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.

Nikki Finke quotes one studio executive as noting: "The Weinsteins live to fight another day." I say, slow your roll: this is the first weekend, and it ain't gonna save the company single-handedly. Next week, Inglourious will have to compete with Taking Woodstock and The Final Destination (supposedly the final Final Destination movie). Horror films make for stiff box office competition, and Taking Woodstock might - might - chip away at hip young contingents who'd balk at violence. But: hot damn! Nazis - and especially Nazi killin' - do pretty okay at both the box office and at awards season. Let's take a look back at the history of Nazis at the box office, shall we? Possible spoilers ahoy, and by no means is this list definitive. Help us with the ones we missed in the comments.

Inglourious Basterds, 2009, Dir. Quentin Tarantino

Nazi Evil Factor: 6/10. Typical Nazis: they go around goosestepping and hating everything but other than Christoph Waltz's character - who just plays evil so well - they're nothing too special, and Hitler is portrayed as an idiot with the temperament of a twelve year-old.

Box Office Performance: N/A In the long run, who knows? But! $37.6M in the first weekend for a Tarantino film ain't bad.

Awards Season Power: N/A No telling at this point. But this year, there are ten - count 'em, ten - slots in the Best Picture category. Even a nomination could bolster its chances, and dollars to donuts, you can bet the Weinsteins are going to fight a brutal campaign to get this thing looked at.

Legacy: N/A Again, yet to be seen. Could be the ultimate Nazi revenge epic (especially compared to Valkyrie, in which not enough Nazis are killed by a sissy, emo, eye-patched Tom Cruise).

American History X, 1998, Dir. Tony Kaye

Nazi Evil Factor: B+. Real, because they're contemporary, and we know they exist, and they're taking our innocent youth with them. They come in all shapes, and sizes, but only one color: white, and angry. They are scary and you probably live near some and don't know it. Also, Ed Norton, we love him! He's so angry looking!

Box Office Performance: C+. Around $24M worldwide, with a great life on DVD. For a film budgeted at $10M with Norton being the most bankable actor, not half bad.

Awards Season Power: D-. Incredibly overlooked. Norton got a nomination for Best Actor from the Academy, but it didn't take home any major awards.

Legacy: B. Kaye wanted to have name removed from the final cut of the film, but critics mostly loved it. Since then, cult status. Still a favorite of basic DVD collections, college dorms, race relations classes everywhere. Maybe the best look at contemporary Nazism to this day. And #50 on the IMDB Top #250.

The Reader, 2008, Dir. Stephen Daldry

Nazi Evil Factor: D. The main Nazi in question turns out to be the older woman who becomes the lover of a young kid. She looks into the distance and stuff after they have sex, and then she gets sad. Then she goes to trial as a war criminal and (SPOILER ALERT) guess what, she never learned how to read. Boo hoo. How mean can the Nazi at the center of an Opera Book Club selection adaptation be? Exactly.

Box Office Performance: B+ 8/10. Awesome. $106,759,226 worldwide, according to the film's Wikipedia page, with more DVD sales numbers to come. With an estimated $32M budget, I think it's safe to say producers were happy with the result.

Awards Season Power: B. It won Kate Winslet an Oscar! How 'bout them apples? Not surprising, but still, mostly a critical consensus that it was the award-winning (note: not the best, nor the favorite) female leading performance of the year.

Legacy: C. The highbrow Nazi chick flick to watch, if you're going to watch one. Flawed, but gets the job done quite well in certain respects. Not the be-all-end-all, but not a bad entry, either.

Schindler's List, 1993, Dir. Steven Spielberg

Nazi Evil Factor: A. This is Spielberg, are you kidding me? It's like the opposite of E.T. Imagine a world where everything cuddly, wonderful, and nice were sucked out of its head and you were forced to watch the entire extraction. Welcome to World War II, and also, the entirety of the Schindler's List experience. The girl with the red jacket, for christsake. These fuckers are evil, soulless, and terrifyingly accurate depictions.

Box Office Performance: A$321M worldwide, and that's without network rights, DVD sales, etc.

Awards Season Power: A-. It's a Spielberg movie about the Holocaust. How do you think it did? Sadly, no huge actor awards, but this one was never about the actors. This was a movie about the story, the storytelling, and the storyteller, and the awards it got reflected that. It remains, statistically, the most critically lauded film of Spielberg's Career. Also, try to talk shit about this movie as a critic, and you're bound to be ostracized for it. End of story.

Legacy: A+. The Holocaust Movie, bar none. A full viewing of Schindler's List fulfills my yearly quota for requisite Jewish guilt, but I don't know anyone who can sit through it more than once. Maybe the biggest downer to ever make so much money and do so well at the box office. Shown in high schools, shown in Sunday Schools, shown in any class that's ever done any serious studying about the Holocaust.

Downfall 2004, Dir. Oliver Hirschbiegel

Nazi Evil Factor: C-. Hitler's going down, and he's portrayed sincerely by an awesome Bruno Ganz as a fat, blubbering, manic moron who doesn't know what to do when the walls are closing in on him. It was controversial for being one of the first films to have a German playing the role of Hitler, and one that tried to humanize Hitler as a three-dimensional character with human flaws. In other words: something besides a monster.

Box Office Performance: B. $92,180,910. Not bad. The film cost around $25M to make, and most of it takes place in a Panic Room-like bunker.

Awards Season Power: C-. It was nominated for Best Foreign Film, but lost. The British loved it: it won the BAFTA for Best Foreign Film. Bruno Ganz was critically lauded, but people just couldn't see giving an award to the guy who played Hitler better than anyone else could play him.

Legacy: B-. The Ultimate Hitler Movie, but moreso for the context than for the portrayal of Hitler. Director Hirschbiegel was trying to help viewers understand Hitler and his pain, and trying to provoke conflicted emotions about him, which worked, but nobody would admit it, and there was lots of outrage over Hirschbiegel's attempt. More important, however, is that Bruno Ganz's performance became an internet meme (whee!) where people would insert subtitles into a scene where Hitler is screaming his subordinates. For all intents and purposes, it is a pretty great internet meme, if there is such a thing. Example, in place of the trailer, above.

Valkyrie 2008, Dir. Bryan Singer

Nazi Evil Factor: C-. Meh. X-Men director Bryan Singer made Nazis about as evil as, I don't know, Magneto on a bad day.

Box Office Performance: B-. $200M. Tom Cruise did pretty well, all things considered, including a reported budget of $90M.

Awards Season Power: F. Niet! Critics don't dig on Nazi, Eye-Patchy Tom Cruise.

Legacy: C-. It's Tom Cruise dressed up as an Eye-Patchy, Nazi Killin' Nazi, directed by the guy who did The Usual Suspects. Camp value!

The Pianist, 2002, Dir. Roman Polanski

Nazi Evil Factor: B. They hate lots of things, but a piano-playing Adrien Brody ain't one of 'em. Typically evil. They kill things people love and are generally evil assholes.

Box Office Performance: B-. For a $35M budget, $120M (most of that coming from worldwide gross), it did fairly well, and still attracts decent followings on DVD.

Awards Season Power: B+. Failed to capture any Best Picture wins, but did score BAFTAs and Oscars for Polanski and Brody. Also took the Palm d'Or at Cannes, for what it's worth.

Legacy: C+. Should have a better one, but Brody's post-Pianist career and Polansky's pervy hideout status continues to haunt this movie amongst people who haven't already seen it. It's great, but is it great enough to be in the pantheon of great Holocaust movies? It should be.

The Producers

Nazi Evil Factor: F. Not so much. There's a maybe Nazi-loving Broadway artiste, but the real villians here are Broadway Producers, who, well, yes.

Box Office Performance: B Well, consider this: the film itself did mediocre box office business because much of America considered it to be in bad taste - Peter Sellers even had to put an ad out in Variety telling more theaters to carry it - but it eventually spawned a long-running musical that gave Broadway some much needed life, which spawned a so-so movie version of the new musical. So, for Mel Brooks, yeah, I'd say it paid off.

Awards Season Power: C. Won WGA awards for Brooks, scores an Oscar nomination for Gene Wilder, won an Oscar for Brooks' writing.

Legacy: C+. Well, it gets to be compared with the shitty Broderick/Lane remake, which was a remake of the musical, which was better than the original movie. Not the best Brooks movie, but not the worst. Then again, "Springtime For Hitler." Kind of wonderful, no?

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.

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.

New York Times writer David Segal goes for the jugular with some of the contextualizing work done here. There're the great anecdotes from filmmakers the Weinsteins have worked with, like Quentin Tarantino's story about the time Harvey wanted to buy a restaurant just so he could blow smoke in the fire marshall's face:

The story killed, and when the laughing died down, Bob smiled, waited a beat and added another punch line. "A million dollars," he sighed, "for a cigarette."

Ah, the flush years. They must seem kind of distant now.

Or Weinstein loyalists like Kevin Smith sounding "wistful" about a failure to promote a film:

"They had impeccable taste when they were hungry," Mr. Smith says. "The problem is that they're not really hungry anymore. They're starving and desperate."

Or guys like the producer of Fanboys going on the record about how terribly trite he thinks the Weinstein's tastes have become:

To Dana Brunetti, who produced "Fanboys," the whole episode was a blown opportunity. "I don't think the Weinsteins understood that they had this stalwart audience of ‘Star Wars' fans in their back pocket," he says. "They just wanted the movie to be whatever had been hot the previous weekend. It was ‘Superbad' one weekend, something else the next."

All things that would've never have been mentioned in public - or private, maybe - by the talent in the Weinsteins employed in their heyday. The Weinsteins' strange fraternal relationship with each other is documented; so are moments of affability, to push home the point that Harvey and Bob aren't the bulldogs they used to be. But key to understanding the Weinsteins, and the way they keep getting by despite hemorrhaging money on failure after failure, is a scene in which Harvey's rattling off the company's slate of current and upcoming releases.

...the brothers were downright generous with me when it came to screening their coming movies. In fact, they shared as much of their slate as was ready - six movies in all, as well as ads, DVDs and rough cuts of unfinished products. The goal, they said, was to demonstrate the strength of these films. For Harvey, it also seemed as if the screenings were supposed to bolster his case if - or, perhaps in his mind, when - he had to complain about this article. We showed him everything and he still said we're doomed, was the subtext. If there is such a thing as prevenge, this is it. "You see this?" Harvey asks, pounding a finger against a sheet of paper. It's a Nielsen NRG tracking poll, a gauge of public interest in coming movies. He points to figures besides "Inglourious Basterds." Here's the G-rated version of what he says next: "This is called ‘smash hit'!"

Or the "next big thing" strategy, which is what they've been riding on for a while, now: sell investors on the idea that whatever comes next will, in fact, be the great success, just based on concept alone: a new Kevin Smith movie, starring the fat Jewish guy from all the Judd Apatow movies: huge! A new Holocaust movie, starring the Academy-loved Kate Winslet: blockbuster! And so on. They even take to admitting that they're nothing more than film producers, which is something they failed to realize when they tried to diversify into a multimedia company.

"What happened was, I got more fascinated by these other businesses and I figured, ‘Making movies, I can do that in my sleep,' " he says in an interview in his office in downtown Manhattan. "I kind of delegated the process of production and acquisitions. Yes, I had a say in it, but was I 100 percent concentrating? Absolutely not. I thought I could build the company and delegate authority, and that's where it went wrong."

But while they now praise the virtues of being scrappy, independent film producers again, it has to bruise the egos of the Weinstein Brothers. So much so, that they'd let a New York Times reporter in their buisness to get the story of their next success strategy out, and in the process, risk having to read damaging anecdotes about themselves like this one, delivered by Kevin Smith:

At the premiere [of Zach And Miri Make A Porno], he introduced Mr. Smith to the actress Sarah Chalke, which was awkward because the woman was actually Traci Lords, a co-star of the movie. "The old Harvey would never would have made those kinds of mistakes," he says. "He just wasn't as present, he wasn't minding the farm, so to speak."

The diverse business approach for a film company becoming a media company was a new trick, weakly executed by an old dog, getting older. The question then becomes something along the lines of: will they keep up? As major studios have learned the hard (and Twittered) way, making and marketing films has become an entirely different game. Can the Brothers Weinstein get with it? Or have the innovations and advances in the realm of their fundamental business - just making movies, and nothing else - already passed them by?

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."

There was a ton big budget slop but there was also a hefty amount of grit.
Movies like Usual Suspects, Pulp Fiction, Memento, L.A. Confidential, aw hell, even Fight Club were a great mix of pulp and substance.

With dynamos like Quentin Tarantino leading the charge, it looked as though Hollywood had a new surge of quality filmmakers. If you remember all that then you certainly remember the sense of betrayal you felt when you heard something, like, say Robert Rodriguez was directing Spy Kids 2? What happened to these guys?! Was it the pressure? The art? The women? According to a new GQ interview with Tarantino, it was the swimming pools!

"When you gotta go out and make a movie to pay for the kids' private school and for the three ex-wives, don't talk to me about your artistry. It's their job. I don't want to have to watch the movie I made to pay for my pool." Taraneninto went to say he didn't want to be making movies into his 60's."

It's true! On a long enough time line everyone's success rate reaches zero. And judging from the mixed reviews of Tarantino's newest flick, it looks like that timeline is really short! So we looked at some of the best directors of the 90's and tried to mark the precise moment they decided to re-tile their pools.

And sure, some will nab a prestige comeback flicks but there will always be that bottomless chlorinated beast to feed.

David Fincher: Se7en, The Game, Fight Club
Pool Movie: Panic Room

Fincher was a decorative filmmaker with a pretty morbid vision. Then he made Panic Room with Jodie Foster, who some time in late 90's also decided that she would stop picking plum roles and just you know, show up. Now grasping at commercial success with movies like Benjamin Button, it's safe to assume that Fincher will continue to splash around in the shallow waters of mediocrity.

Jonathan Demme: Silence of the Lambs, Philadelphia.
Pool Movie: The Truth About Charlie
Silence of the Lambs was a game changer for all psychological thrillers about wang-tucking serial killers. Then he encouraged us to reach out and touch a gay, which was fine. But then Demme dropped the Whalberg bomb with The Truth About Charlie. That is an awful movie! And Demme has not made anything not-awful since!

Curtis Hanson previous films: L.A. Confidential, Wonderboys, 8 Mile
Pool Picture: Lucky You

Three years too late, Lucky You tried to capitalize of the poker craze of '02 with a jerky rom-com staring Eric Bana (whose appeal is still a mystery to me) . Lucky You was an undredeemableIe flop. Rex Reed put it best: "I don't know a grand slam from a royal flush and couldn't care less, so I might just as well have been watching a two-hour translation of Egyptian hieroglyphics."

Steve Soderbergh: Sex, Lies, Videotape, Traffic, Che
Pool Movie: The Good German
When Soderbergh made Ocean's 11 in 2001 you could fill an Olympic sized pool with the art house tears. But Ocean's was crowd-pleasing pop at it's best. Soderbergh's real paycheck flick was The Good German . An updated noir vehicle for George Clooney that mucked the line between homage and mockery.

Ang Lee: Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Brokeback Mountain
Pool Movie: The Hulk
Way to go, Ang! Just when we were starting to believe that you were as good as everyone said you were, you go and make The Hulk.

The Wall Street Journal and LA Times confirmed a story Nikki Finke had hints of earlier this week: that The Weinstein Company has brought on financial advising firm Miller Buckfire & Co to play with their cash and figure out how to cover the holes in their reportedly massive debt while covering costs to keep the shop open. Notes a Finke source:

"You don't hire Miller Buckfire to raise money. You hire Miller Buckfire because they are one of top restructuring experts in the country. They currently represent several top institutions going through bankruptcy."

And who are some of those institutions? Well, the recently tanked GM, for one. The cash-crunched Readers Digest, too. And Magna Entertainment, a bankrupt company who holds a bunch of horce-racing tracks and investments in the sport. Which, interestingly enough, was founded by an auto-parts guy. Sure, the company's flack issued some ridiculous denial about "always working with financial institutions," but this one's a no-brainer: they're hurting.

Finke notes that she's also since heard that Harvey - probably with the intention of increasing commercial potential - managed to pressure Quentin Tarantino into cutting down his upcoming WWII Nazi-killing epic, Inglorious Basterds, down from its current three-hour run time. Weinstein's always been pretty hands off with Tarantino, so this comes as a slight surprise, but not really, because the film received a pretty mixed reception at Cannes: not what they wanted or needed.

At least they're still hiring assistants. A recent job posting from the once coveted, semi-secretive (now: ubiquitous) UTA job list notes that someone over there - maybe the Harv, by the job description - needs a new minion to harass:

Seeking executive assistant in NYC. Ideal candidate must have excellent communication skills, and superb gate-keeping skills. Must be available on nights, weekends, expect to spend long hours in the office, be able to travel on a moments notice and stay away for uncertain amounts of time. Must have expansive knowledge of film, the industry and minimum 2-3 years experience assisting another top-level executive. Send cover letter, resume, and list of references to: hrjobs@weinsteinco.com

"Stay away for uncertain amounts of time," eh? Sound ominous. The Harv's supposedly curbed his eating and smoking problems, but a new "fuckface" to digest and regurgitate in a period of unmitigated rage is probably an well-portioned expense the company will - thankfully, but maybe fatefully - never write off.

The Weinstein Company To Restructure [Deadline Hollywood Daily]
Weinstein Co. Hires Firm to Explore Restructuring [Wall Street Journal]
Weinstein Co. hires consulting firm to restructure its debt and raise funds [LA Times]

Madsen also took to the pages of the New York Post today to press the same point: There's no way Carradine would kill himself. Carradine's grieving loved ones are clearly trying to protect his memory from the ignominy of suicide. But given the fact that Thai police are now openly suggesting that Carradine died in the course of asphyxiating himself while masturbating or having sex, it seems the best way to protect his memory would be to keep quiet for now. Because the repeated insistence that Carradine would never wrap a rope around his neck with the intent of killing himself begs the question as to why, exactly, he appears to have wrapped that rope around his neck. And his genitals.

Carradine's manager did tell King that he suspected "foul play," and Thai authorities haven't completely ruled out murder. But you can tell from the looks on these guy's faces what they think happened. And if they honestly believed that Carradine was the victim of a heinous crime, you'd think they'd be shouting it from the rooftops.

We were going to say that we hope, for Carradine's sake and for the sake of his family, that he didn't die in the course of auto-erotic asphyxiation or kinky sex. But who are we kidding? It's better than the alternative. But it's all still bad. Which is why, under these circumstances, going on Larry King right now probably isn't the best way to promote his legacy.

Quentin Tarantino's latest quiet little parlor piece Inglourious Basterds will likely bow at Cannes next month, as Tarantino is much-beloved by those Frenchie freedom haters. [Variety] James Franco may be out but Marion Cotillard, Ellen Page, and Cillian Murphy are all signing up for Christopher Nolan's sci-fi action picture Inception. [Variety]

OMG, this is the best/weirdest news ever. Long-lost actor Edward Furlong, who married an old lady then disappeared, will appear in worst-director-ever Uwe Boll's new movie. It's called Janjaweed and is about Darfur. A hard-hitting look at journalists in Sudan, starring Eddie Furlong. Directed by Uwe Boll. Oh. Oh dear. (But secretly: Yessssss.) [Variety] If you need to scrub that info from your brain, go watch a pirated version of the new Wolverine movie online. Apparently it leaked. I don't know where it is, though. If I did, I wouldn't be writing this right now. [Variety]

Remember that book The World Without Us? It was about what would happen if humans were to disappear from the Earth. So: No people. Fox, somehow, has imagined this as a movie WITH PEOPLE! That guy who made a great forty-minute film and a shitty two-hour film with I Am Legend is set to direct. Boo. [THR] Speaking of people disappearing: Awe-inspiring Big Love actress Jeanne Tripplehorn will star in an indie feature called Morning, about mourning. Hopefully she will play a character named Electra. [THR]

Oh phew. AMC has renewed its terrific little series Breaking Bad for a third go-around. If you're not watching this show, do yourself a favor and check it out. That surprise Bryan Cranston Emmy win? Not such a surprise when you watch the thing. [THR]

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]

We've committed entire Munich exchanges to memory ("We can't afford to be that decent anymore." "I don't know if we were ever that decent.") and plan on dedicating our next camping weekend to the brave men and women of Defiance. But after considering the sneak preview evidence, we think Inglourious Basterds has stretched this particular cinematic subgenre past its breaking point, its splinters sent hurtling into the realm of Hebe hate-porn. We're not sure at what point we turned on this ET Exclusive—oh, who are we kidding, yes we do: It was the moment we saw B. J. Novak's face delivering a ferocious "YES SIR!" to Lt. Aldo Raine's SS-mutilating marching orders. Then there's Eli Roth decapitating an Aryan with a baseball bat. No, Jewsploitation fans that we are, we can't muster the will to take this shit seriously, even on an ironic level. Brad's accent sounds too fucking stupid. [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]

In one case, a hidden camera in a police interview room filmed detectives bashing a suspect during an interview. The suspect was repeatedly slapped and kicked, pinned to the ground and hit with a telephone when he asked to call someone. The detectives then tell the suspect not to "bleed everywhere." ...

A poem written by a AOS member describes "a squad of men all as one, ready to fight until the job's done."

"When banks get robbed and policemen are shot. The hierarchy cries, 'Who have we got'. Who can clean up this mess. Let's call on the men from the AOS," reads the poem

The poem complains of criminals lying and police being reprimanded for taking tough action, but says: "So long as there's bad crooks, they'll need us around, if they're rid of us then crime will abound."

Sung to the tune of "Stuck in the Middle With You," natch.

• Australia's 'Reservoir Dogs' police squad revealed [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]

The 26th and final name listed in the cast? None other than Dancing with the Stars comeback queen Cloris Leachman, who will hopefully revive the German accent that has served her so well in both Young Frankenstein and Broken Lizard's Beerfest. Sure, sure, we're also excited that Goodbye Lenin's Daniel Brühl has been confirmed (he's our bet to succeed Gael Garcia Bernal as the next hot foreign import) and that Mélanie Laurent has been announced as female lead Shoshanna, but let's face it: all other news pales in comparison to the Cloris. Quentin, we eagerly look forward to her paso doble/Batusi dance scene — don't let us down!