The full cast for Quentin Tarantino's WWII flick Inglorious Bastards is starting to come together. Not long after Variety announced that Brad Pitt was officially onboard to play a "Tennessee hillbilly who assembles a team of eight Jewish-American soldiers to take on the Nazis," word has come out that Simon Pegg, David Krumholtz and Nastassja Kinski are all in talks to join the picture. The Office's B.J. Novak is already in talks as well, and he and Krumholtz sign on, they'll be playing "Pitt's underlings." Pegg, on the other hand, would be playing a British lieutenant. Kinski, who's being looked at to play a German movie queen (and is actually German -- go figure!), would become one of the only females in this male-dominated cast.

Personally, I'm a fan of all these folks, though I'm still holding out for a few Tarantino regulars to pop up at some point. (I'd also like to offer up Cinematical's Scott Weinberg for a role. He's a good Jew, that kid.) Tim Roth should definitely nab a role before casting is all said and done, though I'm not so sure there's something for Michael Madsen. I've got the script sitting on my desktop (haven't read it yet), so if you've managed to take a peak, who else do you think would fit in here?

Okay, try and stay with me on this: it's a movie about six children who are genetically engineered to fly. Now, what if said kids escaped from those experimenting on them and were subsequently pursued by a pack of human-wolf hybrids?

I know what you're thinking -- that this could either be the best movie ever made or anything but. Variety has reason to think that Columbia is tipping towards the former, as they've picked up the rights to James Patterson's young adult book series, Maximum Ride. It seems like quite the change of pace for Patterson, he of Alex Cross mystery fame, but as far as the adaptation is concerned, perhaps Don Payne can rein things in, what with two straight-up superhero scripts already under his belt. Oh, and did I mention that frequent Marvel movie producer Avi Arad is also on board?

(Dare I make a suggestion, though: the title makes me think of a guide to Jean-Claude Van Damme's all-time favorite rollercoasters more than a mutants-on-the-lam saga. Just sayin'.)

Can any of our trusty readers vouch for the novels, or at least for their offspring who might have picked up at least one of the four published to date? Are those as new to the concept as I am game for this potential franchise in the making? Goodness knows that we'll need something to fill that supernatural-teen gap post-Twilight...

The man who brought us the videos for "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and "Bullet with Butterfly Wings," and who was at one point turning Scarlett Johansson into a diamond thief, is getting ready for a different feature. The Hollywood Reporter posts that Sam Bayer is teaming up with Michael Bay for the action thriller called Fiasco Heights.

Said to have shades of film noir, the film focuses on a gunman who heads to the crime-filled city of Fiasco Heights. There, he "teams with a degenerate gambler/private eye on the run from a syndicate to look for a beautiful femme fatale and a mysterious briefcase." Oh, those pesky briefcases and sexy women. THR says that there has been a few drafts of the script, but the most recent was penned by Kyle Ward. This is actually his spec, that was picked up last year in April, so I guess he got to bring his pen back to it after some rewrites.

So far, the project is moving along slowly, and time will tell if this Bayer feature fares any better than Brilliance, the ScarJo piece, which seems to have faded into the oblivion.

It's cool to see small replicas, funky cakes, or maybe something knit, but there's just something even cooler when your fan creation needs its own room for storage.

This latest bit of Fan Made comes courtesy of /film's Cool Stuff -- it's a working replica of The Tumbler from both Batman movies. The guy responsible, Bob Dullam, made this thing without blueprints. It was all done with photos found online, piece by piece. I'm beyond impressed. He says, "All parts are scratch built, 'cept tires, rims, brakes, engine, etc.. meaning all body parts brackets, just about everything external on the car." This isn't just a bunch of cardboard tacked onto a car he already had. And now he wants to make the inside look as close as possible to The Tumbler's real inside.

Man, imagine hopping in that thing and driving to the store? It'd be a madhouse. It's sure to make a number of fans go wild, and I bet make a few people teetering on the edge of sanity begin to believe that Batman is real. And do you even need a car alarm for that?

Check out a few more pics of the fan made Tumbler in the gallery below ...

Although I'd seen it twice already, I went ahead and accompanied my father to a showing of Pineapple Express last night, only to be greeted with a surprisingly packed 8:10 showing in the theater's largest auditorium. When we exited, the immediate lobby was fairly lined up with those waiting to catch the next showtime, and when I dashed across the hall to peek in on the 9:30 showing that some of my friends had caught, it was in an auditorium half the size and equally packed, down to people actually sitting on the floor space typically reserved for those in wheelchairs (fire hazard, schmire hazard).

I only say this because, if I hadn't gone last night, I would've been truly taken aback with the film's record-breaking $12.5 million opening yesterday. (In comparison, Superbad opened to $12.3 million last year, but on a Friday.) This bodes better for Pineapple than I had expected in general, what with it only having a week to itself before Tropic Thunder does its best to snatch away its overlapping audience.

Oh, and The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 also raked in almost $6 million itself, so, um, yay for that.

Here's some top casting news for Thursday, August 7:

• The office used to be the perfect prep work for a life of filofaxes, stale coffee, and covert games of freecell. Now it's the perfect training to become one of the Inglorious Bastards. The Hollywood Reporter posts that B.J. Novak is in talks to play one of the soldiers in Quentin Tarantino's long-in-coming film that suddenly got a jolt of caffeine. Should Novak's talks work out, he'll play PFC Utvich, "a soldier of slight build who comes from New York."
• Meryl Streep, meanwhile, is looking to get more romantic comedies under her belt. I guess she's really digging the lighter fare. Variety reports that she is in advanced negotiations to star in an untitled romcom that will place her in a romantic triangle with two men. This project comes from the pen of Nancy Meyers, who has brought us Private Benjamin, Irreconcilable Differences, Father of the Bride, Something's Got to Give, and The Holiday. But who will play the lucky leading men?
• Finally, Max Thieriot has scored the title role in a new sci-fi action film called Prodigy, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Playing a kid named William Cooley, he gets to be "a rebellious student at an elite boarding school producing world leaders with the help of pharmaceuticals. Three days before graduation, several of its alumni are murdered, and William is implicated." The valedictorian begins to investigate the poor kid, and the two become reluctant allies in the fight against the bad guys. Dave Kalstein adapted the story from his own novel, and production is slated to begin in October.

The franchise reboots may never end. According to ComingSoon.net (who spotted it on TrackingB.com), Shane Black has written a spec script for Lethal Weapon 5 without really telling anyone but Joel Silver.

The story would center around Riggs' impending retirement (and his, undoubtedly, being too old for ... well, you know). But before he leaves the force, he has to tackle one last case, and as there are no other police officers in Los Angeles, he hauls Murtaugh out of retirement to help him. Allegedly, both Mel Gibson and Danny Glover are interested, though no deals have been signed.

Now, I name drop Lethal Weapon enough that you undoubtedly know that the series ranks much higher in my life than it probably should. Watching it in my pre-teens not only taught me a choice vocabulary, it rocked my world with glimpses at a naked Mel Gibson. My problems with men probably stem from the pedestal I have placed Martin Riggs upon.

But, that doesn't mean I want a fifth movie -- I already sat through the fourth installment, and it wasn't that good. Black has penned some fantastic scripts in his time -- and I firmly believe A Long Kiss Goodnight is insanely underrated -- and I'd love to see him churning out action-comedies again. But not ones with Riggs and Murtaugh. Let Lethal Weapon lie, and write a franchise that can give us a new badass or two. Check out the video below of Seth Rogen and James Franco discussing Shane Black's movies from Moviefone's latest Unscripted chat...

Men on a mission! Naked women shooting machine guns! Wildly inappropriate hair styles! The recent arrival of Enzo G. Castellari's The Inglorious Bastards on DVD makes clear that the movie is an entertaining, stylish adventure in its own right, justly deserving its reputation as a Eurocult genre gem. Inevitably, it also prompts speculation about what exactly Quentin Tarantino will do with his upcoming version, especially since the DVD features an extended conversation between Tarantino and Castellari about their respective visions.

The 1978 original doesn't have a "bat-wielding Nazi hunter," as one character has been recently described in casting talks for Tarantino's version, though it is set in World War II France. Miscreant Bo Svenson and murderer Fred Williamson are headed to military jail when their convoy is attacked by the Germans. The handful of surviving deserters plan to escape to neutral Switzerland before they end up on a suicide mission for the Allies under the command of Colonel Bruckner (Ian Bannen).

The men take a jaunty trip through a cartoon wonderland constructed out of Hollywood fantasy and Italian wish fulfillment. The film only rarely intersects with real life, instead inhabiting a world of wisecracks and world-weary warriors whose guns never run out of bullets. Castellari is such a brilliant director, though, that The Inglorious Bastards fairly pops off the screen with energetic fervor in nearly every sequence.

As such, it serves as a fabulous blueprint that Tarantino has probably drawn upon, ripped apart, and reassembled.