2009 could go down in history as the Year of the Basterd ... Among an interesting list of scheduled releases is now Quentin Tarantino's latest.

His much anticipated World War II epic Inglorious Basterds, starring Brad Pitt among a host of others, has been earmarked to open in the US on August 21.



Inglorious Basterds, which Tarantino also wrote, begins in German-occupied France, where Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent) witnesses the execution of her family at the hand of Nazi Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz). Shosanna narrowly escapes and flees to Paris, where she forges a new identity as the owner and operator of a cinema.

Elsewhere in Europe, Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Pitt) organizes a group of Jewish soldiers to engage in targeted acts of retribution. Known to their enemy as "The Basterds", Raine's squad joins German actress and undercover agent Bridget Von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger) on a mission to take down the leaders of The Third Reich.

Fates converge under a cinema marquee, where Shosanna is poised to carry out a revenge plan of her own...



As well as the aforementioned actors, the film will also star Mike Myers, director Eli Roth, Samm Levine, B.J. Novak, Michael Fassbender, Cloris Leachman, Maggie Cheung and Tarantino favorite Samuel L. Jackson.

This will be Tarantino's first major release since Kill Bill: Part 2 (2004). Since then he's only been behind the camera for one half of the under-appreciated Grindhouse feature, Death Proof (2007), as well as two episodes of CSI (2005) and a scene in Sin City (2005).

There's some interesting reading in the movie's trivia file at IMDb. It states that Tarantino worked on the script for almost a decade.

Also, Tarantino has said that he intends for this to be as much a war film as a spaghetti western, and has said he would also consider titling the movie "Once Upon a Time in Nazi-Occupied France".