You can say a lot of things about Quentin Tarantino – mainly about his great big stupid chin if you like – but don’t say he never learns.

Remember Valkerie, the movie where Tom Cruise tries to kill Hitler but bollocks it all up? Not a great big hit at the weekend box office. But Inglourious Basterds, the movie where Brad Pitt tries to kill Hitler and then does, is a super duper number one hit at the weekend box office.

Or maybe it’s because everyone really wanted to see what Eli Roth is like as an actor. No? No, we didn’t think so either.

Inglourious Basterds is the new number one movie at the weekend box office, and presumably that’s because it contains a perfect storm of ingredients – Brad Pitt’s box office pull, Quentin Tarantino’s visual flair, the average hecklerspray commenter’s gross inability to spell two simple words correctly and utter, utter mind-bending boredom. Yes, that’s probably it. Anyway, here’s the US weekend box office top five…

1 - Inglourious Basterds (Wow, it looks like deliberate misspelling is the hot new craze at the moment. Let’s try it – Inglourious Basterds iz a pyle off furkken shet. Hey, it’s fun!) $32,602.000

2 - District 9 (Peter Jackson had a hand in producing this. It’s hard to tell though, because nobody who’s seen it has lapsed into a tedium-induced coma three and a half hours into it yet) $18,900,000

3 - GI Joe: Rise Of Cobra (Again, we really must state that – despite the suggestive title - GI Joe: Rise Of Cobra isn’t a porn movie. Sienna Miller doesn’t make porn movies. She probably will in a few years to fund the drug addiction she’ll develop when she realises that starring in a hokey second-rate action film about some toys is as good as her career will ever get, but she doesn’t yet) $12,500,000

4 - The Time Traveler’s Wife (Soon to be made into a TV show, if reports are to be believed. Presumably it’ll be just like Quantum Leap, only for shitheads) $10,025,000

5 - Julie & Julia (You know what’d be funny? If Julie & Julia starred Julie Andrews and Julia Roberts. Or Julie Martin from Neighbours in the mid-1990s and the Beatles song Julia. Or bloody something) $9,000,000

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Last night American Idol sang songs from the movies – specifically the movies with dreadful power ballads in them.

Honestly American Idol, Songs From The Movies? Be more broad next time, we dare you. Why not have a Songs That Exist night? Or, if you feel that’s too constricting for your audience, why not have an Arbitrarily-Chosen Ambient Sounds night? Would you watch Lil Rounds give a heartbreaking performance of Dot Matrix Printer Paper Jam? Because we bloody would.

Anyway, because last night’s American Idol was about films, the show booked Quentin Tarantino to be the guest mentor. Which was weird.

American Idol is one of the biggest shows in history because it understands. It understands that, with Blindy being eliminated last week, the roster of inexplicably bad American Idol contestants is drying up. And without anyone to laugh at, American Idol becomes the worst thing it could possibly be – sincere.

But as we said, American Idol understands this and took two genius measures last night to stop this from happening. These were:

1 – Only letting Simon Cowell comment on about 50% of the performances, much to his obvious chagrin, and

2 – Bringing in Quentin Tarantino to be the contestants’ mentor as a way of promoting his new film, even though he has no obvious musical ability and his new film has the words ‘bastards’ in the title so nobody on American Idol could specifically refer to it by name.

But still, with Quentin Tarantino as the mentor on Movie Night, maybe he’d help to choose some typically idiosyncratic song choices. Perhaps Stuck In The Middle With You, or Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood, or The Love You Save (May Be Your Own) by Joe Tex. But, no, that didn’t happen either. Instead we basically got smacked over the head with a lot of genuinely bad power ballads. Most of which seemed to have been recorded by Bryan Adams, depressingly.

But despite all this obvious nonsense, what were the American Idol performances actually like? Drearily standard, to be honest. Lil Rounds wasn’t as good as people expected her to be, Danny Gokey cried because he’s got a dead wife, Anoop Desai pulled a face that was a little bit ’stalker’ and a little bit ‘rapist’ during Everything I Do (I Do It For You) and Adam Lambert magically transformed Paula Abdul into the world’s worst Yoda impressionist. Exactly what we’d expect at this point in the competition.

So with that in mind, who’ll be chucked out of American Idol tonight? On the basis of last night’s show, Lil Rounds. But who knows? All we can say about the American Idol results show with any certainty is that it’ll have about 15 pointless performances by people we don’t like in it, it’ll go on for roughly nine days longer than anybody really wants it to and we’ll seriously consider impaling a giant metal spike through our eyes and face about 15 minutes in. So, you know, nothing new.

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So what does any actor do when they realise their popularity is at an all-time low – even lower than it was when nobody even knew who Mike Myers was? That’s right – they sign up for a role in a Quentin Tarantino movie. Works every time.

So it comes as no surprise that Wayne Campbell has joined the increasing ranks for Tarantino’s newest hype-machine, Inglorious Bastards. It’s a war film and it’s by Quentin Tarantino, so expect it to be quite insane and bring about countless complaints from idiots, while other idiots just talk as if it’s the greatest film that’s ever happened.

When it’s clear to anyone with sense that it isn’t offensive, it is good, but it isn’t the second coming.

It’s the Tarantino formula.

It’s clearly something that Mike Myers has looked in to, as he has opted to try and save his flagging reputation by signing on to Bastards. The Canadian who seems to think he is British will play General Ed Fenech, “a military mastermind who takes part in hatching a plot to wipe out Nazi leaders,” apparently. Reports that Myers will adopt his utterly hilarious Scottish accent for the part are said to be ‘unfounded as of right now, but he probably will as it’s the only accent he’s done for the last fifteen years’.

Mikey boy will be joined by cast members such as Brad Pitt, Eli Roth and B.J. Novak on the film, though we aren’t too sure who that last one is (a quick check on IMDB shows he’s one of that lot from the American version of The Office, so… err… fair enough). The film was supposedly to have Simon Pegg attached too, but scheduling difficulties got in the way, meaning the one with the tiny ears is just going to go and do another film with Nick Frost.

Not that we’re complaining, of course. They’re actually funny. Unlike Mike Myers.

Inglorious Bastards is a Tarantino remake of Inglorious Bastards, which was a remake of The Dirty Dozen. Confused? Well it has Mike Myers in it now, so it’s unlikely to get any less confusing. Prisoners escape, French underground, difficult mission – that’s about it. Expect kitsch references, a soundtrack that will be all over the radio for years to come and the semi-revival of some careers to come from it, as is always the case with Quentin Tarantino movies.

Rather than casting Myers as the hero of the piece, some sense has fortunately been seen, and his role is thankfully just a small one. Surely not big enough for him to ruin proceedings, but at the same time probably the right size for some of his reputation to be restored.

Until he brings out Austin Powers 4, which will involve the same joke being made repeatedly for two hours, and ruins himself forever.

It’s the Myers formula.