The movie cost $65 million, with another $35 mil for marketing. The Weinsteins were god damned determined to market the hell out of this! And that's great and all. But the WSJ explains the problem:

The company co-owns the $65 million film with Universal Pictures, so it will only reap half the profits — a symptom of the studio's financial troubles and the reason that even a hit like "Inglourious Basterds" may not be enough to save them.

Oh Harvey. Next time keep all of the Tarantino flick and sell off half of Miss Potter.

In his astutely worded takedown of the movie, Liel Leibovitz says that Tarantino's revisionist history—where Jewish soldiers kill Nazis and burn Hitler alive—robs history of its shades of gray, and, thereby, this "bit of shallow propaganda" ruins the lessons we were taught by WWII.

It is a failure not only of imagination, but also of morality. The desire to turn film into a literal, blunt instrument of revenge drains it of the terrific power it has as a sharp and precise tool with which to cut through myopia, forgetfulness, ignorance, and denial. When in the hands of intelligent and sensitive directors, the results are shocking, evocative, world-changing.

Of course, all the filmmakers he goes on to name who do this well—Jean-Pierre Melville, Marcel Ophüls, and Claude Lanzmann—are Jewish.

Theirs is the Jewish way. Rather than burn film, they develop it into art. They are talmudic, offering endless interpretations to the fundamental question of our species, the question of our seemingly endless capacity for evil. Tarantino, however, is not interested in such trifles. He doesn't see cinema as a way to look at reality, but-ever the child abandoned in front of the television set, ever the video-store geek-as an alternative to reality, a magical and Manichean world where we needn't worry about the complexities of morality, where violence solves everything, and where the Third Reich is always just a film reel and a lit match away from cartoonish defeat.

So, add to the heaps of criticism of the movie that Tarantino isn't Jewish enough to make a good movie about Nazis. We don't agree with that. We believe that no matter the race, creed, or color, people have the ability to make shitty movies in about equal degree.

According to Guest of a Guest, Weinstein is leveraging the substantial marketing might of A Small World, the exclusive "Facebook for millionaires" that the Weinstein Co. stupidly invested in three years ago, on behalf of Basterds.

All 400,000 of them! And A Small World's self-satisfied, plugged in, wealthy membership are just the kind of people to go wild over a chance to win some signed movie crap.

As the Weinstein empire downsizes, Harvey is not too far from a joke Bruce Feirstein made in the New York Observer a few years back about his no-stone-unturned approach to awards campaigns:

I keep having this vision that I'm going to open the front door and find ... Harvey Weinstein himself, doing some door-to-door lobbying: "I've got Anthony Minghella out in the car. Want to meet him?"

Weinstein is reportedly trying to unload his stake in the site, which recently announced that it "plans" to be profitable by the end of the year. Smart move!

The reviews are starting to come in and evidence is contradictory. On the positive side, Lisa Schwarzbaum from Entertainment Weekly gives it a B and says it's, "cinematically dazzling, to be sure, 
 enhanced by an meticulously chosen retro soundtrack." In New York David Edelstein gushes.

Even more than his other genre mash-ups, this is a switchback journey through Tarantino's twisted inner landscape, where cinema and history, misogyny and feminism, sadism and romanticism collide and split and re-bond in bizarre new hybrids. The movie is an ungainly pastiche, yet on some wacked-out Jungian level it's all of a piece.

Oh, but his fellow Gothamite David Denby couldn't disagree more, and rails against it.

Like all the director's work after Jackie Brown, the movie is pure sensation. It's disconnected from feeling, and an eerie blankness-it's too shallow to be called nihilism-undermines even the best scenes.

Even the trades are split. Variety comes out in favor:

By turns surprising, nutty, windy, audacious and a bit caught up in its own cleverness, the picture is a completely distinctive piece of American pop art with a strong Euro flavor that's new for the director.

And The Hollywood Reporter against:

Otherwise the film lacks not only tension but those juicy sequences where actors deliver lines loaded with subtext and characters drip menace with icy wit. Tarantino never finds a way to introduce his vivid sense of pulp fiction within the context of a war movie. He is not kidding B movies as he was with Grindhouse nor riffing on cinema as with Pulp Fiction and the Kill Bill films.

The only people who can come to a consensus are the British where both the Guardian and the Daily Telegraph hated it.

Damn, now it looks like we're going to have to save Harvey Weinstein from bankruptcy and pay our $12.50 to try to figure out for ourselves whether or not it's good. God, critics are even worse than Nazis.

Quentin Tarantino is inescapable, from The Atlantic to Jimmy Kimmel, and Weinstein seems to be leaking gossip items to engineer the appearance that he's blithely spending money in St. Tropez. But if Inglourious Basterds doesn't perform at the box office in ten days, Weinstein's days lounging around the French Riviera will be numbered.

He has leveraged his entire company on the fortunes of Tarantino's movie: According to Nikki Finke, the Weinstein Company has pushed back the remainder of its 2009 slate of films—save Halloween II, which opens a week later—in order to put all available resources into marketing Basterds. The Weinsteins could barely come up with the $30 million marketing budget for Basterds, and if they lose money on it, they won't be able to afford to market the rest of their pipeline—including All Good Things, Youth In Revolt, and Hurricane Season. And given the fact that they hired a bankruptcy consultant to help renegotiate their considerable debt earlier this year, it's unlikely they'll find new avenues of financing to fill the gap.

Harvey Weinstein was once the unchallenged master of buzz generation, but he most recently fell flat on his face with The Reader, which like Basterds, had a Nazi thing going on. While The Reader notched an Academy Award—a game the Weinsteins still know how to rig—it pulled in just $34 million domestically and $100 million or so worldwide. That's $70 million more than the Weinsteins spent to make it, but Basterds needs to make several times that in order to pull the company out of its hole. And the Weinsteins won't get all the money—if there is any—since they sold part of the movie to Universal in order to get it made.

So here's hoping that Harvey's hype machine, which for Basterds has included rafts of ads on TNT's Dark Blue, the BET Awards, and sponsorship of ESPN's Espy Awards, can turn the movie into a phenomenon of Pulp Fiction proportions. Somehow, though, we don't think offering Quentin Tarantino to The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg is really going to get it there, but we do like this little anecdote:

Goebbels provides one of the most amusing moments in Inglourious Basterds, crying when Hitler praises his latest film. "If Hitler says that this is the greatest movie you've ever done, I can see Goebbels getting choked up," Tarantino said in explaining the scene. "When Harvey Weinstein does that, I get a tear in my eye."

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.The Invention of Lying, which Gervais co-wrote and co-directed with Matthew Robinson, looks pretty funny and absurdist and sports a bogglingly good cast—Gervais, Jennifer Garner, Jonah Hill, Christopher Guest, Tina Fey, Martin Starr, Jason Bateman, Jeffrey Tambor, Rob Lowe, Patrick Stewart, Stephanie March, John Hodgman, and Louis C.K., among others. Ridiculous.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Inglourious Basterds will be bloody good bloody fun. We're especially liking Mike Myers' gonzo Brit in this trailer.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Hm... While The Box has an interesting concept, our faith in Richard Kelly is a bit rattled after Southland Tales. Now, that movie definitely had its merits (that whole virtuoso Justin TImberlake/"All These Things That I've Done" sequence chief among them), but in sum it was a muddled mess. The trailer for this picture begins promisingly (if you can forgive Cameron Diaz's brutal accent) with a creepy, fable-like setup, but then devolves into watery, ugly CGI and we start to worry. Also, does the presence of James Marsden mean he's on the leading-mean up and up, or does it mean that this is a schlocky B-horror film? Sadly, we kinda think it's the latter.

The Weinsteins are behaving like people on the brink of bankruptcy. They laid off 11% of their staff late last year. They overplayed their hand with Project Runway, stupidly trying to wring more money out of the show by taking it to Lifetime in violation of its contract with NBC, resulting in costly litigation and a multimillion-dollar settlement. They apparently lost the rights to produce a sequel to Sin City for lack of cash. According to Nikki Finke, they can scarcely afford the $30 million or so required to release Quentin Tarantino's Ingourious Basterds in August—they haven't released a film since February, and Finke says they've pushed back the release dates of most of its 2009 slate in order to "hoard cash" for Basterds and Halloween II, which also comes out in August. Tarantino, Finke says, has been gaming out the worst-case scenario: What happens if the Weinstein's can't come up with the cash to release it?

All of which explains why the Weinstein Co. recently hired Miller Buckfire & Co., a consulting firm that specializes in distressed companies and bankruptcies, to restructure debt and help the company raise capital. The move is a tangible and indisputable indication of the money troubles that the Weinsteins previously dismissed as baseless rumor, but they're still gamely trying to spin it is routine: "As a matter of practice we have always worked with financial institutions to explore our options with respect to equity and possible investments and it is something we will continue to do."

In that light, Bob's attempt to sell his Beresford apartment—complete with a "terraced master bedroom" and a "gargantuan coatroom"—looks like desperation. He wants $34 million for it, a 70% premium on what he paid for it five years ago. But that makes sense, since the real estate market has been on a real tear since then. For Bob, it's a significant downsizing: He bought a $15 million brownstone on W. 70th St. last month, so if successful, the deal would liberate nearly $20 million in cash—which could go quite a long way toward helping release Basterds.

But the Observer is skeptical that Bob can get what he wants for it:

And it's more than anything in the building has ever sold for: The mega-investor Bill Ackman spent $26 million, a relative pittance, on his new duplex one floor up; Jerry Seinfeld spent just $4.35 million on Isaac Stern's duplex last decade.

One broker who has seen the apartment complained that it faces south, which means its views of Central Park aren't ideal. "You do see the park when you're that high. But, obviously, the coveted view is east."

Via Empire, we bring you three one-sheets from the Basterds marketing campaign, which has rejected the obvious tagline of "Nein Nein Nein Nein!" if favor of the less Hitler-tantrumy, "Once upon a time in Nazi occupied France." (The grammar Nazis in us would point out that there should be a hyphen in there, but we're happy with our scalps where they are.) We love a good fairytale!

• Exclusive: Inglourious Basterds Posters [Empire]

Basically because it looks like Grindhouse Goes to Europe, which is really dismaying. All splatter and camp and nothing else. I liked Death Proof and all, but since Tarantino movies don't come along all that often, it left me wanting more. As for Basterds, obviously this is just a very early trailer, and more substance probably lurks beneath the lurching metal n' blood surface, but for right now I'm decidedly less than thrilled. Remember that glimmer of deeper meaning at the end of Kill Bill Vol. 2? I was kind of hoping for something like that.

Looks like instead we'll get a weird Hitler joke, Brad Pitt doing what Brad Pitt does marginally well, and that smug BJ Novak looking smug. I'd ask someone to wipe that look off his face, but I think it'd require the actual removal of his entire face.

Watch above and judge for yourselves.

Right away, we found the absence of Mark Steines going, "Ooooh! This looks scaaaary! I HATE Nazis! Scalping? Is that like a dandruff thing? OMIGOD WHAT'S HE GONNA DO WITH THAT BASEBALL BAT?!" enhanced the tension so woefully missing from the ET preview. The blood-splat title cards were a nice touch, and the generic thrashmetal soundtrack (didn't they use the same music in 9?) neither hurts nor hinders the cause, though deserves points for slightly drowning out Pitt's accent. Thankfully, the critical Hitler line, "Nein, nein, nein, nein!" is still intact, a natural element around which TWC can start building their "Why So Serious?"-esque marketing campaign. [Yahoo Premieres]

In any case, here's a teaser of tonight's official Basterds footage debut, offering a taste of all the goosestep-activated tripwire excitement and Nazi-scalping fun to come. (We have a feeling the first time this aired at the Pitt-Jolie's, it was followed by a lengthy father-son talk in which Brad explained to a worked-up Maddox, "Nazis don't exist anymore, and even if they did, you wouldn't have my permission to scalp them.")

Also revealed: the projects' official logo. But don't be surprised if the final one-sheets replace the Nazi eagles and swastikas with smiley-faced dingbats and a variety of stick-figures representing Brad Pitt and his men in a rowboat. [ET Online]

The Weinstein Company has officially pinned Quentin Tarantino's Nazi-scalping World War II action-drama to August 21 — traditionally the place films like Bangkok Dangerous, College and God knows what else go to die before flourishing in the DVD/Flopz™ afterlife. That changes now, insists trend-buster Harvey, who spent a good portion of mid-2008 courting Basterds suitors to help pursue a Cannes '09 premiere, and who retains only the highest hopes for QT's Brad Pitt-led epic.

Cannes isn't out of the question, though even if Tarantino missed it we figured it had Venice and Toronto to push it into a mild, mid-September prestige slot — more Burn After Reading than Tropic Thunder, the latter which survived an Aug. 15 opening last year with a ubiquitous, $35 million marketing blitz on its behalf. That's way too rich for the Weinsteins' blood, leaving us to wonder if we should circle the date in pencil like we're accustomed to before they move a film back to a more word-of-mouth friendly awards-season spot.

Or if Harvey knows something we don't — that all the spit-take rehearsals in the world won't save what might be looking increasingly like a critical and commercial nonstarter. At least someone learned something from Grindhouse.

• August date for Quentin Tarantino World War II movie [Reuters]

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.

• Article Name [Source]

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.

• First Look At 'Inglourious' Brad Pitt [Empire via /Film]