Leave it to Roger Ebert to compare the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics to the Nazi propaganda doc Triumph of the Will. In a blog entry, Ebert wrote in part: "The closest sight I have seen to Friday night's spectacle, and I mean this objectively, not with disrespect, is the sight of all those Germans marching wave upon wave before Hitler in 'Triumph of the Will.'"

In context, Ebert was addressing the "astonishing" $300 million show featuring "thousands of painstakingly drilled performers" who had spent "four months in rehearsal. Eight hours a day." His fascinating article includes thoughts on the opening ceremony, the challenge for any nation to ever equal the ceremony, much less surpass it in spectacle, the individual vs. the collective, and China's capitalist leanings.

At heart, of course, Ebert is a film critic, and he notes the direction of Zhang Yimou (Raise the Red Lantern, House of Flying Daggers) and the costumes designed by Eiko Ishioka (Mishima, The Fall). Triumph of the Will may still be fresh in his mind as a point of comparison because he wrote extensively about it again in June as one of his "Great Movies."

I played sports before movies lured me to the dark side, so when I was younger I related to the Olympics as a budding athlete. That was a long time ago, but I did watch a little Olympic badminton * and cycling before heading out to see movies this weekend. Have the Olympics distracted you from movie watching?

* UPDATE: Spelling corrected and link added. Thanks to ML for the gently-worded comment.

Film critics are often criticized themselves for being the wrong audience for a movie they've panned. Whether it's old white guys who aren't the right audience for a Tyler Perry movie or old white guys who can't appreciate a "chick flick," the subjectivity of certain reviewers is sometimes even called out for being too racist, sexist or otherwise prejudiced. We saw a high level of apparent chauvinism going on recently with the release of Sex and the City, and now it's happening again with Mamma Mia! Last Friday, in her his review, New York Sun critic Grady Hendrix* noted that Mamma, "has been getting generally good reviews, but it's also been getting trashed by some critics who all have one thing in common: They're men." And the claim has now been escalated by Liz Smith, who quotes Hendrix in the Page Six section of today's New York Post.

Despite my half-belief that Hendrix has a point about some male critics, I didn't want her his claim to go unchecked. Especially because her his review went out on the same day that most newspaper reviews went out. Meaning, how could she have known the true demographics of all negative and positive reactions? Going through all the Mamma Mia! reviews sampled on Rotten Tomatoes, here is what I discovered:

The second edition of the AFI Dallas International Film Festival gets underway Thursday night. Among the dozens of films premiering for local audiences, Stuart Gordon's Stuck, inspired by real-life events that transpired in nearby Fort Worth, stands out like a sore thumb to me. The film received some good reviews when it premiered in Toronto last fall; our own Scott Weinberg called it "more of a twisted thriller than an out-and-out horror movie ... [with] a sly and simple streak of social commentary." But my interest lies in issues beyond the film itself. Namely, can fictional depictions of real-life stories affect people like secondhand smoke?

One evening in the fall of 2001, twenty-something nurse's aide Chante Mallard partied at a club, drank some alcohol, split a tab of Ecstasy, smoked some marijuana, left the club, accepted a ride from a friend, picked up her car at her friend's apartment, and climbed into her gold Chevrolet Cavalier. A few minutes later, she hit a man on a dimly-lit highway. She was a mile and a half from her house in southeast Fort Worth, Texas.

Gregory Glenn Biggs flew into her windshield head-first. Mallard headed home. Badly injured, bleeding profusely and stuck in the cracked windshield, the hapless Biggs pleaded for help. Mallard pulled into her garage, got out of her car, closed the garage door, and went to bed. Biggs died.

Some enterprising journalist at today's Manhattan junket for The Other Boleyn Girl decided to pull Natalie Portman's chain on issues of women in film, and well ... she has a lot to say on that subject. I'll let her take over. "I've recently been getting frustrated. [turns to Scarlett Johansson] I don't know if you've had this experience, but we're probably seeing a lot of the same variety of what's out there, but I mean the number of roles for strippers or prostitutes -- or the opposite -- which, is like, 'She's the moral center of the film! She's the pure one. She's the one that makes the man realize who he should be', you know? That sort of dichotomy exists so strongly, it's like the virgin/whore thing evident to the greatest extent. So that's really been bothering me. Sort of finding a character who is complicated, like the women in this film, is very, very exciting. Also, I love comedies so much, but any kind of comedy the girl's like 'in fashion' or she's really into clothes, or like, she just wants to get married. Those are not values that I care to jump on the bandwagon of. I'd love to do a comedy. I'd love to do a romantic comedy, but you don't find something where the woman has, like, a real job.... so yeah, it is frustrating, but I also don't want to bitch about it."

Portman was much more circumspect when asked what we could see from her next on the big screen. She did say that she's already completed her work on the heavy romance-triangle drama Brothers -- wow, that was fast -- but said nothing about any future projects, like the Francis Lawrence martial arts fantasy she had been linked with a while back, or anything else. And I was nice enough to spare her the question about when she'll do a sequel to The Professional -- she gets that one at every junket.

You could go batty trying to figure out why Oscar voters like what they like -- these are the rocket scientists who thought Crash was Best Picture material, as opposed to say, a candidate for the worst movie of that year -- so it was only with mild bemusement that I greeted the Academy's decision this year to snub Atonement director Joe Wright, who deserved a Best Director nomination for every reason you can possibly summon. A few reasons: 1) He managed the extraordinary challenge of taking a piece of dense, modern literature and turning it into a compelling drama and a romance that works as a movie without dumbing down the material. 2) He's a talented, 'every shot counts' style of director, who labors over his shot selections and has the visual acumen of a Stanley Kubrick. 3) He deserved a nomination for his last film and got snubbed that time too.

The Guardian recently got its own elaborate set visit to Wright's upcoming movie The Soloist, starring Robert Downey Jr. and Jamie Foxx, and the topic of Wright's snub was on everyone's mind. Downey, in particular, was ready to open up about it, saying that "it's a f**king crime Joe wasn't nominated. He's the goods, man, he really is." When Wright was asked directly about it, he responded "Well, out here it's all they bloody talk about, so yes for twelve hours or so I was gutted because everyone seemed so angry about it on my behalf. Then I just looked around and thought: What am I even thinking? I'm making a movie in Hollywood with these amazing actors I'd only ever seen sitting there in my cinema seat like a mad fan -- and they seem excited to work with me for some reason." A pretty classy response.

The snub talk is only one part of a huge and interesting set visit report that includes new details about The Soloist and a lot of funny stuff with Robert Downey, Jr. Here's a sample, to leave you with -- Downey talking about his working relationship with Wright: "First day, I said 'Listen Joe, just don't f**k with me and we'll be okay.' But the whole point is that we're supposed to f**k with each other and he did f**k with me -- for some reason he got under my skin and f**k, it worked."

In a new, in-depth interview with British magazine Sight & Sound, Quentin Tarantino, who I had the pleasure of meeting at this year's Sundance, goes into all his upcoming and most of his past projects, and gives a detailed update on exactly where he is with his next feature, a war movie called Inglorious Bastards. "I've got tons of material and a lot of stuff written but now I've figured out what to do, I gotta start from page one, square one," Tarantino says, seemingly putting to rest any notion that this thing will be going before the cameras in the next year or so. "I started just before I came on this trip and brought the stuff with me but I haven't had a chance to continue yet. But maybe on the flight back home I'll come back into it. I love writing in other countries." No further details about the plot or potential casting is given, just that quasi-confirmation that the film is in his cross-hairs at the moment.

Tarantino also talks at length about Grindhouse, admitting to being depressed and disappointed over how the film was received at the box office, but defending his longer, original cut of Death Proof as the definitive one and arguing that it stands on its own quite well. Tarantino also talks about the process of getting involved with the double feature in the first place, and reveals that he first wanted his contribution to be a Candyman-style horror film about the ghost of a slave that terrifies a group of white girls. "The first idea was a bunch of young college history students that were going through a tour of the plantations of the old South. And there's a ghost of an old slave that is part of negro folklore. Jody the Grinder actually went down and bested the devil, by f**king him. And so the devil put him on earth for all eternity to f**k white women."

So why didn't this idea make the cut? "I would probably have had Sam Jackson playing that part," Tarantino continues," and it was really good, but then I didn't have anywhere to go with it, because if you have a story about a killer slave with supermacho powers done in the style of a slasher film, then even if he's doing it today, and even if the white girls are innocent, how can you not be on the slave's side?" Tarantino goes into many other areas in the interview, talking about his writing process, the books he's reading, the British movies he'd like to make one day, and even his plans for eventual retirement.

I'm always relieved when I don't have to review a film like Meet the Spartans, because it's such a writing challenge. What do you say about a movie that's intentionally bad? Thankfully, Slate's Josh Levin is up to the challenge, skewering the film riotously in a new piece. The first part of his reportage is focused on the length of the film, which he declares is less than what other reviews are telling you -- he clocked it with his watch and says that it's no more than a hour and three minutes from opening to closing credits, well below feature length, and asks "Isn't it massive consumer fraud to charge $10.50 for a barely hour-long movie?" Levin then goes on to declare that the co-directors of the film, Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, are not even worthy of being compared to The Wayans Brothers, Uwe Boll, or "a bear who turns on a video camera by accident while trying to eat it." Friedberg and Seltzer are "evildoers, charlatans, symbols of Western civilization's decline under the weight of too many pop culture references."

What seems to irk Levin most are the directors' basic misunderstanding of what constitutes humor, since they more or less have impersonators walk on screen and just stand there. Again, I haven't seen this film, but I think I have a general understanding of what he's getting at, since movies of this stripe seem lately to rely more and more on the reference itself to be funny rather than to do anything funny with it. "If you'll indulge me for a second," Levin writes, "I will pause to crack up Friedberg and Seltzer: 'Paris Hilton.'" He also fumes at the movie for having the actors call out the names of the people its impersonators are supposed to be impersonating, in case we don't get it. "The filmmakers betray their lead actor by having him shout 'Paris Hilton!' or 'Dane Cook!' every time one of the film's copious celeb impersonators makes an appearance," Levin writes. "Meet the Spartans dares to presume that it's smarter than the people watching." I don't think he liked it, do you?

For more, check out Scott Weinberg's take on the film.

One of the best moments in There Will Be Blood comes when oilman-misanthrope Daniel Plainview first meets preacher Eli Sunday, after having already met and done a business deal with Eli's identical twin brother Paul earlier in the film. The camera lingers on Plainview's face as he examines Eli, trying to ascertain whether this is some kind of scam and if the person he's talking to is really Paul, passing himself off as the new brother for some nefarious reason. Some have speculated that this scene and the whole identical twin device P.T. Anderson uses has a lot of resonance because it shows what a disadvantage Plainview typically finds himself in when trying to know the mind of another person. (It's a problem that he deals with again in the film when a man arrives claiming to be his long-lost brother.) But it seems that we may be reading too much into it -- in a new half-hour Fresh Air interview, Paul Dano, who plays both Eli and Paul, says his casting in the roles of both brothers had a much more mundane genesis -- another actor was originally cast as Eli and then let go.

"Somebody else was cast in that role and replaced with you?" the NPR interviewer asks Dano, to which he replies "Yeah. For what reason I'm not sure. I don't care to know, or I didn't want to know." Dano says that the unknown actor had already been filming for a short while when Anderson approached him about taking over the role and he had less than a week to prepare for the part. "We looked at some scenes and talked about the part a little bit and he said 'I'd like you to do this part' and they'd been filming for a little bit already, so I said 'Okay, that's great. It's a little bit of a shock.' And he said 'And why don't you still play the Paul part and we'll just make them twins?'"

Dano also talks at length about how he views Eli, saying that "he's somebody who I think made himself up. He invented himself. I think he's quite a bit of an actor. He created this persona at a very young age once he saw what religion and his curiosity with religion could do for him." If you want to hear the rest of the interview, and I recommend it, get yourself to NPR and click on the recent Fresh Air programs.

Our own Scott Weinberg recently told you about the canning of quote whore Pete Hammond from the pages of Maxim Magazine, and brought you many of Hammond's incredible quotes, culled all year long by the indefatigable Erik Childress at efilmcritic.com. Now Childress has announced his annual Criticwatch "Whores of the Year" list, saving his "2007 Michael Medved Bag of Douche Memorial Award" for Hammond. Jeffrey Lyons and Earl Dittman made the top ten this year, along with young E! Online critic Ben Lyons -- son of Jeffrey -- for calling I Am Legend "one of the greatest films ever made." Says Childress: "If he were 12 and had only seen 50 movies in his lifetime it would STILL be one of the dumbest god damn statements ever made by a human being named Lyons."

Apparently Childress has taken on the superhuman effort of combing through every blurb on every movie ad for the entire year and cataloging them in such a way as to reveal their hidden hypocrisies. How many films in 2007 were called "masterpiece"? At least 20, and that's including Dittman's assessment of Halloween. Even more films were called "spellbinding" and "a must-see!" I personally escaped this year, but several of my critic friends did not. Even Cinematical's James Rocchi is mentioned, for having used the phrase "raw sexuality and fever-pitched emotion" in his review of Red Road. A big thanks to Erik for keeping score.

I have no idea what the purpose of this list is, other than that somebody on the Arts beat for The Telegraph was bored, but it's pretty entertaining. Starting with A and going to Z, encyclopedia-style, every letter gives us a benchmark in the history of cinema or an interesting piece of trivia. Example? B is for Bollywood: this trivia item tells us that Britain is now a major shooting locale for Bollywood films, so much so that London tourism guides are now catering to Indian tourists who want to see where certain movies were shot. F is for First Film, as in the famous Roundhay Garden Scene -- a two second film clip that is thought to be the oldest surviving motion picture. It was filmed in 1888. G is for Gimmicks -- a biographical item about William Castle, the guy who came up with all those movie-house gimmicks of the 1950s, like attaching buzzers to the seats.

I was most intrigued by R is for Reviews, another bio item about Harold McCarthy, one of the first movie critics who started operating in the 1930s. It was his opinion that 1946's "'Do You Love Me', a Technicolor musical, would go down much better with 'industrial audiences' than the 'better class' of viewer." The N for Newsreel item is also interesting, recounting some of the most fascinating British newsreels in existence, such as footage of Titanic survivors and a little WWII news reel called Paris Under the Crooked Cross, which offers a glimpse of Paris under Nazi rule. It was "filmed by a man who hid a camera in his bicycle basket." The list is definitely fun reading and might give you a few ideas for books to look for next time you go to the film section of the bookstore.

An eclectic group of online film notables, including former Times critic Elvis Mitchell, AICN's Harry Knowles, my colleague Glenn Kenny of Premiere.com, Roger Ebert's sidekick Jim Emerson and Jen Yamato of Rotten Tomatoes have gotten together to have a long, in-depth discussion about one of the year's top awards contenders, No Country for Old Men. A lot of topics are discussed during the free-floating talk, ranging from macro subjects like the film's much talked-about ending and the theme of old vs. young to minutiae like what happened to the coin that the gas station attendant won his life with and the significance of Javier Bardem's Prince Valiant haircut. There's also a lot of talk about the significance of feet in the film -- one character gets wounded in the foot and Bardem's character has a peculiar obsession with keeping his feet clean and there are lots of shots of walking feet in the film. What does it all mean?

It's the controversial ending that prompts the most debate, and Harry Knowles talks at one point about a screening of the film that took place in Austin with Josh Brolin in attendance: "A member of the audience stood up and [said] 'Why did they end it like that?!' and Brolin just looked at the guy and he looked angry." Kenny offers a unique interpretation of the last act, specifically referring to two events that happen in quick succession involving Bardem and another character. He believes Bergman's The Seventh Seal was an influence for the Coen Bros. on that. To hear the whole thing, just download the MP3 off the film's official website and enjoy.

What is the proper etiquette one must employ when interviewing Juno screenwriter Diablo Cody? Are you allowed to ask her about her time as a stripper and a phone-sex operator? Is that crude or off-topic? There's no question how she (and Fox Searchlight) feel about the issue -- sitting down with Cody for a one-on-one interview last month (for another outlet) was one of the oddest experiences of my life, since Fox insisted on having a senior publicist actually be in the room and stand near me during the interview and occasionally even interrupt my questioning -- a first. I later found out the same treatment was given to others, and this thinly-disguised attempt to intimidate the journalist out of asking any potentially non-PG questions was really out of line and unnecessary. However, Cody can't control television interviews as successfully, as evidenced by her upcoming appearance on Peter Bart's AMC show, which apparently turned into a cringe-fest.

On Cody's MySpace page, she says Bart "was full of condescending questions. Wait until Sunday -- you'll see him asking when I plan to be a normal woman and have children!" I can't wait to see that, since it would seem to be a new contender for the stupidest thing he's ever said, and that's saying a lot. In the meantime, AMC is hosting some teaser clips from the interview, and you can see Cody's face drop into a pained grimace when Bart asks "Were you ever a stripper?" and moves on to other questions like "Were you writing at the time that you were stripping?" and "Where did you strip?" Some bloggers have taken the position that it's invariably creepy and unnecessary to ask Cody these kinds of questions, but I still say when someone writes a whole book about something, it's sort of fair game.

In her latest column for Variety, Anne Thompson details the production histories of Cloverfield (due for release from Paramount Pictures on January 18) and Paranormal Activity (pictured; screening soon at Slamdance and looking for a distributor). She says that both "borrow admiringly from the 'Blair Witch' playbook," which she defines as: (1) "casting unknowns who can improvise," (2) "scare [audiences] with a homevideo documentary style," (3) "build suspense by not showing everything." The entire article is well worth reading, but raises the question: Does the "playbook" for The Blair Witch Project deserve imitation?

I know some people were genuinely spooked by The Blair Witch Project, believing it to be "real" found footage, but according to my admittedly unscientific investigations, for every person that was scared there were three people who were irritated by the horrible "improvised" performances and/or nauseated by the 'shaky cam' photography. The film's incredible financial success -- especially compared to its tiny budget -- spawned dozens of (creatively) cheap imitations, like a copy of a copy (with apologies to Multiplicity). Frankly, if I never see another poorly-made 'shaky cam' horror film I will be quite happy. And I reserve a special place in Cinematic Hell for crap masquerading as "the real thing" just to try and shake a few coins loose from horror junkies like myself.

The third point -- "not showing everything" -- actually hearkens back to "pure classical horror," as acknowledged by Paranormal Activity co-producer Steven Jay Schneider. He doesn't list titles, but the classics must include the Universal Studios monster flicks of the 1930s and the superb, atmospheric pictures Val Lewton produced for RKO in the 1940s. Of course, Steven Spielberg's Jaws is probably a bigger influence on today's younger filmmakers as far as creating suspense without showing everything (right away); Cloverfield director Matt Reeves directly references him in the article.

I admire filmmakers who try to be inventive, so I hope Cloverfield and Paranormal Activity turn out to be good, suspenseful pictures. But an interesting story, characters I care about, and a dark atmosphere are what make things genuinely creepy in my ideal horror playbook, not big-budget studio productions pretending to be homemade indies or homemade indies pretending to be "real."

A number of people who've seen There Will Be Blood have commented on the fact that women don't seem to figure into lead character Daniel Plainview's life at all. As one commenter on David Poland's blog recently put it, "There's never a single woman in sight of him. Not when he becomes successful. Not even when he's older. Not even whores. There's no explicit point of this made, so much as it's just de facto." This is part of the commenter's argument that Plainview is a repressed homosexual. Another commenter pegs Plainview as simply a-sexual, noting that "his only love and appetite was for more money as a means to an end." But is that really what's going on? I recently sat down and read the script for There Will Be Blood and noticed something that I don't remember being included at all in the film. Since it's only one line I could have just missed it, but I don't think I did, and if I'm right it might go a long way towards explaining things.

On page 80 of the script, Daniel and Henry (a drifter who may be his brother) are sitting in a mess hall drinking and talking and Daniel tells Henry that H.W., who he's been passing off as his son, is "not even my son." "What do you mean?" Henry asks. At this point, the script says that 'Daniel begins to break down, holds his crotch' and then says to Henry "He's not my son. My c**k doesn't even work. How am I gonna make a kid? Does yours work Henry?" So that kind of sheds a new light on things, doesn't it? His half-hearted attempts at finding male companions -- his adopted son and Henry, in addition to his manservant -- are his only option, really.

Is getting the Letterman show back on the air more important than keeping Hollywood's movie writers churning out sequels? Apparently so. Before the recent side deal brokered by the WGA to put Letterman's writers back to work -- Leno can't make such a deal because his show is owned by NBC, while Letterman's show is owned by his own production company -- Nikki Finke speculated over whether the move would cause serious rifts within the ranks of the WGA, specifically between television and film writers, and now that seems to be happening. Finke says that when the deal was being considered, she was contacted by "well-known WGA members, especially feature film writers, angry that the WGA was even contemplating such an agreement." Now that it's happened, she's quoting one unnamed "successful screenwriter" who tells her "I'm going back to work. I have gotten five phone calls tonight from feature writers and every single one of them has said some variation on, 'Bullshit on this. Why am I looking at staying out of work until April when these guys are going to start picking up paychecks on Tuesdays?"

The writer goes on to point out that the Letterman deal creates a wedge for stars to flock to Letterman's show to promote their products -- SAG won't have a problem with that since WGA has given Dave's show their blessing -- thus diluting the effect of the ongoing strike. "If you're going to strike GM, then you strike GM," the anonymous writer says. "You don't say 'We're going to give a waiver to the guys making pickup trucks because they're really good guys. You don't maintain solidarity by letting a handful of guys go back to work."

Finke also says that many angry film writers like that one are now planning to go Financial Core, which means returning to work while using a legal protection to prevent the guild from punishing them. Under the law, union members only have to pay their dues to be union members -- they can't legally be punished for crossing picket lines as long as they inform the union that they are exercising that right.