you-all have to say about Jana Pallaske's feathered experiment...

[Images via Getty]

• How did Brad Pitt end up in Inglourious Basterds? Booze and weed maybe:

"All I know is we talked about backstory and we talked about movies into the wee hours," Brad says. "I got up the next morning and I saw five empty bottles of wine on the floor. Five. And something that resembled smoking apparatus, I don't know what that was. Apparently I had agreed to do the movie and six weeks later I was in a uniform." You read that right: He and Quentin Tarantino were wasted and talking about Hitler. [Guardian]

• "'Today' show's Ann Curry can't keep hands off 'Inglourious Basterds' Brad Pitt in Cannes." [NY Daily News]
• Some guy named Kris Allen won this thing called American Idol. Will the Glambert have a career?!?! [Reuters, NY Daily News]
• Simon Cowell has his personal bodyguards watching over Terri Seymour after she was attacked by a disgruntled American Idol fan. [Daily Mail]
• Green Day has the most popular CD in the country, but you can't get it at Wal-Mart; "They won't carry our record because they wanted us to censor it," frontman Billie Joe Armstrong says. The retailer would have offered a "clean" version, but Billie Joe explains: "We just said no. We've never done it before. You feel like you're in 1953 or something." [AP]
• Rihanna was indeed seen kissing rapper Drake, whom you may know as Aubrey Graham, aka Jimmy Brooks on Degrassi: The Next Generation; the guy in the wheelchair. Remember that time he found out he couldn't get it up? Yeah. Anyway click here for a LOL. [People]
• The recent Bruce Springsteen hubub — in which he was accused of having an affair with his neighbor's wife — was actually extortion. The husband thought the rocker would pay "big money" to make the accusations "go away." [NY Post]
• The brother of Jon Gosselin's alleged mistress says: "The rumors are true… Personally, I do think they're going to continue seeing each other. I think they think they can get away with it." [E!]
• Kate Gosselin says the tabloids are making her life hell and she is worried about the kids: . "I don't want them dragged into this. It kills me. I've been saying, 'Let's find a country where our show doesn't air, and let's just go there until this all dies.' I have to laugh about this, or else I'll cry. It's a matter of, when will they stop?" [People]
• Mariah Carey announced the title of her new album via Twitter: "Bcuz I Love U, I want u to be the first to know the title of my new album Memoirs Of An Imperfect Angel. It's very personal & dedicated to u." It is not dedicated to proper spelling, however. [Mirror]
• Talent firms William Morris and Endeavor are merging, which is good news for clients like Amy Adams, Keira Knightley, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, but bad news for the 100+ people who have been laid off. [Gatecrasher]
• Chris Brown may be working on a country song called "Trapped In A Dream." Doesn't he mean nightmare? [E!]
• Kim Cattrall has written an essay about making Memorial Day meaningful for The Huffington Post. She writes: "My family has served in the military dating back at least four generations, so I can truly appreciate the sacrifices made by those men and women who have fought so courageously in defense of freedom." [HuffPo]
• Kim Kardashian's Dash stores in Miami and Calabasas CA have both been vandalized — the perps scribbled graffiti on the windows, and the kopykat krime in CA included a note which read, "We love you Kim!!" If you love her, why are you spraypainting her windows? [TMZ, E!]
• Susan Boyle: Namechecked on The Simpsons. [Mirror]
• The head honcho at Disney/ABC is being dragged into Kate Walsh's divorce battle — Kate's ex wants him to testify about Kate's finances. [TMZ]
• Josh Lucas has dumped a gf via text message in the past. "I'm sickeningly embarrassed about it to this day." [Gatecrasher]
• A man in Montana — who was accused in 2005 of trying to kidnap David Letterman's son — was denied appeal by the Montana Supreme Court. [AP]
• Michael Jackson canceled the first four opening shows of his 50-date gig at London's O2 arena, which means 80,000 fans who had bought tickets will have to wait up to eight months to see the concerts. Jackson says the cancellation is due to "technical issues." As in, technically, he is not ready to do a huge concert? [Daily Mail]
• Can you ever, ever get tired of seeing pictures of 50 Cent and Bette Midler together? [Gatecrasher]
• James Cameron's Avatar, described by Steven Soderbergh as "the craziest shit ever," may be shown in theaters for THREE MONTHS. [NY Mag]
• Natalie Cole had a kidney transplant on Tuesday; she had been have dialysis three times a week since September. [CNN]
• "'Meet me man to man and I'll save your marriage,' Katie Price's horse 'hunk' tells Peter Andre." [Daily Mail]
• In case you didn't hear, My Name Is Earl has been canceled. [Mirror, BBC]
• Abbie Cornish is in Jane Campion's new flick, Bright Star, and according to this report, she "dyed her locks chocolate brown, filled out her figure to fit with the era's rounder beauty standards and took diction lessons in order to deliver Keats' poetry just so." [WWD]
• Rosario Dawson will star opposite — ugh — Kevin James in a romcom called The Zookeeper. What is up with the schlubby dudes getting hot ladies? [Variety]
• Hank Azaria plays a reanimated ancient Egyptian bent on world domination in Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian and says: "It's kind of my niche — semi-naked, accented freak." [LA Times]
• Rapper/producer Swizz Beatz is in a relationship with Alicia Keys. But he's not yet divorced from wife Mashonda. He wants the court to seal documents related to the divorce so the public doesn't know any details. [Page Six]
• Michael Douglas spent Wednesday night moderating a panel of Washington experts on the issue of ridding the world of nuclear weapons. I watched Clean House. [USA Today]
• Phil Spector may get life in prison. [Mirror]
• Congrats to Chad Lowe and girlfriend Kim Painter, whose first child, Mabel Painter Lowe, was born on Saturday. [Star]
• Samantha Harris, the lady with the brown hair on Dancing With The Stars, will play Roxie Hart in Chicago on Broadway. [Page Six]
• Heather Mills was approached to be the face of a video game (based around someone with a prosthetic arm), but she wanted six figures to get involved with the project, and the producers were like, No. [The Sun]
• Redmond O'Neal was transferred to a new jail, where he'll begin intensive drug treatment. [People]
• "As she exhibits the bloodstained bag John Lennon's clothes were stored in after his murder, why the ex-Beatle's fans are saying 'You're just a ghoul, Yoko.'" [Daily Mail]
• RIP Wayne Allwine, who was the voice of Mickey Mouse. [Reuters]
• Blind item! "Which top model was dismissed from her agency - all because she became a Scientologist?" [Gatecrasher]
• "Batman's a hell of a lot tougher to do because he's all physical. He doesn't use guns. He's completely physical. John Connor uses guns. It's just a matter of picking somebody off and getting a good shot." — Christian Bale. [Mirror]
• "I've joined the millions and millions of women on the planet who are working mums, and I've discovered it's a real balancing act. I think the most incredible thing for me was that I didn't read any books about how to be a mum. Your instinct kicks in, and it's like you're tapping knowledge that you have in your DNA." — Rachel Weisz. [Mirror]
• "Artistically, me and Brad have been sniffing around each other for a while. The longing looks across the room, the little notes, 'I like you, do you like me.' Pretty quickly into writing I realised this is the one for Brad and then I started getting nervous – 'shit, if he doesn't do it, what the fuck am I going to do?'" — Quentin Tarantino, on Inglourious Basterds. he also says: "I'm never going to explain the spelling. When you do an artistic flourish like that, to describe it, to explain it, to take the piss out of it would invalidate the whole stroke in the first place." [Guardian]
• "We interviewed GfE's. They were intrigued by (the film). They were very helpful, very open. They would have to see the film to let me know if it's an accurate depiction of their lifestyle or not. There was only one of them we talked to that was in a committed relationship. That was one of the things we talked about — how do relationships work when this is your job? Most of them said it really doesn't. Most of them said if I'm going to get serious with someone then I'll stop working for a while and play it out. All of them said it never works out with a client. Whenever you move from the client to a real relationship it never works out. Although the one that we met who was in a committed relationship did meet that person as a client and they have been together for a long time. So I guess there are no absolutes. But in general they seem to think that doesn't work." — Steven Soderbergh, on his new film, The Girlfriend Experience. [Reuters]
• "Every time I am making a movie I feel insecure, and I feel scared, and that's part of the way I work.If one day I would be on the set feeling too secure - that would really scare me." — Penelope Cruz. [Yahoo News via AP]
• "I'd like to offer an apology and a clarification to remarks I made recently. While on the David Letterman program, I joked that I might need a ‘mail-order bride' to achieve the goal of having more children in my life. I believe that most people understood that this was a joke and took it as such. (A dated reference, no doubt, and another sign of my advancing age.) However, I do apologize to anyone who took offense." — Jack Donaghy Alec Baldwin. [MSNBC]
• "Showbiz types are people who grew up talking to themselves alone in a room for hours until they found some sort of outlet. Once they found that outlet, everything fell into place, except for the fact that they still never worked out why they still talk so much. So you see, though filled with deep emotional voids that can never be filled, Showbiz Types are an important part of our Nation's tapestry. I'm a Showbiz Type. (cue penny whistle and marching drums) But I am not a douche!!" — John Mayer. [Perez]
• "FRESH ASS PICTURE!!! YO WHY CAN'T ALL PAPARAZZI PHOTOS BE THIS GOOD? WELL OBVIOUSLY BECAUSE MOST CELEBS JUST AREN'T RIHANNA LOL! ... BUT ON THE REAL, THIS PIC IS HARDCORE. PEEP THE PERSPECTIVE SHOT OF THE CITY IN THE BACK. SOMETIMES THE PAPS OVEREXPOSE THE LENS OR HAVE THE FLASH TOO HIGH TAKING ALL THE EMOTION OUT OF THE MOMENT. THIS MOMENT IS CAPTURED IN TIME NOW. I LOOK AT OUR CURRENT SUPERSTARS LIKE LEGENDS IN THE MAKING... LIKE JUSTIN IS THE NEW MIKE , BEYONCE'S THE NEW TINA TURNER, GAGA'S MADONNA, JAY IS SINATRA... WAYNE IS HENDRIX, THOM YORKE IS ROGER WATERS, THESE ARE THE CHAMPIONS AND SHOULD BE DOCUMENTED AS SUCH. THAT SAID, IT WOULD BE DOPE IF THE PAPS OPERATED WITH THE SAME INTEGRITY AND ATTENTION TO THEIR CRAFT AS THE LEGENDS THEY PHOTOGRAPH..... GOOD JOB ON THIS ONE!" — Your friend Kanye West, complimenting a snap of Rihanna. [Kanye Univercity, NY Daily News]