The teaser for Quentin Tarantino's long-awaited WWII epic, Inglourious Basterds, comes out today. You can catch it before the new Friday the 13th remake, which is appropriate enough given that Basterds (the misspelling is Tarantino's doing, not mine) looks like it's going to be a splatter-fest.

I've already watched the teaser multiple times online. It shows Brad Pitt giving a rousing speech as he orders eight American soldiers to collect 100 Nazi scalps each; this scene is intercut with a few brief glimpses of carnage. There are some familiar faces, like Eli Roth, who directed the Hostel movies, and Samm Levine, semi-famous for his role as one of the geeks on Freaks and Geeks. My initial reaction is somewhere between blown away and utterly perplexed. This is Tarantino's first period piece, so it's exhilarating to see his style in the context of a historical setting, in this case Nazi-occupied France. But what's up with Pitt's performance? It looks like it belongs in a Coen Brothers movie. And what is Hitler doing yelling "Nein!" at the top of his voice? That's just cartoonish. I guess I don't have a handle on the film's tone yet.

Having said that, Inglourious Basterds is my number-one most-anticipated film of the year. The prospect of any new Tarantino movie makes me feel like a kid on Christmas morning. Basterds has a release date - August 21, 2009 - and frankly that day can't come soon enough.

One of the frustrating things about being a Tarantino fan is how thin the man seems to stretch himself. I can't imagine what it was like for fans of Terrence Malick, who made two of the most seminal films of the ‘70s (Badlands and Days of Heaven) and then literally fell off the face of the earth for twenty years. That's the most extreme case. Still, Tarantino hasn't exactly been prolific in the 12 years since Jackie Brown came out.

At the beginning of his career, we got a movie a year. Reservoir Dogs came out in 1992, True Romance in '93, Pulp Fiction in '94 and From Dusk Till Dawn in ‘95. (I include True Romance and From Dusk Till Dawn knowing full well that Tarantino didn't direct them, but I still consider these movies to be an important part of his filmography.) After Jackie Brown came out in '97, Tarantino sort of pulled a mini-Malick, before returning with a vengeance in '03 with Kill Bill.

Of course, Pulp Fiction was enough to tie many of us over for years, with its labyrinthine plotting, groundbreaking structure and endlessly quotable dialogue. I basically spent my high school years memorizing that movie on laserdisc. In the years since, Tarantino has never quite lived up to the glittering heights of Pulp, but (excluding the bizarre anthology film Four Rooms) he's never exactly stumbled, either. You just know he's gonna get to the top again, and that's what makes each of his movies so exciting.

Frankly, I don't get all the hostility directed at Tarantino these days. Death Proof ('07) gets a really bad rap. Along with Dazed and Confused, this is one of my favorite hang-out movies of all time. I love the long scene at the bar in Austin, and I love the wonderfully strange performance by Kurt Russell as the sadistic killer Stuntman Mike. The movie is like a ‘70s time capsule that Tarantino dug up, gave to us as a gift, and now everybody wants to take it back to the store and exchange it for something else. What gives?

But I digress. The release of another Tarantino film is a reason to celebrate. Movies like Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill are an endless source of inspiration and pleasure for moviegoers everywhere. Maybe Inglourious Basterds will be another movie like that. I say bring on the scalps!