Beaks here...

Will Quentin Tarantino's rush to Cannes cost him a completely original orchestral score from Ennio Morricone? According to the maestro himself, it's a distinct possibility.

Speaking to Variety, the eighty-year-old Morricone cautioned that, while he has accepted Tarantino's offer to score the World War II epic, he is concerned that the three-month, February-to-April window between the completion of principal photography and the April delivery to the Cannes Film Festival won't leave him enough time to finish his work. Per Morricone, "Either I start working on it before he stops shooting - after we discuss it together - or I just can't do it." (Couldn't he get an extra two weeks stretching into May? Movies cut it close at Cannes all the time. Just ask Wong Kar-Wai!)

If it comes to this, Morricone might just contribute "a couple of tracks", which means Tarantino would fill out the rest of the film with old, lesser-known Morricone cues? Given the composer's prolific past, that shouldn't be too difficult. There are lots of rotten movies (particularly from the 1970s) sporting classic Morricone scores.

Finally, CHUD's Russ Fischer informs me (via the The Quentin Tarantino Archives), that Eli Roth is taking a break from his baseball-bat-wielding duties as "The Bear Jew" to direct "Nation's Pride", the film-within-a-film starring Daniel Brühl as a heroic Nazi sniper. Though it's all in jest, I'm sure it's still a little... odd to call the shots on a Nazi propaganda movie.