Funny Games (2008)

[MacGuffin]

Not So Funny Games with Naomi Watts
Source: ShockTillYouDrop

One of Hollywood's brightest imports may arguably be one of the industry's greatest emotional masochists. Genre and horror fans have purred over Naomi Watts since David Lynch's Mulholland Drive and Gore Verbinski's The Ring; or, if you want to swing back further, you can find her beaming by a lively grocery cart in a faux trailer playing in Joe Dante's Matinee or paying her dues in Children of the Corn IV. She was later rewarded higher-caliber turns in 21 Grams and King Kong, offering her a reprieve from her tussle with "He who walks behind the rows." And with each successive effort, the Aussie native has raised the stakes, stretching range and risk. This couldn't be more evident than in her latest film Funny Games (opening in limited release March 14th), a remake of Michael Haneke's '97 shocker directed by...Michael Haneke.

I had just missed the actress two months ago while up at Sundance where I spoke to her co-stars Michael Pitt and Brady Corbett. The untimely passing of former boyfriend Heath Ledger understandably forced her to cancel all scheduled interviews. Today, hands dug into the pockets of her tight black jeans, eyes scanning the room, Watts is sitting before me at a table, which dwarfs her petite frame, at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills for a press conference-style discussion about "Games." She tells the group of journalists before her that she's been up since the crack of dawn, which may account somewhat for her reserved, quiet tone. However, palpable signs of sleep deprivation are mowed down by genuine enthusiasm when she speaks of her Haneke experience and the "beast" of a remake she was involved in.

To get right down to it: There would be no Funny Games without Watts. Haneke has stated before that he would have never moved on a nearly shot-for-shot American remake had the actress expressed disinterest in the project. Watts nevertheless found this "slightly seductive in a way, because he's someone whose work I admire greatly. He's worked with fantastic actresses before - Juliette Binoche and Isabelle Huppert, I'm major fans of them. [It] felt like a huge amount of pressure, it was also very flattering. I wouldn't make this film with just anyone. It's by no means a no-brainer. To do this film was terrifying and that always interests me. It's nice to think you can combat your fears."

Watts explains she was called by "Games" casting director Johanna Ray - an instrumental player in scoring the actress for Mulholland Drive - and offered to play Ann, a wife who, with her son (Devon Gearhart) and husband (Tim Roth), is psychologically and physically tortured in an idyllic lakeside vacation home by two young white gloved-wearing lunatics. She accepted ("This script screamed at me. It's so powerful in its effect."), jumping into the project as victim and executive producer, but her duties wearing that latter hat didn't extend far into principal photography. "Haneke and I talked about some of the casting and the crew members but once we were on the set it became very clear very quickly that he was attached to every detail and knew exactly what he wanted. I just sat back and said 'This is your beast, I trust you.' I went with his flow, even though I struggled with it at times, I liked that he had such a defined and clear vision of my story and everything. When someone is so sure, you trust them."

And that trust was put to the test during the film's most rigorous and demanding sequences of remorseless violence. Watts describes the on-set vibe as "tense" as Haneke struggled to evoke an air of menace and realism. Shooting roughly adhered to a chronological order and authenticity was crucial to Haneke's vision which often includes excruciating single-shot scenes dripping with atmosphere or sweating brazen cruelty. "The first time I was bound and gagged [by actor Michael Pitt], Haneke was like, 'Oh, that looks like shit, let me do it!' and he'd bind me up," Watts says wide-eyed. " I'd be laughing, but it was a nervous laughter. [I did get] bruises, it's training. I've done a few films that require emotional and physical commitment. I'm kind of used to it."

She confesses, also, that the role posed a challenge in that it was hard to turn off her emotions at the end of the shooting day. "Working in the style Michael Haneke likes to work in is going to be challenging for any actor. The fact this was a remake is...it's always hard because you feel you're going to be compared to the original's actors, but the fact that he was designing each shot the exact same way as the original film meant that you had to do the exact same blocking and tread the same steps as the other actors. And then you suddenly feel like, 'Wow, how can I invent this character, how can I find this theme in my own organic way?' It became such a heady thing and that's so not the way I like to work, I like to intuit it, feel it, surprise myself.

The pressure put upon her was felt amongst her co-stars, too, especially the fresh-faced Pitt and Corbett. Watts easily related to Pitt's method of working and understood the uphill battle he faced as he careened through each scene with "endless amounts of dialogue. Haneke wanted to shoot long takes and he doesn't do a huge amount of angles which means more of the long takes," she says. "[Pitt and Corbett] had to be very much on their game, I was so impressed with the two of them. Very fine actors. Although they struggled with it, playing this horrible, psychotic people, I think there was some fun in it too, weirdly."

Since bowing at Sundance, Funny Games U.S.A. has been labeled as a divisive film, some heralding it as a poignant statement on American violence. Watts agrees with that sentiment but would like to add, and point out she isn't standing on any soapbox, when she says, "I don't think it's supposed to be enjoyed, it's supposed to be work for you, you're supposed to participate and walk away feeling richer for the experience. For knowing and understanding your place as an audience member better, so therefore the next violent film you see, you're more mindful and conscience of those violent moments where ordinarily you'd go 'Yeah!' as brains are splattering everywhere. [People who like those films] might feel very angry, but it definitely makes you more conscious and to me, that's the success. It's provocative and thought-worthy."

[bonanzataz]

Michael Pitt receives all the hate a pretty boy usually gets--and by "pretty" I mean "at least somewhat androgynous" (I have a friend who DESPISES Cillian Murphy and J. Rhys-Myers for this reason)--but I don't see that he's done all that much to deserve it. I don't know that he's been called upon to do anything dramatically astonishing, but I also don't think he's been bad in any of the roles I've seen him in (The Dreamers, Last Days--again, not too demanding, but he was up to them). Like I said earlier, the shock is that Brady Corbet comes off like a self-important jerk in his interviews. I imagine it's because he's an aspiring auteur, but news flash for young Master Corbet: The Kubrick/Morrissey-level disdainful asshole-ism is a privilege you EARN by doing great work, not a prerequisite to same!

please give me a little more credit. i don't dislike michael pitt b/c he's attractive. i dislike him b/c he's not.

[squints]

FUNNY GAMES
Source: Premiere.com

GLENN KENNY'S REVIEW (posted 3/11/07)
One and a half stars

Funny Games is a practically shot-by-shot English-language remake of the 1997 German-language film by the Austrian writer/director Michael Haneke. The picture, remade by the maestro Haneke himself, is every bit as gripping, suspenseful and upsetting as the original. And it's even more of a crock.

Haneke is a very accomplished filmmaker and, more importantly in this case, an extremely intelligent man. He is not quite so intelligent, though, that he's able to recognize a really bad idea when one occurs to him. Funny Games purports to condemn mass media and cinematic violence by positing two extremely polite young psychos — products of our media culture, supposedly —against a decent bourgeois family of three, vacationing at their isolated lake house. The two white-clad preppies (Corbet and Pitt) take the trio (Roth, Watts, and little Gearhart, who bears an uncanny resemblance to the young Nikolai Burlyayev of Tarkovsky's 1962 Ivan's Childhood) hostage, subjecting them to a series of increasingly sadistic games, meant to culminate in the family's extermination. Every now and then Pitt's character, the smarter of the two psychos, turns to the camera and addresses the audience: "You're on their side, aren't you?" he asks early on; later, he says, "You want a real ending, with plausible plot development."

Well, that would have been nice, actually. Haneke was particularly eager to remake the picture in English, in an American setting, because the film, you see, is about America. Never mind that the conceit of a married couple playing "guess the classical music piece" with their car's CD player (in the opening scene) strikes one as slightly, you know, European.

Throughout the picture, Haneke demonstrates an imperial hauteur that completely undercuts his already dubious point. After having his characters establish the unreality of the piece by addressing the camera, he then depicts, as realistically as contemporary cinematic technology will allow, the very real pain and humiliation suffered by victims of actual violence. He employs, with great deliberation, some hoary genre tropes, such as a dog that is the only sentient being to immediately sense the true evil of the home invaders. Haneke's deck-stacking turns truly egregious during a scene in which the family's kid, Georgie, escapes from the psychos and takes shelter in a nearby house; followed by Pitt's character, he tries to resist. In a normal genre film the kid could conceivably be expected to score some kind of triumph, staving off the bad guy. But of course that doesn't happen: little Georgie behaves just like a real kid, and gives the game away. But where Haneke's victims are all too human — they cry, they bleed, they puke, they soil themselves, just as any of us would do in their situation — his villains are as even more superhumanly undefeatable as your average Michael Myers or Freddie Krueger, to the point where they never even stain their white gloves. Aha! The fact that they don't stain their white gloves must be deliberate, then. Indeed, but to what end? Haneke's finally the one playing an insulting game with his audience, whoever he hopes his audience to be. I imagine he thinks he's going to teach a lesson to all the kids who lap up the likes of Hostel, but I've got news for him: those people don't go see Michael Haneke films, no matter how cleverly they're marketed. Haneke here is only preaching to the suggestible — people who are likely to think that his final twist, in which he offers the viewers catharsis and then snatches it back in the most meretricious, not to mention inane, method possible, is a stroke of genius. And yes, there are people out there who will buy it. I know some of them — folks who keen like banshees about civil liberties every time Hillary Clinton or Joe Lieberman open their yaps about Hollywood or video game excess, but who are perfectly willing to genuflect at Haneke's deeply dishonest vision before heading to the fainting couch to snurfily condemn America's deeply deplorable taste for violence.

Some random thoughts I experience while watching the film, if you're interested: "Leopold and Loeb existed many years before Beavis and Butthead. Also, Beavis and Butthead references are really dated. Sadism is named for a French writer, dude. Yes, that piece of John Zorn music certainly seems violent, but given the formalist context in which it was created and in which it resides, it's actually only 'violent.' TV remote controls don't actually work that way with TV content, and never have, jackass."

"There's a lot of blood in Pierrot le Fou," an interviewer noted to Jean Luc Godard back in 1965. "Not blood, red," Godard shrugged. Haneke, on the other hand, insists that if it's depicted, it's as good as real, and underscores that point by giving his killers some philosophical dialogue about simulated worlds at the very end. Not terribly convincing stuff, as it happens, and a bit too-little-too-late after Haneke's high-handed deck-stacking. Funny Games is an accomplished film — the actors in particular do absolutely first-rate work all around (if I ever see Michael Pitt in person again, for instance, I'm really gonna have to restrain myself) — but my ultimate advice to movie lovers is to spare yourselves some needless abuse and not bother to play at all.

— Glenn Kenny

[Pozer]

dear Pubrick (wherever you are),

thank you for making me not throw away 2 hours of my life in a theater.  sadly, i did so last night in the comfort of my home with this dreadful bullshit.

i was fadin out a bit (as i do so nowadays when watching movies in the eve in the comfort of my home), but tell me spoiler the dude didnt pick up the remote control and rewind the actual movie. end spoiler. . . ah, it doesnt matter.  same bullshit either way.

[children with angels]

In a way, I like the fact that there's some real scepticism about this film: it proves that just because a director has proved himself great, we shouldn't assume he is infallible, and it it shows that people don't like to be condescended to about 'mainstream' filmmaking. However, I still think that both Funny Games are really interesting and worthwhile films, and that the negative resonse to them also points to a less cheering trend: the desire to take filmmakers at their word when they talk about their work, rather than responding to the movie in front of us for ourselves. I've written a piece on the remake that I thought I'd reprint here for anyone interested. Basically, I argue that Haneke doesn't know how good a film he has made (now twice)...


Because it is quite so similar to its original, to talk about Funny Games U.S. is really to talk about two films. As such, this response to it will be divided into two parts; firstly I want to discuss the film that both versions essentially are at their core: the self-conscious interpretation of the horror genre. Secondly, I'll talk a little about the film that only the second version is: the 'shot by shot' remake.

Although there will certainly be differences between the two that are the result of the changes in actors, and the slight changes in staging, camera set-ups, and so on, we could only truly be able to discuss the potential meanings of these differences by closely analysing both films in detail side by side. After only two viewings of both films, this isn't really possible for me, so in this first half I'll (somewhat problematically, but nonetheless unavoidably) be treating the execution of the two versions as if they were essentially identical, since this is, importantly, how they ostensibly seem.

As I've said before, I have some problems with how Haneke describes the project of Funny Games. In interviews, he has time and again said that it is intended to educate its viewers into being conscious of the moral problems inherent in watching horror films. He sees it essentially as a didactic lesson - a commentary on movie violence that will shock complacent horror spectators out of their passive relationship to cinema, restoring their endangered conscience by daring them to keep watching; as he says: "Anyone who leaves the cinema doesn't need the film, anyone who stays does".

This seems to me a hugely pious, arrogant, and unintelligent argument, and one that reveals that Haneke doesn't know very much about horror films or their audiences at all (and he has indeed admitted that he doesn't watch very much horror cinema).

Firstly, it assumes that viewers of cinema in general are mostly passive, uncritical, and easily manipulated - that they are blind consumers, completely at the mercy of the films they watch, rather than conscious beings who don't simply turn off their brains and moral compasses when entering a movie theatre. This is an argument that has been put forward since the beginning of cinema by many elitist critics of mainstream film (and popular culture in general), who see themselves as being far above the 'average' audience member, and it also unfortunately formed the basis for much insensitive film theory in the 1970s. It reveals an innately snobbish and condescending attitude towards 'the masses', and to popular cinema, and has actually been repeatedly disproved by audience research that has shown that the real responses of individual viewers are far more individual, complex, and critical than those of the mindless automatons Haneke implies. Even if studies hadn't been undertaken that disproved the theory, however, simple common sense - and our own experiences of film-viewing - should be enough to dispel the myth of the wholly uncritical spectator.

Secondly, Haneke's conception of Funny Games reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the horror genre in particular. From at least Psycho (1960) onwards, horror has consistently engaged with issues of voyeurism and audience involvement, and by no means always assumes it is addressing a passive, guileless viewer. From the shots from killers' points of view found in countless slasher films, to the 'found footage' horror of Cannibal Holocaust (1980) or The Blair Witch Project (1999), to the self-reflexive postmodern horror films of the 80s and 90s, horror movies have continually played with the question of what it means to watch onscreen violence. Indeed, the very basis of horror's persistent aim to shock lies in the fact that it is aware that the violence that it portrays is morally troubling, that it is something to be withstood and endured, and is thus implicitly asking us to question our relationship to it.

So, given these objections to Haneke's explanation of his film, why do I still value and enjoy it? Basically, because I see it as a fascinating and very effective piece of horror cinema itself, and not as somehow standing outside the genre and hurling righteous criticism at it.

SPOILERS
For a start, many of the pleasures that it offers are those often found in horror cinema. In particular, it repeats the always-interesting mainstay horror trope of 'normality' (read: predominantly white, middle-class, heterosexual, etc.) being violently attacked by forces that it doesn't want to acknowledge, and is ill-equipped to defend itself against. In particular, here we have the bourgeois family under threat, as is the case in so many horror films - a situation that brings with it all the issues of family values and parental fears that the genre often plays on. In both Funny Games this predicament is treated in an agonizingly believable fashion, with the dialogue and performances ringing troublingly true. The sexual politics of this scenario are especially cuttingly dealt with, as when the intruders disable the father first, then mockingly keep referring to him as the "ship's captain", whilst forcing him to watch as they threaten his boy (who is named after him), and sexually objectify his wife.

Both films also use intelligently the familiar genre template of the threat to 'normality' actually being a perverted version of 'normality' itself - in this case, in the form of two clean-cut white, middle-class, young men. This is, again, something that can be dated back at least to Psycho's depiction of its danger coming from the American family, and has been given many effective treatments since, not least of course in the terrifying cannibalistic family of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). These common horror film elements are revisited affectingly, carrying all the weight of social meaning and disturbing psychological undertones that are so often stirred up by the genre. The fact that they are being employed in a slightly self-conscious way (that is: they are used so boldly and uncomplicatedly as to seem distilled and paradigmatic) is interesting in itself (since it contributes to the distance that the film on one level creates), but it also testifies to the fact that these are in fact powerful and resonant tropes, and that Funny Games wouldn't have access to them at all were it not for the work put in by the decades of horror filmmaking that preceded it.

Secondly, the film is interesting because, while it does tell a very effective horror story, it also simultaneously encourages a sense of distance from the agonising events it depicts, both through one of the intruders repeatedly turning to the camera and addressing the audience directly, and through the infamous 'rewind' moment. The result of these Brechtian devices is more complex than it might at first appear, since it doesn't only draw attention overtly to the fact of our watching, but also to the fact that what we are watching is of course fictional, and thus not truly rationally deserving of the intense involvement we have likely been experiencing.

This creates an interestingly doubled kind of viewing experience: on the one hand we have been getting very emotionally involved in the story of this family's suffering ('Tom' is right when he says, "You're on their side, aren't you?"), but, on the other, this emotional engagement threatens to disappear at these moments when the 'fourth wall' is broken so overtly. This is a familiar potential problem for works of art using Brechtian alienation techniques, and not necessarily one that Haneke has fully taken into account. This is because the morally troubling experience of watching the psychological and physical torture of the family (which it is surely Haneke's aim that we should feel) rests to a great extent on our caring about the characters, and this empathy is severely compromised, not heightened (as seems to be Haneke's plan), by these asides that tell us: "You're watching a film, you're watching a film..." On the other hand, these acknowledgments of the make-believe status of the scenario are also fascinating precisely because they periodically drain the believability out of the otherwise extremely realistically and painfully realised drama.

As such, these devices, rather than complicating our moral relationship to the action (i.e.: making us feel uncomfortable to be watching the violence, or threat of violence), can in fact act to relieve us of our sense of responsibility towards the events on screen to a greater extent than the less self-conscious kind of horror film that Haneke is supposedly criticising. While the sense of watching something that perhaps we shouldn't be is routinely created through the point of view shots of a film such as, say, Halloween (1978), if the illusion of its fictional world was forcefully broken - as happens in Funny Games - this kind of film wouldn't have nearly as much scope for creating this sense of morally-troubling voyeurism as it in fact does. Although it might not do that which its director seems to think it does, however, I would nevertheless argue that this empathy/alienation effect is still interesting and valuable for the way in which it forces us to continually navigate a viewing experience that exists somewhere between intense involvement and complete detachment. This is a position that few other horror films place us in, and one that it is continually fascinating to try to get to grips with.

This complex experience of the film as something that is simultaneously highly involving and coolly disconnected is only complicated further by the 'shot by shot' remake concept of Funny Games U.S. If (but only if) we have seen the original film, watching this version becomes a doubly challenging exercise in attempting to keep up our involvement with something that we are constantly reminded is staged and fake. For a viewer with a knowledge of the previous film, every single shot, every set, every line of dialogue, every plot point tells us that we have seen this before. If we keep this in mind - as it is difficult not to - then this has the potential to drain any narrative tension and sense of empathy from the drama entirely: for one thing, not only do we, after all, know exactly how the story will end, but also exactly what will happen along the way to get us to this ending.

This is a different experience to that created by a more conventional (read: less exact) remake because, while there is certainly always a familiarity present in watching a reworking, there are usually nevertheless many elements that make this particular retelling unique, and thus always a greater possibility that we will be able to lose ourselves in the world and story it presents us with. Watching Funny Games U.S. (or, to a lesser extent, Van Sant's Psycho [1998]) is in a sense actually more like watching the original film again after already being familiar with it. The big difference, however, is that when we watch a film for the second or third or one hundredth time, although we are conscious of this fact, the film itself certainly isn't - that is, it itself doesn't openly proclaim its already-seen-ness to us in any way. Because of the lack of this kind of barrier, we are thus often able to become caught up in it anew despite being familiar with it - perhaps never to the extent that we were upon first viewing, but still certainly to some degree - since the film still offers itself to us unselfconsciously.

Although it will never be identical, a 'shot by shot' remake, on the other hand, has its already-seen-ness (apologies for the turgid turn of phrase) inscribed into its every frame, and its decision to replicate its original as closely as possible thus forms a bold challenge to our involvement in its action. Rather than having the innocence of a film merely being watched for the umpteenth time, the self-consciousness of a 'shot by shot' remake is endemic and inescapable, and the world, story and characters it depicts thus suddenly has the capability to be seen as entirely artificial, false, and unconvincing, since we know it all to be mere replica.

Although many might argue that this then makes the film as a whole pointless, I would argue that while - yes - it can cause it to significantly lose its ability to work as narrative cinema (this happens, I would say, almost completely for Psycho '98), it also means it gains a very interesting element too: something akin to the uncanny - the familiar made unfamiliar.

This process feels similar to me to a few different strategies of visual art, such as when an artist places a 'readymade' object in a gallery, or paints a painting of a photograph that is virtually indistinguishable from its original, or replicates everyday objects but makes them from (say) plastic. Though they all have different meanings and purposes, part of the effect of each of these practices is that we are forced to look again at something that we think we understand, only to realise that it has been transformed in some way - either through context, through medium, or through its very substance. This sense of the uncanny - of something being the same, and yet not - can essentially force us to question what exactly makes something something in the first place, and can thus create an almost philosophical affront to our ways of perceiving the world; in short, it can be a truly invigorating aesthetic experience, as the art world has acknowledged for a long time.

One of the main potential differences of this effect for cinema though, and one of the reasons why I think a 'shot by shot' remake is such a fascinating concept, is that the replicated object is one that is not just overtly making demands on our eyes and intellects, but also our emotions. What happens to the way we emotionally relate to events on screen when we are aware of their status as a copy - particularly when those events are of an extreme emotive nature? The answer can be that, for whatever reason, the characters' plights become entirely emotionally uninvolving - as with Van Sant's Psycho. With Funny Games U.S., however, I would argue that the 'shot by shot' remake has managed to at least partially side-step this outcome - a fact that makes it a particularly interesting example of the trend.

As I said earlier, the strength of execution of both versions of Funny Games is such that its emotional affect is able to withstand, for the most part, the assaults made on it by the initial alienation tactics. Though we are occasionally shocked out of our engagement, we are continually pulled back in. And the same is - amazingly - also largely true for Funny Games U.S., despite the added level of self-consciousness created by the uncanny 'shot by shot' strategy. Speaking personally, while I certainly know that I am being invited to be more detached from it than ever, and while this detachment occasionally comes to the fore, when watching the remake I am nevertheless often still drawn into an intense involvement with the family and their terrifying ordeal. This is a testament to the quality of the screenplay and the way it intelligently uses its horror tropes, and to the effective way the action is staged and shot, as well as to the performances of the lead actors - especially Watts and Roth.

At moments such as when Roth is trying fruitlessly to dry out the mobile phone and finds that he is too sick to eat the morsel of bread he tries to force down, or when Watts grabs him by his face and, sobbing uncontrollably, chokes out the words "I love you", the sheer force of the characters' situations hits home to me despite all the distancing tactics of the Brechtian asides and the 'shot by shot' concept. That this should happen is strange and wonderful, and the reasons for it are various and complicated, but the fact of this alone is enough to tell me that this is a highly complex film that manages to work both on the levels of its predecessor, and on a few of its own. It thus somehow manages to succeed as a horror film, as a meta-horror film, and even, as it were, as a meta-meta horror film.

Haneke has said that he remade his film in English purely so that he could educate more of us poor horror-watching fools than he was able to first time around. That may be. However, I've said it before and I'll say it again: in my opinion he has now twice made a much better and more interesting film than he believes he has.

[jtm]

this was my current netflix movie.

fucking garbage.

i made it 1 hour, 3 minutes, and 17 seconds into. that's enough. i'm turning it off. i've never not finished a netfilx movie until now.

i'm guessing everyone innocent dies in the end, and it's supposed to be some kind of commentary on violence in todays society, but i just don't care.

poorly poorly handled.

[Reel]

 I really like this movie. I was just wondering if there is any purpose to going and watching the original version. It's impossible to find, so I figure no. Plus everybody on here is basically saying this was done shot for shot. I love the actors in this one, especially the accomplice to Michael Pitt oddly. He just seemed convincing as a confused teen who would fall into this dude's trap and end up doing some fucked up shit.

[Tictacbk]

I'm fairly certain you can watch the original on Netflix Instant. 

...But I haven't seen either of them, so I can't really answer your question.

[Reel]

I finally saw it, took about 5 years though. Am I mistaken, or did people here not really like the movie? I guess you gotta give the original some credit, but even the remake is a waaaay better home invasion movie than The fucking Strangers. I love Haneke's take on plain, out in the open serial killers. No hidden motives, fancy killing techniques, or stupid masks makes for a much suspenseful and interesting kind of story. The only reason it hasn't been done more is probably because people just don't think about their characters enough with this kind of thing. It's just such a miserable, cringe inducing, feel bad movie. Haneke manages to take that initial feeling of shock and repulsion from the first scene of A Clockwork Orange and stretch it out into two hours. Okay, so I don't like what happens here, but I can really respect and appreciate how it was done. Certainly one of the most humane horror movies out, you just feel so awful watching it..

anyways is there any other good Haneke some people can recommend that isn't either A. boring ( Time of the wolf, Cache )  B. Confusing ( Code Unkown ) or C. The Piano Teacher, that was great and fucking devastating so you can leave that one out.

[squints]

hmmm, you might try Benny's Video. If you liked funny games. I personally loved Time of the Wolf and Cache, but whatevs.

[Stefen]

That's like his whole filmography.

[pete]

reelist you really seem to enjoy shitting on the imaginary faces who don't love a film the same way as you do.

[cronopio 2]

my sister called me a fag cos i was scared of this movie.

[Jeremy Blackman]

Finally saw this. I remember seeing the original (a long time ago) and not being particularly moved or affected, but this was different. I think part of it was the language barrier, since the language is so important. The acting is also much better.

I guess as a huge fan of confrontational movies, I'm predisposed to give this a fair shot. It doesn't surprise me how much negative reaction there was to this, but what does surprise me is the anti-intellectual tone of the criticisms. If you disagree, that's fine, but it's as if people were annoyed that he even tried. If you think the meaning of the film is not particularly well articulated in the director's interviews, or that he's obnoxious in interviews... who cares? I'm not even interested in reading these interviews; the film speaks for itself just fine. It's so simple... stop trying to create more layers to be aggravated with.

For whatever reason, I find myself completely unable to be annoyed with this movie.

[chere mill]

i'm glad you finally saw it. i think i prefer this one over the original, too. haneke remaking his film for an american audience is appropriate, and the presence of naomi watts certainly doesn't hurt either. i always found him to be very candid and articulate in interviews (not pompous or pretentious like he has been accused of). funny games is so relentless and uncompromising that i find it almost unwatchable (something i'm sure haneke would be pleased to hear). certainly one of his most powerful films, but i think my favorite is still the white ribbon.