The White Ribbon (2009) Somewhere On the Path of Least Resistance… It was shaping up to be quite a period of beginnings and ends and odds and evens, for Frank, whose metaphorical fork in the road, had just come across a very literal alligator in the path. Yes, a literal one. Improbably but decidedly accurately and true to life, there was an alligator lying on the way to his room in the Lafayette Hilton. The Yankee in him would have none of it. But what was one to do? He stares dumbly at it as his full ice bucket beads and drips down his arm. Somewhere up the path ahead a warm bottle of Ron Barrelito was awaiting his return. Down the path behind him his sister’s wedding party (her second) was an unforgivingly cheery event refusing to cease. But now his escape was in doubt. Maintenance had thrown up snow fencing around the swamp to curtail just this sort of thing from occurring. Where do a lazy bunch of conasse get a pile of snow fencing in this tropic anyway one might wonder. And Frank had asked them just that but his answer not forthcoming due to the language barrier. For one thing, there was no snow down here in the bayou and thus no reason to and he didn’t have another name for the wide slatted iron mess dangling in front of the leading edge of the swamp, making a half-hearted attempt to keep its seussian creatures inside its marshy confines. And now one was in his path. And he stared at it open mouthed, lit cigarette pasted to his bottom lip by spit, dropping ash from the corner of his mouth to the front of his polo shirt. It was a big bull of a thing; a male, slime drying to grey battle-scarred armor in the sun. The unblinking reptilian eyes of this fanged speed bump are trained on Frank’s every move. Its body was 12 feet long if it were an inch. The tail another 15 feet at least. Frank and a family of four could rest comfortably in its mouth. Resting on the pink sofa of its tongue. Perhaps playing the teeth with a mallet, like a gruesome xylophone. Or with the extra hands of the children, spin china plates on every fang like the most demented vaudeville show the world had ever imagined. Instead, the thing swiped out at Frank with a turn of its enormous head and a gnashing of its huge jaws, and snapped off Frank’s left shoe, and now sat chomping it down. Frank fell over as one would expect. It was terribly inconvenient and probably would have been painful too when the adrenaline wore off. Now he lied there and fretted and waited for the thing to gnaw off his foot outright. Stacy Adams were expensive god damn shoes for one thing after all. No matter how his Sugarloaf thought. And what of her? What would Sugarloaf think of him limping home sans left foot? She was a hot mess and a joy to make love to. But she was also more than a bit of shallow thing too. She’d leave him as soon as he couldn’t manage the dance floor any more. Or when she realized he never go jogging with her in Evangeline Park again. They would never be able to at it doggie style again, him standing at the foot of the bed. Her favorite position. There were prosthetic things too of course. But creepy pink-orange rubber gadgets. Really not sexy at all. That was crazy. Sugar, was dead, of course, Frank had heard the news earlier, but hadn’t yet had a moment to process it. Spike had filled him in over vodka gimlets this morning in the hotel bar before the wedding. With the oil drilling ban on, he had little else to do than stop by and dish what had been going on whilst Frank had been in the Middle East. It seemed she had broken her neck falling off the bed while ‘making love.’ As Spike told it, she had jumped when her dearest Barry had taken the initiative to slip a couple of fingers into her anus. She had only agreed to one. Live by the sword die by the sword. And so it was now almost with relief that Frank, sprawled on the pavement saw the Louisiana sun blotted out by the upper jaw of the croc—no a gator—he ought keep those straight—and the bottom teeth gingerly slip themselves down past his ears and clamp unceremoniously down on his neck. It was a shame he had gotten his hair cut yesterday. Of course, if the alligator in the path is our current metaphor for life, it begs the million dollar question (if this can in fact still be called a movie blog after all): What film is just like an alligator in the road? What film is an unnerving, unwavering mass of teeth and scales that won’t get out of your way?: Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke’s Das Weisse Band: Eine Deutsche Kindergeschichte aka “The White Ribbon - A History of German Children" (2009). Of course.

A film that subtly if not diabolically portrays the German, Nazi generation as children. Very naughty children at that. It seems with films like this and 2005's Cache, Haneke is coming into his own. Far from the passé shockumentary Benny’s Video (1992) from the past decade, typical of the hit me over the head shock of things like Dogme 95 or Gregg Araki, who with Mysterious Skin (2004) may also be growing up. And Frank is growing up too. Fear not, intrepid reader. Frank was not going to lie down and let an alligator gobble up is head. Not after countless close calls and a bottle of duty free rum waiting for him. Instead He wedges the remaining Stacy Adam(s?) into the gators jaws, buying him enough time to muscle through an azalea, and then hop the fence into the pool. It was there that he found the intriguing Hadassah Pomegranate in a chaise lounge attempting to tan but mostly burning. Frank dubbed the cute Israeli au pair, “Flip-flop,” given the pile of thongs she had in her suitcase “just in case,” the largest of which she offered to replace Frank’s lost Stacy’s. Flip-flop had an infectious giggle, an ample bottom, and a wealth of witty conversation. So, in the end, Frank was able to wait out the hungry reptile with a night of delightful company. Many more, it seemed would ensue.