Monday Reviews: The White Ribbon and Others

Boy, do things change quickly, and I don't just mean the sudden but schedule-savvy switch of my Friday Reviews series into its new Monday timeslot. Last year, I earned my highest-ever attendance on this blog by live-blogging the Golden Globes, which I had also done for that strike-canceled ceremony in 2008. This year, not only no live-blog, but in fact, I have been so checked out that I didn't even know until Sunday morning that the Globes were happening this weekend. Apologies if I am flagrantly avoiding what my regular readers would like me to post about, but just now, clicking over to IMDb to peruse the winner's list, I cannot say I am sorry to miss a ceremony where Avatar and The Hangover got crowned as the year's great achievements in cinema, and where proficient, face-saving turns in films as desolate as The Blind Side and Sherlock Holmes scored top acting honors.

My only bit of Globe-related activity today was finally seeing Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon, a front-runner for the Best Foreign Language Film award. Indeed, it copped that trophy tonight, but as per my general dyspepsia throughout this season, I was mostly disappointed in the movie, whatever its strengths. With only The Lovely Bones and The Last Station left to see in the 2009 awards cycle, it's getting harder and harder to drag myself out to the cinema. In general, I've been having much more luck renting a whole slew of films from 1944, as provoked by the recent Best Pictures from the Outside In installment featuring Going My Way. I've written short pieces about the Joan Fontaine-Orson Welles Jane Eyre and Jacques Tourneur's nutso mystery Experiment Perilous, while continually working my way toward a richer and richer sense of 1944 as a whole. Stay tuned for more dispatches from this interesting vintage.

And incidentally, though I wish I had more auspicious content with which to mark the occasion, happy fifth birthday to this blog! I certainly didn't expect while writing this first post amid a flagrant bout of procrastination that this blog would last out the rest of the winter, much less emerge as the primary portal through which a lot of readers find their way to Nick's Flick Picks. Thanks so much to all of you who keep reading, responding, and linking.