Quentin’s already much maligned Weinstein Company/Universal pic is getting 50s in “‘definite interest” from men. And women are stronger on Inglorious Basterds than on District 9, even though the Sony pic opens a week earlier. (That movie’s “looking really good, too,” a rival studio exec tells me. “It’s gotten some movement over the last few days.”) The only competing movie tracking higher with young guys right now is G.I. Joe. Yes, that much maligned Paramount pic coming out August 7th. It is 86 overall, with males in the 90s (just to give you a relative comparison). For weeks, Paramount’s claims that the movie works have fallen on deaf ears. But now a rival studio even tells me, “Paramount is doing a good job ignoring the sniping and snarking. It’s come on tracking really strong. It’s looking to open at $50M-$60M — which is a great result.”

Now for the bad news: Since most marketing say “unaided awareness” is a more important data point (that’s when you tell the pollster that you are aware of a certain film coming out without being given the title), Basterds‘ aided awareness is very low (“1″ overall, with a “2″ for males). The unaided awareness numbers for District 9 are good but not great (“4″ overall, with “7″ for younger males, and “5″ for older males).

Meanwhile, I’ve confirmed that Inglorious Basterds, to be released August 21st, is still the same length it was when it screened at the Cannes Film Festival. (Well, technically, it’s 1 minute longer now.) This was also confirmed last night when Basterds screened as the closing film at Montreal’s Fantasia Film Festival.

Tickets sold out in under an hour. Cliphones and cameras were collected, and metal wands passed to make sure no recording devices were brought into the 700-seat venue. Eli Roth presented the film and explained that Quentin was in Berlin on the press tour. Roth addressed the various rumors about Tarantino’s edit, saying that Quentin had re-cut the version shown at Cannes. But during the six weeks he’d also added various scenes for the version that Montreal saw. Other scenes were tweaked based on Cannes reactions.

Roth told the crowd it was a difficult film, a ballsy film, but a great film: “If you like it, tell your friends, blog about it, Twitter about it, write about it on Facebook and IMDB. If you don’t like it, shut the fuck up!” (That got a big laugh.)

By the way, playing the film in Montreal, an international city where practically the entire audience speaks French and many also speak German, really helps in a film that features a lot of spoken French and German. There were certainly jokes that the Montreal audience got that few other audiences would even notice. (Like a really dirty pun about the French dairy farmer’s three daughters.) The filmgoers cheered for the Basterds and booed the Nazis. At the end, the audience gave the film a thunderous ovation, and about half the crowd made it a standing ovation.

Editor-in-Chief Nikki Finke - tip her here.