“When everyone recognizes beauty as beautiful, then there is ugliness. When everyone recognizes goodness as good, then there is evil,” wrote Alan Watts.

***

I went to the movies over last weekend to see “District 9” but at Kips Bay they said the air conditioning had failed in that particular theater.

So I opted for “Inglourious Basterds,” which I was kind of dreading sitting through. I appreciate Quentin Tarantino’s huge talent but sometimes I’m not in the mood for his blood-and-guts style.

Well, I was wrong to hang back. There is a lot I’d like to avoid in this film – people being scalped and beaten to death with a baseball bat – but when you compare it to what the Nazis did to millions, it becomes kind of a droll equal justice.

This is Tarantino’s wet dream of how to get even with Hitler and his minions and he has imagined a terrific story with super suspense and appealingly interesting characters. The film’s real heroine, actress Melanie Laurent, is a positive, big, movie-star find; someone we might compare to the young Lauren Bacall or Kim Novak or Danielle Darrieux. She is French, Jewish and out for revenge.

Brad Pitt is marvelous as a tough Southern killing machine out to win the war all by himself, with the help of his "Inglourious Basterds." This is one of his best anti-Brad-Pitt-superstar characters. (Christoph Waltz as the SS officer is sensational, an Oscar nominee for sure!)

I have to say it – writer-director Tarantino is a genius and he has made a movie that very well could win the Academy Award next March. (You can close your eyes for a few minutes during the scalping and baseball bat moments. After all, scalping and using a bat for the wrong things is so all-American.)

***

Jeremy Piven was asked by Time about his Ari Gold character on TV’s "Entourage." They wanted to know if playing a role based on a real person affected the way he did the part.

Here’s Mr. Piven: “The character is loosely based on Ari Emanuel, whose brother Rahm is the White House chief of staff. He was my agent for a time, so I did get an eyeful and an earful of Ari Emanuel – that is for sure. I haven’t heard any of his comments about my character. If he didn’t enjoy it, I would’ve heard about it.”

Oh, and yes, Jeremy says he hasn’t had fish in 11 months and his mercury levels have gone from 60 to below 3, which makes him feel like a different person from the one who suddenly opted out of David Mamet’s play “Speed-the-Plow” on Broadway.

***

Are you interested in the memoir of a very famous concert pianist who dabbles in the paranormal, has battled debilitating illness and married one of the most beautiful and charming women of Hollywood? Well, you will be. The renowned Byron Janis has just sold his life story to John Wiley publishers via the Doug Grad agency.

He charts his early life as a child prodigy, the unearthing of two undiscovered works he found by Chopin in France in the late ’60s, his struggle with arthritis late in his career and his happy marriage to the late Gary Cooper’s daughter, Maria. We’ll see this book in 2010 to coincide with the bicentennial of Chopin’s birth.

P.S. On September 10 Byron and Maria travel to Los Angeles for the unveiling of a stamp, with Gary Cooper’s iconic, handsome face on it.