Brad Pitt Officially One of Tarantino's 'Inglorious Bastards'

I will admit that we completely misinterpreted the smoke surrounding the Brad Pitt rumors for Quentin Tarantino's war movie, Inglorious Bastards. In our mind, it seemed like a QT rumor, a kind of pie-in-the-sky casting pick that has no basis in fact. For a number of additional reasons - take, for instance, Pitt's commitment to other projects when Bastards will film, the fact that Tarantino has never pushed a movie through in a matter of seven months, and that his screenplay is roughly four hours long - and we were very pessimistic that the movie would unfold they way we heard it would (you know, like casting Leonardo DiCaprio...we were wise to stay away from that bait). We also wondered if Quentin could make such a sprawling movie in a short time. He's notoriously slow on the set, and his window to premiere at Cannes next May would be just over half a year for shooting and post-production of two full-length movies. Whether or not that happens is still up in the air, but Brad Pitt sure as hell is an Inglorious Bastard as of yesterday, with Variety reporting that he will star as Aldo Raine, "a Tennessee hillbilly who assembles a team of eight Jewish-American soldiers to take on the Nazis." The casting news is not over for the Weinstein Company/Universal flick. Nastassja Kinski is having discussions about playing one of the film's few female roles; curiously, Tarantino's female characters are at least as well written as their male counterparts, and in some cases, they're better. Kinski would play a German movie star in the film. Elsewhere, three incongruent names have popped up to join Pitt's team of soldiers, which already includes horror director Eli Roth. Hot Fuzz star and sudden British go-to guy Simon Pegg, David Krumholtz from the TV show Numbers and B.J. Novak, one of the actors/writers/producers of The Office, are all in talks for roles in the film. How will all of this come together? I really have no idea. It's an unusual mix, with Tarantino, a bloody exploitation movie about WWII, a cast that has Brad Pitt, maybe Nastassja Kinski, and a bunch of guys you'd probably never see in the same room together, much less the same movie. And it's all supposed to happen in about the length of time your average romantic comedy would be allowed for shooting and post-production. Then again, this whole thing has been a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants affair, with Tarantino finally wrapping up his script earlier this summer, and hurriedly putting out feelers for studio backing. But apparently everyone has supreme confidence that this can all be executed on a schedule that begins in mid-October. But you won't catch me saying Inglorious Bastards isn't going to happen ever again.