Film romaneste... This has nothing to do with the better-known bloggeratti, & everything to do with where the better films are being made. Last year, it was Germany, and Hungary; both Schulze Gets the Blues and Kontroll made my year-end list, the former at number one (better than Crash). This year, I owe a tip of the hat to Moartea domnului Lazarescu. I saw it at the campus cinema in the Univ. of Wisc.-Milw. student union, & I was floored. The apparently digitally-shot feature about a pensioner's death as everyone watched -- his neighbours, who only thought to remind him to stop drinking; the doctors at three hospitals, as the paramedic and nurse brought him to them so he might receive the life-saving treatment required -- reminded me why I took to film (while a PCV in Romania, yes) so much. It spared no opportunity to expose the decrepit state of Romanian health-care, but it was not overbearing in so doing. Merely, the events captured in a most rudimentary, mundane style, bore that out. No shot was lingered on, nor any voice raised. But, everything was laid out.

Now, seeing this, and even remembering that Moartea... is a fiction, a movie narrative, I have to think how surprising that Romania got the nod from the EU in just the last week. I mean, Peace Corps remains there, as best I know. Peace Corps!

Romania is a country still on the upward side of the post-Communist mount that she must ascend to reach equality with the West, as the presence of PC bears out. No one would be clamouring to admit Mongolia to a trading bloc in East Asia, nor to allow Tanzania full entree to a similar bloc in Southern Africa. But, but... Romania! In the EU!

I have been there, though three years ago, and can say from that experience that any thought that the country, outside of Bucuresti, might share a place, for now, with Belgium, Finland, Spain, and Sweden, is mistaken.

But, we shall see. The new government in Romania, led by Basescu, could surprise with the speed of reform...