Das Weisse Band, or as it is grudgingly known in English The White Ribbon is the 2009 Palme D’Or winning film by Michael Haneke, an Austrian filmmaker who’s most notable leitmotif is hostility toward the audience. Whether or not you like his films will boil down to your position on that issue, and quite honestly, if you think that going to the movies should involve some glimmer of entertainment, then stop reading now. Michael Haneke despises you and your gluttonous, popcorn-guzzling ways. If you have a quarrelsome streak, and have a fondness for arguing with the inexplicable, then you’ve just found your Citizen Kane.

The White Ribbon is set in a small Austrian village on the eve of World War I. A storm is coming, and it appears to begin with a malicious prank. The town doctor thrown from his horse when it gallops into a wire strung across the path. The doctor is thrown off and shatters his collarbone, and the close-knit town can find no motive or suspects. Days later, an accident in the mill begins to reinforce the suspicions and paranoia. Gradually, the idyllic life becomes routinely shattered with inexplicable acts of violence and soon everyone in town – from the Baron and the pastor, to the doctor and the farm workers – are all caught in a growing cloud of darkness.

Who among the villagers is responsible for these deeds? Who is covering them up? Haneke won’t answer those questions, and the film’s power is in its stern refusal to even address them. Evil isn’t the product of a single, discernable event, Haneke seems to be saying, it’s merely part of a grand cycle that passes from generation to generation. And once it takes root, it’s impossible to weed out.

The stark black and white cinematography adds to the air of vaguely defined menace that suffuses the village. The film was originally shot in color and converted to black and white in post-production, which, as many critics have noted, seems to have drained the film of any glimmer of hope. The crisp focus and blown-out highlights film each frame with intense detail and complete opacity. It is meticulous cinematography, every frame is precisely calibrated. The glacial tempo is strictly regulated and the soundtrack is painfully dry.

Critics have been enraptured by the film, because it’s the kind of film that appeals almost exclusively to critics. Read Ebert’s thoughts here. Anthony Lane blends a review with a tongue-bath of a profile of Haneke, and thoroughly slobbers over both (New Yorker, October 5, 2009; subscription required).

In Lane’s article, one of the early quotes from Haneke seems to sum up his position as an artist:

“I hate the smell of popcorn. I rarely go to the cinema… The spectators seem to have lost respect for the film.”

A profile in the New York Times magazine for his 2008 film Funny Games reinforces that.

“I’ve been accused of ‘raping’ the audience in my films, and I admit to that freely — all movies assault the viewer in one way or another. What’s different about my films is this: I’m trying to rape the viewer into independence.”

Stay classy, Michael Haneke. His work, however, is an interesting paradox. Countless art school dropouts have attempted to “rape the audience” with their work, but Haneke is one of the few who succeeds in making people ask for it. His films tease and beguile, luring you in with the promise of catharsis and then torturously refuse to deliver. Yet, as audience raping goes, Haneke does a far better and more thorough job than verzogener Fratz like Darren Aronofsky.

Haneke gets away with it because is an exquisite craftsman as a director. His work has a technically precise feel that clutches you by the throat even when the film is meandering through a sunny field. Even his admirers will admit his films are profoundly uncomfortable to sit through, and like any exercise in masochism, it forces to you reflect upon why you’ve just done that to yourself.

If you want answers, this is not a movie for you. The White Ribbon won’t even bother to answer your questions with other questions. Try to probe its mysteries and the film would laugh at your efforts, if it deigned to notice you at all.

Perhaps the film is a Zen koan – a riddle designed to probe the incomprehensible. As an audience member, I found The White Ribbon insulting and tedious. As a critic, I found it tiresome and opaque. Wearing either hat, I wouldn’t recommend that anybody go to see it. But whether it’s a study in arrogance, pomposity, or mundane belligerence, anybody who goes to movies to not enjoy them should make extra effort to seek this out.

American politicians—as well as American voters—have a confused, and often contradictory, set of beliefs about how health insurance should work. The wayward, patchwork plan that we seem likely to end up with is probably a good reflection of the wayward, patchwork opinions that most legislators have on the subject

Surowiecki’s single-page essays are almost always an inspired read. After some trenchant analysis, he points out perhaps the biggest contradiction in the current health-care reform package:

If you’re a triathlete with no history of cancer in your family, you’re a reasonably good risk, and so you can get an affordable policy that will protect you against unforeseen disaster; if you’re overweight with high blood pressure and a history of heart problems, your risk of becoming seriously ill is substantial, and therefore private insurers will either charge you high premiums or not offer you coverage at all. This kind of risk evaluation—what’s called “medical underwriting”—is fundamental to the insurance business. But it is precisely what all the new reform plans will ban. Congress is effectively making private insurers unnecessary, yet continuing to insist that we can’t do without them.

The emphasis, of course, is mine. And it’s a point that absolutely has to be considered strongly. The current health care bill is essentially forcing private industry to solve the problem, even though they’ve repeatedly proven that they’re not up to the task.

Surowiecki conclusions point to the screamingly obvious – that health care should be treated as a utility, not a privilege for the rich. And that forcing private industry to operate by government constraints isn’t nearly as effective as allowing the government to compete on level ground with private industry.

As a wise friend of mine recently pointed out, the for-profit health insurers are dinosaurs. They are an industry whose time has past, and for those of us with eyes on the future, it’s time to gradually sunset those providers and replace them with a more sensible solution.

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/talk/financial/2010/01/04/100104ta_talk_surowiecki#ixzz0bFPkaVje

If critics were cars, Denby would be a Ford Taurus. His writing is clear and logical, and almost as exciting as a tan-colored, four-door sedan. He not only lacks the flamboyance and savage wit of Anthony Lane, the top gun film critic at the New Yorker, he seems almost wholly devoid of personality whatsoever. Denby, at heart, is a dry academic lulling his readers to sleep with his texture-free analyses.

However, once in a while, he fires one hell of a shot across the bow of the film critics community. Imagine hopping into grandpa’s Taurus, and finding out at the first stoplight that he’s got a 230 horsepower V-8  engine in there that can take a Corvette off the line. There’s the shock of “holy shit, where did this come from?” Months ago, he illuminated the teen-dance flick How She Move with eloquent prose and made you look at a generic teen movie as an intriguing cultural artifact. This week, he tackles Hancock.

Fanboys have been circulating negative reviews of Hancock for months. The Rottentomatoes.com rating is at 36% and falling. (Notably, though, J.R. Jones at the Chicago Reader also gives it a thumbs-up, and the Reader has long been a high-water mark of film criticism.)

Denby digs in to Hancock, essentially calling it the next evolution in pop entertainment:

If everyone knows that digital has tossed realism overboard, then why not turn that knowingness into a joke? Hancock flips an obnoxious neighborhood kid into the sky and, looking up now and then, carries on a conversation with Ray, only to put out an arm and catch the howling towhead as he falls to earth. That’s a pretty funny trick, and there are others just as good…

He follows that thought with some eloquent observations about Will Smith and Charlize Theron.

We’re also puzzled by [director] Berg’s visual style, which, in these intimate scenes, depends on a handheld camera, restlessly moving yet pinned to the actors in super-tight closeups. It’s as if he were making a Cassavetes psychodrama….Suddenly, we realize why he stays so close. We are watching genuine actors at work, not well-paid hired hands filling up the space between agitated zeroes and ones.

I haven’t seen Hancock yet, so I can’t hold forth on his accuracy, but kudos to Grandpa Dave for breaking from the pack, and giving us a fresh way to contemplate a film that you might otherwise completely ignore. Right or wrong, that’s what good film writing is all about.

He writes:

Again and again, directors like Adrian Lyne (“Flashdance”) and Rob Marshall (“Chicago”) broke dance movement into fragmentary closeups—furiously tapping feet or thrusting elbows or churning thighs. Dance is devoted to the splendor of the body, but these movies turned bodies into pistons, pumps, cylinders—at times, we might have been watching a Soviet documentary on milk production. The shots yielded repetitive movement for film editors, who, with the directors sitting over their shoulders, rechoreographed the dance into rhythmically stimulating but humanly nonsensical patterns.

That crack about Soviet milk production is pure Anthony Lane – apparently his bitchy colleague at the New Yorker has been rubbing off on the old man. More importantly, he’s put his finger right on the pulse of the editorial process that dehumanizes movement into blurs and hype-machined parts. It’s a nice reminder that the art of film isn’t solely the province of pompous “art films”, and a good take at a film that seems destined to be overlooked.

David Denby – How She Move