Quentin Tarantino and Brad Pitt's Teutonic catalogue-shoot adventure became all the more glamorous today as news leaked that Hong Kong icon Maggie Cheung is preparing to join the cast of Inglourious Basterds [sic]. Not to be outdone, Tarantino alum Samuel L. Jackson finally got around to reading the bootlegged script on his desktop, apparently phoning the filmmaker to lobby for some motherfucking narration up in this motherfucking war movie. And it worked!Jackson won't likely make the trip to Germany, however, where Cheung shall make her diva descent shortly for the role of Madame Mimieux, the French cinema proprietor who, according to the Playlist, "takes in the protagonist Shosanna (Melanie Laurent) when she is homeless and being sought by the Nazis." A man whose Asian-film fetish defers only to his taste for toes, Tarantino will work around the minor French/Chinese ethnicity-disconnect problem later just for the chance to work with Cheung — and potentially finish the movie someday after first and second choices Nastassja Kinski and Isabelle Huppert reportedly bowed out of the same role. Meanwhile, Jackson's narration will come much later, a small part whose expository whimsy served as rich consolation yesterday from old pal Tarantino after the indignity of Jackson's attachment to... we can't even say it. That's what friends are for, we guess.

After a long slog winning over everyone from skeptical Germans to Cloris Leachman, Quentin Tarantino is already a little more than a week into shooting his World War II action epic Inglourious Basterds [sic]. And now the first photo from the set features star Brad Pitt in smooth, modelesque repose — just the way we remember our grandfathers telling us about the European front. See him in all his Nazi-scalping sartorial splendor after the jump.We thought at first that Pitt looked a little aged as Basterds' Lt. Aldo Raine; maybe not Benjamin Button-aged, but certainly more distinguished than the frosted flake he portrayed last month in Burn After Reading or the sandaled hero sure to follow in his forthcoming The Odyssey. It's most likely just us, though, perhaps having missed the stage direction in Tarantino's bootlegged script that called for "a tall, brooding Jew, Abercrombie-coiffed, and boasting the weathered visage of one top-secret orphan-hunt too many." Either way, wake us up when Cloris arrives.