With his previous feature film Australian director Baz Luhrmann came within tasting distance of a Best Picture Oscar, as well as several other awards. Moulin Rouge! (2001) did win two, for Costume Design and Art Direction, but all the glory that year went to other things. He must have taken notes; The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring cleaned up in the technical categories with four Oscars, and Black Hawk Down took two more. Two serious, disease-of-the-week dramas won in the "upper" categories: A Beautiful Mind and Iris. The following year, Luhrmann must have watched while the jaunty Chicago won Best Picture, and Roman Polanski won Best Director for his lengthy Holocaust drama, The Pianist.

So Luhrmann set out to work on his fourth film, Australia. Maybe it started out once, many years ago, as a 90-minute pop-Western about driving cattle and saving the farm. This entire section is bright and quick and exciting -- and lots of fun. But then perhaps he decided that that just wasn't enough, or at least it's not enough for anyone who wants to win a great big Best Director trophy. So at the 90-minute mark, Australia more or less stops, transforms itself into a giant-sized World War II drama, complete with grayness, dropping bombs and angel choruses, and keeps going for another interminable hour. But is it enough to fool Academy voters?

As soon as the Lone Ranger started to be pulled into modern Hollywood, I knew other cowboys would follow. If Hi, Ho, and Silver, aren't your idea of a good time, how about Bill "Hopalong" Cassidy?

Variety reports that 300 producer Mark Canton is joining forces with Pterodactyl Prods. on a film that will feature the iconic Hopalong. The hero, who was created back in 1904, made his way through stories and novels before going Hollywood in 1935 and appearing in a whopping 66 films through the '30s, '40s, and '50s. Canton says: "We're looking to ring in the modern age with a branded, well-loved hero that we approach in a fresh way." (Hopalong had comics, serials, a series, and was the first image to be slapped on a lunchbox.

Of course this would appeal to cross-platform thinkers, but can we really call Hopalong well-loved today? His fans are at least pushing 50, if not 80 or 90. Nevertheless, I'm intrigued by this newfound love of cowboys. I guess after pirates, cowboys are the natural progression. And I can't feel too irked about this all -- I'll save it for the Stooges. How about you?

Poor Jonah Hex. As William Goss reported earlier, Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor have left the scarred cowboy behind due to creative differences. But does he still have Josh Brolin to play him, or not?

The truth is, Brolin can't decide if he is. He had a chat with MTV News that didn't decide the question, but did reveal his enthusiasm for the project: "When I first read it I thought, oh my God it's awful! And then I had a moment a week later and I thought why is it awful? Maybe the thing to do is to do the most awful movie I can find ... [I love] the absurdity of it. It almost allows you to create a new genre. I love going back into the spaghetti western idea and completely turning it around."

Will he ever make up his mind? "Soon. In the last couple months I've been going back and forth about it. I went back to my gut. Is it a sell out? What is it I like about this movie? ... It's so tongue in cheek. It's so ridiculous. But once I started putting people in my mind and saying what if I put Malkovich in this role then what does this movie become? Now let's put this producer and director on it and think about how it plays out. Then it becomes fun. Now I love that movie. If you have a great filmmaker come in then suddenly these gags and characters become interesting."

It seems like every other day Ridley Scott is promising to make a movie (even when we wish he wouldn't). But, one project that he can't seem to get in motion is the feature film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's western, Blood Meridian. In an interview with Empire, Scott gave an update on the adaptation, and it sounds like it could be one heck of a movie, but you are left with the feeling that it isn't going to happen any time soon. Scott told Empire, "It's written. I think it's a really tricky one, and maybe it's something that should be left as a novel. If you're going to do Blood Meridian you've got to go the whole nine yards into the blood bath, and there's no answer to the blood bath, that's part of the story, just the way it is and the way it was."

McCarthy's novel centered on a teenage runaway referred to as "the kid" and his time with the Glanton gang, a historical group of scalp hunters who massacred pretty much everyone they came across on the United States–Mexico borderlands in 1849 and 1850. Back in August, it had been announced that Todd Field (Little Children) would be taking over for Scott on the project, but Scott made no mention of Field in Empire's interview. Leaving us with another unanswered question hanging over the project: if and when this movie ever gets going, just who is going to be directing it?

Since I haven't read the original novel, I leave it to you out there. Can anyone make a film version of McCarthy's brutal and violent novel? Or, is Scott right? Maybe Meridian should stay on the bookshelf where it belongs.

With only two features to their credit -- they co-wrote and co-directed 2006's Crank, and together scripted this past spring's Pathology -- maybe it's a bit premature to declare myself a fan of the duo known as Neveldine/Taylor. (Even if that's the case, Eugene's got my back.) Yes, I'm the guy psyched for Crank 2: High Voltage, and I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt for other upcoming projects, such as the Gerard Butler actioner Game and the comic book adaptation Jonah Hex...

Well, now, the latter's lost maybe only a fraction of what precious little interest it had, as Neveldine/Taylor has reportedly walked away from directing the project, citing (and say it with me now) "creative differences." However, the implication from this Variety brief is that their script is already done and will be the same one that Josh Brolin is still tapped to star in (to Thomas Jane's probable dismay).

Something tells me that a film that's gathered this much attention to date won't go unmade, but it's now a matter of who will helm it. 2009 will remain the year of N/T regardless, with Crank 2 scheduled to open in April and Game in September.

Now that we've all had a chance to see some of the video footage that has been leaking from the set of Quentin Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds (footage that has since disappeared), you might have noticed that the man himself was nowhere to be found in most of the clips. But, according to The Quentin Tarantino Archives, one man who has been behind the camera lately is Mr. 'Torture Porn' himself, Eli Roth. Rumor has it Roth is directing a Nazi propaganda film to be included in the story of "...a group of prisoners-turned-soldiers whose mission is to take down a group of Nazis, and the other follows a young Jewish woman who seeks to avenge the death of her parents by this Nazi group."

The horror director first signed on to the project back in August to play Sgt. Donnie Donowitz, "a baseball bat swinging Nazi hunter". But, I guess Roth wasn't content with just being in front of the camera this time around. QT Archives reports that Roth is directing the story of "Daniel Brühl as a Nazi sniper and GIs on a suicide mission." -- presumably while Tarantino was off teaching Til Schweiger how to do a spit take.

You almost have to feel sorry for Tarantino with the amount of scrutiny surrounding his WWII epic -- think about it, when was the last time a headline about an orchestral score got this much attention? So far, Tarantino and company have managed to keep a few details from spilling with the help of the odd water cannon. So, you may be wondering: why all the mania? Well, maybe it's because Tarantino has been talking about making Basterds for so long -- or maybe it's just because for a lot fans, Grindhouse wasn't the comeback they had been hoping for. Either way you cut it, we may not like what the guy has come up with, but at least it will be like nothing else we've seen before.

Inglorious Basterds is expected to arrive in theaters in 2009.

I should have known better than to start writing columns and dreaming too much about a Preacher movie. Apparently, the project is just as iffy as its ever been. EmpireOnline caught up with newly appointed director Sam Mendes to find out that things aren't as definite as they seem.

"I'd love to make Preacher. But there's no script. This is a typical Variety announcement, 'Mendes to direct Preacher' – I wish! Basically they should have written, 'Mendes in development with Preacher'. What I'm doing is, I've gotta find a script. I've just got to get it written." To be fair, The Hollywood Reporter did say that Mendes would "lead the search" for writers, but the directing job didn't seem so questionable.

Mendes does sound pretty enthralled with the material, so at the very least he'll have a good go at it. "It's brilliant, it's an incredible twisted vision. There's so much of it you couldn't possibly fit it all into one movie. It's just about what you keep and what you leave out, and how you structure the story. But just to have that toy set again, being able to paint on a big canvas and to say 'I am gonna do crazy crane shots and massive action sequences again because I want to,' it's exciting."

But enthusiasm doesn't always get movies made. Plenty of people have fallen for the material in the past, and this adapting it for the big or small screen always falls short of the finish line. I fully expect this to slip back into the purgatory of pre-production, the rights to the series collecting dust on a Columbia shelf.

I've been burned by Jonah Hex rumors before, so this time I'm going to tread carefully ... very carefully. Hollywood Elsewhere reports they have reliable information that Josh Brolin (W.) has signed to star in WB's feature film version of DC Comics' Jonah Hex. According to Wells' "friend", it's a done deal -- but a top secret one. So in spite of protestations to the contrary from both Warner Bros. and Brolin's reps, Elsewhere believes they have the real dirt on the comic book adaptation

Hex was created by John Albano and Tony DeZuniga, and it centers on a disfigured bounty hunter who wanders the plains in a tattered confederate uniform. Hex had a rotating cast of villains, and the series was known for its rough-and-tumble plot lines and copious amounts of gore. Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor (Crank) have already been hired to write and direct the flick, and not much is known about the story other than the fact that Jonah's "quest in the film is tracking down a voodoo practitioner." According to Elsewhere, there will be plenty of CGI and sci-fi overtones, and even though the earlier incarnations of Hex were strictly in the setting of the Wild West, as the series carried on Hex came up against plenty of supernatural bad guys – making the fantasy element of the flick not as far out as you may think.

I guess we'll have to wait and see if Brolin is really donning the six-shooters for Hex, or whether we'll just have to settle for the actor playing a different 'cowboy with a bad reputation'. So what do you think? Is Brolin a good match for Hex on the big screen? Sound off below....

There's no question Appaloosa is a Western. It's set in 1882 in the New Mexico Territory, it has tin-star-wearing city marshals getting into gunfights with ornery cusses, it includes some scenes involving problems with Indians -- the whole nine yards. But underneath all that, it's really just a buddy movie, a rough-and-tumble, no-girls-allowed, steak-and-potatoes romp that happens to be set in the Old West. It's as much Don Quixote and Sancho Panza as it is Butch and Sundance.

The buddies are Virgil Cole (Ed Harris, who also directed) and his sidekick, Everett Hitch (Viggo Mortensen), an inseparable pair of freelance peacekeepers and expert gunmen. At the film's outset, they are hired by the dusty frontier town of the title to protect it from Randall Bragg (Jeremy Irons), a devious rancher whose band of ne'er-do-wells occasionally murders local citizens, including the previous city marshal. With Cole as the new marshal and Hitch as his deputy, the two set about enforcing law and order.

One of the town's new ordinances, under Cole's direction, is that you can't bring guns inside the city boundaries. He informs a couple of Bragg's men of this when they show up at the saloon one day.

"That's the law," Cole says.

"Your law," replies one of the men, scoffing.

"Same thing," Cole says. OH SNAP!

For the first time in its four-year history, Austin's Fantastic Fest decided to premiere a handful of its titles on the internet, thereby giving the hardcore genre fans of the world a chance to sample what this festival is all about. One of those titles was South of Heaven, which I decided to watch online, so as to give myself the option of seeing something else once the festival began. Plus I figured, hey, if the movie's are already posted (albeit temporarily) on the net, then how "top-grade" could they be? Surely the FF crew would save the BEST stuff for the actual festival, right?

Wrong.

I finished the film at about 3:30am and I immediately dropped the following email to the Fantastic Fest programmers, and this is a censored-yet-direct quote from yours truly:

"Just finished watching South of Heaven, and I can't remember the last non-horror flick I was this jazzed about. It's the Coens meets Sam Fuller while watching Looney Tunes and making an '80s mix tape full of The Smiths and Depeche Mode. I (freak)ing loved it."

(from left to right) Fantastic Fest programmer Zack Carlson, Fantastic Feud co-hosts Devin Steuerwald and Scott Weinberg, and Not Quite Hollywood director Mark Hartley

With the weekend came no sure rest for Fantastic Fest attendees. Saturday kicked off with, among other things: a screening of Conquest of the Planet of the Apes shown from an HD master of a cut unseen in over thirty-five years; initial screenings of the very popular Tiffany stalker doc I Think We're Alone Now and the very anticipated Swedish vampire drama Let the Right One In (which can now fall firmly in the former category); and a boat party held in honor of Donkey Punch, in which several youthful types face some serious consequences after their high behavior on the high seas. Did life end up imitating art on that front...?

As the director, co-screenwriter and star of Appaloosa, Ed Harris follows up his Oscar-nominated work as an actor-director in 2000's Pollock with an adaptation of Robert B. Parker's novel, revolving around two old friends and partners (Harris and Viggo Mortensen) in 1882 New Mexico trying to enforce the rule of law in a town threatened by a corrupt power-broker (Jeremy Irons). Harris spoke with Cinematical in Toronto about working on Appaloosa, adapting Parker's novel, co-starring opposite Mortensen and how hard it was to find financing for a traditional Western like Appaloosa: "Pretty hard. I mean, it was very interesting; people really responded to the script, and if the budget for it had been half of what it was, we probably could have got it made pretty easily. ... But we needed the budget to serve the production values; it called for that. I didn't want to make a little intimate art-house film. I wanted to make something that respected the space that it took place in ... it deserves it; it calls for it; so, it was pretty tough; it was a real battle."

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Under no circumstances is Ji-woon Kim's The Good, the Bad, the Weird a great movie, but I found myself genuinely impressed with it. The pitch – "Korean comic spaghetti western" – sounded like the sort of ultra-hip, insubstantial, self-consciously campy Asian actioner I've grown tired of; I kept flashing back to Riyuhei Kitamura's much-hyped but totally useless Versus, an acquired taste I haven't acquired. I needn't have worried. Though Kim's western pastiche may be insubstantial, it's anything but a drag. It's masterfully directed, legitimately funny, and legitimately fun, thoroughly enjoyable even at an excessive 129 minutes.

Though you may think you're here to see how Kim (whom you may remember from his terrific horror entry A Tale of Two Sisters) plays with the western genre, you're really here for the action sequences. There are two spectacular ones: the rollicking train robbery that opens the film, and a later all-stops-out chase scene involving several gangs of bandits and the Japanese army. These aren't the sort of scenes that bring you to the edge of your seat, but rather the sort that put a steady, delighted grin on your face. Unapologetically goofy, absurdly attenuated, brilliantly paced, and backed by a rousing musical score, they alone make the film worth sitting through.

1. People are willing to get out of bed at seven in the morning to watch a movie about people starving themselves to death. I don't care how much people paid to be here: it is simply amazing that the 8:30 am showing of Hunger (which Kim reviewed at Cannes) -- one of the most intensely unpleasant films I've ever seen, with a program description that did that aspect of it justice -- was a near-sellout at Telluride's largest venue. By the time I got to the theater at 8 am on a rainy Sunday morning, I was 259th in line. Everyone keeps saying that what "makes Telluride special" is the enthusiasm and undying cinephilia of the audience (most of whom come back year after year), and nothing epitomizes that attitude better than this morning's Hunger queue.

2. Anyone who fights to save the whales is automatically a hero, no matter his means. Just as it was remarkable to see people line up at the crack of dawn to watch an indescribably painful art film, it was disappointing to see a Telluride audience give an uncritical standing ovation to "eco-pirate" Paul Watson following a screening of Pirate of the Sea, the mediocre, one-sided documentary profiling him. Watson, a Greenpeace dissident who goes out on a boat and tries to sink or sabotage whaling or seal-hunting operations, may well be a hero, but there's no way you could fairly come to that conclusion after watching the hagiographic documentary, which takes Watson's word as gospel, and refuses to explore the troubling implications of his often violent efforts. Another documentary about Watson, called At the Edge of the World, will play Toronto; here's to hoping it's a bit more considered and thoughtful.