• A tired-looking Sarah Jessica Parker took her three children for a walk and, again, looked tired. So everyone says she has one foot in the grave and it's all Sex and the City's fault because SJP has to work so hard! Pitchforks, please. [Daily Mail]
  
  
• Can you believe that someone as famous as Britney Spears has been checking into hotels under assumed names? Once those pitchforks are done with SJP-murdering Sex and the City, turn them on Spears. She's evil. [Page Six]
  
  
• Everyone and their mother's leaving at intermission for the latest incarnation of Othello, which stars Phillip Seymour Hoffman. Blasphemy! [Page Six
  
  
• Oliver Hudson, Goldie Hawn's less famous child, will soon have a second baby with wife Erinn Bartlett. Mazel! [NYDN]
  
  
• Suri Cruise's wardrobe is worth more than your impoverished life! (PS: Can you believe we live in a society where children are both richer and more fascinating that actual adults? Now, turn those pitchforks on yourselves. And us.) [San Francisco Chronicle]
  
  
• Lily Allen went out, got drunk and her sad, pathetic boyfriend had to watch. [3am]
  
  
• Famous actor Dennis Hopper has been released from the hospital, so halt your prayers. [CBS]
  
  
• The ever-wonderful Liza Minnelli will cover Beyonce's "Single Ladies," because she knows something about such matters. Well, kind of... [MSNBC]
  
  
• Katy Perry, a singer who will no doubt be remembered as a one-hit wonder, has been "snogging" Russell Brand, a comedian of some sort. She also sent him pictures of her boobies. [The Sun]
  
  
• Why are people surprised that a man as rich and connected as Simon Cowell would spend massive amounts of money on his birthday? More importantly, why were we not invited? [Daily Mail]
  
  
• Jon Gosselin's been acting like more of an ass than usual since splitting with his equally horrid wife. Now TLC has suspended the reality show he left because of his "erratic behavior." Huh? [NYDN]
  
  
• A comedian named Billy Eichner recently recounted a sex session with former NYT food critic Frank Bruni, who, said Eichner at the time, has an "oral fixation." What does that even mean? He likes food? Oh... Well, who doesn't? [Page Six]
  
  
• Quentin says there will be a Kill Bill 3. Hoorah! [Page Six]

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.

• Robert Pattinson says that he doesn't have a girlfriend, despite all the rumors about he and Kristen Stewart dating. He says he wishes he could just go out with models all the time, because that's what he thought life would be after becoming a movie star: "You always think you're going to get more girls after you've made a movie and it never happens. You sit there and you're like ‘I'm a big movie star and I want to go out with some models' but I don't know why that doesn't happen." Pattinson also said that LA women are nuts, which is exactly what he said about New York women a few weeks ago. [Mirror]
  
  
• Brad Pitt says that he's "an artist" when it comes to rolling the perfect joint, and he's pretty skilled at coming up with new and innovative ways to smoke marijuana, according to Quentin Tarantino. [Page Six]
  
  
• Mariah Carey say that she's tired of being dissed by the Grammy Awards and is withdrawing herself from consideration for the next cycle of awards. [Gatecrasher]
  
  
• Anna Wintour is going to "ad-lib it" on Letterman this coming Monday night. Her people say that she's done plenty of live TV before and that handling Dave should be a breeze, though she wasn't pleased when she was told that she couldn't wear her sunglasses on the show. [Page Six]
  
  
• Slutty former Star reporter broad Kate Major still won't shut up about boning Jon Gosselin. She now says they did three times and it was "amazing." Disgusting. [Gatecrasher]
  
  
• Alicia Silverstone says that she enjoys gardening in the nude, a habit she picked up from Woody Harrelson, who she says she "used to spend a lot of time with." Hmmm! [Page Six]
  
  
• Penelope Cruz is rumored to be pregnant with Javier Bardem's child and is hiding out from the photogs until she's further along in her pregnancy. [Page Six]
  
  
• Former American Idol champion David Cook is rumored to be dating a woman almost a decade older than he is, a 35 year-old "busty Atlanta model" named Kimberly Johnson. [Page Six]

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?

• The Yankees' Derek Jeter and Alex Rodriguez hate each other, and now their mutual dislike is apparently spreading to their starlet girlfriends, Kate Hudson and Minka Kelly, who are reportedly not exactly that into each other either. [Page Six]
  
  
• Seth MacFarland has outed Stewie on Family Guy as being a big, fat gay! He says that he and his writing staff had a script ready to go in which they outed him but then canned it in the end. [Gatecrasher]
  
  
• Larry King's wife Shawn has pulled out of a Michael Jackson tribute concert being put together by Larry King's wife Shawn. [Page Six]
  
  
• Matt Damon got fat in preparation for his latest movie role. He says he gorged on McDonald's and Doritos and dark beer, but now the movie's done and he's already lost all the weight. Asshole. [Daily News]
  
  
• Awww...Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen went on a double date the other night y'all! They went to Strip House (Steaks?!) and ended the night "chain-smoking cigarettes until after 4am." [Page Six]
  
  
• Kourtney Kardashian has gotten herself knocked up. No word yet on who the father is, but the hot rumor is that it's some ex-boyfriend of hers named Scott. [Sun]
  
  
• Sienna Miller has already taken the Slinky Wizard back home to meet her family, so you know that things must be pretty damn serious. She threw a pool party for her family and friends, where James Blunt tried to pick up on her, but like a true knight, Slinky Wizard swooped in and swept her away from him. [Mirror]
  
  
• Liam Neeson attended a film premiere for the first time since the death of his wife, Natasha Richardson, who was usually on his arm for such events. Reports say that he seemed understandably solemn and distracted. [Daily Mail]
  
  
• Jaime Pressly was photographed popping a squat on an LA street outside of a club, but she says it was all a big joke and that the liquid coming out from under her dress came from a bottle of water she poured out. [Sun]
  
  
• Diane Kruger says that she did everything but sleep with Quentin Tarantino in order to land a role in Inglorious Bastards. [Page Six]

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."

• Amy Winehouse's ex-husband says that she once reached into Kate Moss' handbag and swiped a baggie of cocaine from her. This has to be the most awesome thing the ole junkie's ever done while on a binge, right? [Daily Mail]
  
  
• Ample-assed famous person Kim Kardashian and her boyfriend, New Orleans Saints running back Reggie Bush, have split up. As a lifelong Saints fan, I couldn't be more pleased. KK is Reggie's Yoko Ono, just a world class succubus. [Sun]
  
  
• Love letters Madonna wrote to an ex-boyfriend from the early 90s, a former bouncer at Limelight named James Albright, have been put up for sale by some entrepreneur looking to make a buck. It appears as though the most startling revelation of these letters is that Madonna liked to brag about how cute her "booty" was back in the day. [Page Six]
  
  
• Oh here's news that'll make your day brighter—it looks as though Lauren Conrad's new novel, LA Candy, is being optioned to be made into a film. And LC's hard at work on a second book! [Gatecrasher]
  
  
• A new reality show featuring Tobey Maguire's mom and little brother called "Growing Up Maguire" is in the works. No, we have no idea how this happened. [Page Six]
  
  
• Rihanna and Chris Brown are claiming that the fact that they were both staying in the same hotel recently is merely a coincidence and that no laws were broken and please don't come and arrest Chris for breaking his restraining order Mr. Police Officer. [Gatecrasher]
  
  
• Quentin Tarantino got his buddy Eli Roth, who is Jewish, to make a bunch of Nazi propaganda films that Tarantino is using in Inglorious Bastards. [Page Six]
  
  
• Mischa Barton has been released from the psych ward and claims that she'll be returning to work on her new TV series within the next couple of weeks. [Daily Mail]
  
  
• Some sicko in possession of Michael Jackson's hair from the infamous Pepsi head-fire incident during the 80s says he plans to convert the hair into diamonds and sell them to fans. Yeah. [Sun]
  
  
• Katie Holmes was nearly set ablaze when a car on the set of her new movie exploded due a faulty battery or something. Katie reportedly noticed sparks coming from the engine area and bolted from the car seconds before it went up in flames. [Daily Mail]

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 fairy tale romance between Dallas Cowboys' quarterback Tony Romo and Jessica Simpson has come to an end after he dumped her on the night before her birthday. Love is officially dead, y'all! Hey but Nick Lachey is single again too! [Daily News]
  
  
• Poor Renee Zellweger. She went out in the Hamptons to the shitty Hamptons club Lily Pond over the weekend and left early at 1:30, taking off in a car all by herself. Why won't anyone bang Renee Zellweger? [Page Six]
  
  
• Megan Fox has to get drunk to watch her movies. She says that she had to drink an entire bottle of champagne to get through Transformers 2. Us too! [Daily News]
  
  
• Larry King's wife Shawn is a finalist for one of the lead roles in the new Spiderman musical set to open on Broadway next year. [Page Six]
  
  
• Quentin Tarantino says that he plans to retire from directing when he turns 60 because directors only get worse with age. [Daily News]
  
  
• Michael Jackson's ex-wife, Debbie Rowe, has struck a deal with Michael's mother to keep Joe Jackson's crazy ass from getting anywhere near Michael's kids. [Mirror]
  
  
• After 8 months of living on an island in an effort to get clean, Amy Winehouse has returned to the UK just as much of a mess as she ever was. We look forward to all the great London tabloid photos surely to come featuring Amy staggering in the streets. [Sun]
  
  
• All the hair extension jobs might be causing Lindsay Lohan to lose her hair. And we're sure that the drugs and questionable sanity have nothing to do with it as well. [Mirror]
  
  
• Nicole Richie went to the beach with Joel Madden and wore a two piece to show off her ginormous baby bump. [Daily Mail]
  
  
• Speaking of the beach, my fellow Cajun Ali Landry is still arguably the most beautiful girl in the world. [WWTDD]

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.

The Weinsteins seem to have lost the rights to a sequel to Sin City owing to lack of capital, and the Wrap says rumors are swirling that the company doesn't have enough cash on hand to mount its slate of fall releases:

The company, say the rumormongers, has run out of capital. There is no cash to release fall movies like "Youth in Revolt." Weinstein has been serially seen in the company of billionaires, desperate to raise more funds to replenish the $1.2 billion he has raised — and apparently spent so far, without a blockbuster hit in sight.

Even Weinstein company executives acknowledge the rumors are rampant.

Still, the Weinsteins kept up a appearances, hosting an appopriately extravagant penthouse party and showing reels from Nine, the new musical from Chicago's Rob Marshall, that the Wrap says has "boosted the company's confidence."

But wasn't Inglourious Basterds supposed to boost the company's confidence? Isn't it a replay of Pulp Fiction, the cheap and unstoppable monster that conquered Canne in 1994 and made both Tarantino and the Weinsteins what they are today?

The movie played for the press overnight, and early reviews are mixed. The Hollywood Reporter says it "merely continues the string of disappointments" at this year's festival—it's boring, there's too much talking, and it's crazy because the heroes [Spoiler redacted because you thought we were jerks for mentioning what was in lots of the reviews] at the end, which didn't actually happen. The Daily Telegraph says it's "not so much inglorious as undistinguished." Other people liked it, but it sure doesn't sound like the eye-popping, buzz-generating fare that the cash-strapped company needs. Of course it's not the critics who will be paying at the box office, and Brad Pitt's presence on screen combined with Tarantino's fanbase could be a potent combination.

So maybe Inglourious Basterds will still be a massive hit and save the Weinstein Co.! Or not:

"This is a thumbs-up, thumbs-down year for the company," said a senior executive from another independent film company. If ‘Basterds' does well, it won't be a new lease on life, but it will be proof of concept. By New Year's, it will be ‘pop the champagne,' or else — the reverse."

Another rival film executive was more skeptical: "If ‘Inglourious' is a misfire, it'll hurt them ... If it's a hit, I don't know if it'll save them."

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]

• Rihanna might be a "loser" to Donald Trump for going back to Chris "I Will Kill You" Brown, but the singer presumably hopes the epic duet she's recording with Brown will set everyone straight. Decide for yourself if Rihanna deserves the inevitable late-night jokes about her "smash hit" and so forth.
• Marc Jacobs explained Photoshop shrinkage to Victoria Beckham. Concerning his nude photo in January's Harper's Bazzar: "They've done this horrible thing, Victoria. They've airbrushed me, so I look like a Ken doll." [WWD]
• Alec Baldwin doesn't care if you're 11 years old, or 12 years old, or a child — you will watch his Turner Classic Movies cinema showcase show when the appointed time comes, Saturday 8 pm, and have the decency to have the God-d*maned television turned on! [Variety]
• Eighteen months from blissful wedding to bitter divorce and the gossip columns. It's another JDate success story. Literally! [P6]
  
• Quentin Tarantino is going around town dressed like a bum. [P6]
  
• Now Paris Hilton has attached herself to Douglas Reinhardt from The Hills. It's too late to use tape recordings of their conversations on prisoners at Gitmo. [Mirror]

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]