Some quick items from around the web tonight.
* Quentin Tarantino talks to Mike Fleming about, what else, “Inglourious Basterds” — the movie made simply to confuse my spell checker. And, yes, once again, Harvey didn’t tell him to cut it by forty minutes and it’s actually slightly longer now than it was when it screened at Cannes to all-over-the-place reviews. He made suggestions, however.
* Gary Ross has been brought in to do a new draft of Sam Raimi’s “Spiderman 4.” Ross is a solid writer, and an okay director in his own right. He’s done wonders for Tobey Maguire’s career previously on both the career launching “Pleasantville” and the entertaining but kind of unremarkable “Seabiscuit.” So, perhaps it’s just an attempt to get a script that will work better than the highly problematic Spidey 3. Josh Wigler, however, has some concerns involving Ross’s upcoming Lance Armstrong project.
* They have a director for the big, huge, enormous 3-D Smurfs movie. Do I give a smurf? No mother-smurfing way.
