Because I Care I Share

I'm just that sort. I know. A crown of thorns, a blaze of light, I will never be appreciated in my own time. Sad, sad.

Lordy today needs to end; I'm growing delirious. Expect seizures of weirdness like this for another hour or so unless I rein my brain in. But for now, here is what little Roger Ebert so far has to say of Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon from his spot on the festival circuit:

"It's fairly routine at a film festival to hear a director praise somebody else's film. But Lone Scherfig, the Danish director of the wonderful "An Education," went a little further than that. Of Michael Haneke's "The White Ribbon" she told me, "I think it may be the best film I have ever seen." The film, which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes 2009, couldn't be more different than Haneke's much-admired "Cache" (2005), about a family disrupted by the arrival of videotapes indicating someone has inexplicable access to their lives. Yet in a way it's similar.

Set in Germany on the eve of World War One, it involves a small rural community torn apart by a series of horrible crimes. Who is committing them, and why? Haneke is too original a director to make anything as simple as a whodunit. His film is not about the identity of the killer but about the nature of the community. Where does suspicion fall, and why, and what does that imply -- about society in general, and Germany at that time in particular? In a buried sense, the real subject of the film may be the rise of the Third Reich. No, suspicion doesn't fall on local Jews. The film is more about the nature of guilt and suspicion itself."

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