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I do have to mention that that one particular shot (at least in the original) is one of the most terrifying scenes I've ever seen in a film (with the roaring race-cars making way to complete silence). It's just shocking, even though I felt completely prepared for it. I really don't care what anyone says about the intentions or misshaps of this (or, I guess, the original) film, but that one scene/shot is just masterfully done and boundlessly effective.

What I was arguing against was the suggestion up above that nobody would care if a poem was thesis-driven when, in fact, that is a major part of poetry criticism and has been for centuries. I don't see why films should be treated any differently.

I said nothing about being "thesis-driven," I said "making an argument," which is not the same thing (for one thing my phrase lacks the pejorative tang). And when has criticizing whether or not a poem maintains an argument ever been a major part of poetry criticism? A minor mode, maybe, with modern critics allergic to allegory, but who exactly goes around negatively criticizing or outright rejecting Donne, Herbert, Crawshaw, or Marvell on that basis? Who encounters a poem making a rhetorical position and sniffs in aesthetic displeasure? A major mode of criticism has been the analysis of poetic argument and, further, the understanding of all poetry, being rhetoric, as argument. I think maybe we're confusing pedagogy with argufying.

Hahahaha when Ann shoots Peter everyone in my theater clapped and yelled shit out like "it's about time" and everyone was just sort of in a happy mood like the movie had finally given them something they deserved the whole time and then the rewind scene and you can hear the confused angry disappointment. Hahaha.

Rex massacres it.

He ends his review thusly:

Funny Games is as funny as the final stages of muscular dystrophy. One question diminishes all others: Why? From the press notes handed out at the critics’ screening I attended, I quote: “In the belief that explanation would be reassuring, Mr. Haneke deliberately refuses to provide any.” Then the Austrian himself adds: “I’m trying to find ways to show violence as it really is: it is not something that you can swallow. I want to show the reality of violence, the pain, the wounding of another human being.” And I want to see a tall building fall on Michael Haneke.

David Thomson on the film.

A.O. Scott

And The Onion

The best review of the film yet:

I was blindsided by this movie. Went with a friend and didn't know a THING about it beforehand. All I kept saying was, "Let's get out of here. It's a MOVIE. The director/ producer/whatever is trying to forcefeed us with S--T. How can the actors even think of being in such a movie -- what about that little boy?"

Finally when it was over and my "friend" looked like a deer in the headlights -- I was physically sick. I demanded my money back from the box office only to have the girl laugh at me -- at first. I threw up on the floor right in front of her -- and it splattered. She gave me the money, helped me clean up and actually cried. My "friend" was embarrassed by my behavior -- and therefore has lost my friendship. This whole last scene (starring me, my friend, the cashier at the box office), seemed a sequel to the movie.

Who wouldn't be embarrassed by such behaviour.

You know... I'm not particularly a fan of Funny Games (the original). It is worth watching once, although it strikes me as one-note and slightly hypocritical and I have no particular desire to see the remake, other than perhaps for Michael Pitt, whom I find to be an excellent young actor.

Nevertheless, there is something utterly ludicrous about these American reviews. If anything, they are even more over the top than in 1997 - as if Haneke is not, at least, a serious filmmaker; as if Funny Games is somehow more abysmal / offensive than the Hollywood crap they all drool over on a weekly basis. It is this defensive critical posturing, combined with the kind of pathetic reaction described by Kate Johnson above, that is lending credibility to the film more than anything.

Antoine Doinel wrote:The best review of the film yet:

Haha, for a split second when I clicked that link I thought that Ebert had written that himself. Oh, happy times.

I'm told that Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian threw up at the premiere of the afforementioned Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael.

Perhaps we should start a separate "critics spewing" thread, would be interesting to hear if there are any more stories

Joel Siegel walked out of Clerks II, and exactly a year later, he was dead.

How about a thread for discussing all of the times we've vomited after reading film critiques? I have a pile of student papers that can help us all get started...

Ah, but I don't think the infrastructure of the internet could support such a list.

The newest issue of Sight and sound has a insightful wright up on the remake and an interview with Haneke about the film, the production, and his expectations for the film. In his interview he also reveals that he is making a film in German about the educational standards and processes during 1913-1914 which he believes allowed for the rise of Nazism.

You can begin punishing yourself in the comfort of your own home June 10 when this gets released on DVD

Personally, I enjoyed the English version better because since the film is so visual, being able to concentrate on the movement and framing instead of reading the subtitles seemed to benefit me.

I thought every performance was on par with the original, if not better. Of course, Michael Pitt could not beat the original Paul.

domino harvey wrote:They're also forgetting that "stupid people" (which is I assume being used synonymously by this forum and elsewhere for "mainstream audiences") aren't smart because to some degree they don't have any inclination to learn. What makes anyone think this film is going to have any sort of effect on a viewer who's already made up his mind to not use it? At best, Joe Dumbass will see Funny Games and say "That was a dumb/weird/crazy/(insert thoughtless, immediately dismissive adjective) film" and quickly move on to the next movie without any retrospection or thought to the film. Funny Games is an exercise in superiority for the filmmaker and the masochistic art house viewers "attuned" to the film, a problem since it's main goal is to give lip service to the "mainstream" viewers it will never attract/retain.

I couldn't agree more. The only letdown of the film was the fact thats it main purpose was just going over the heads of the audience it was meant to put into check. But what do you expect? This is America.

I might have a difficult time purchasing this DVD even though I would like to view it again. It seems to defeat the films purpose when you buy it.

I meant to post on this awhile back. I actually liked it a lot too, which surprised me. There are a couple of reasons why. One thing is, like moviscop said, the English version boasts stronger performances across the board (including Pitt's). This is somewhat hard to gauge, however, for reasons I'll get into in a minute.

The surprising benefit of having a cast of familiar faces or, more to the point "movie stars", is that the disruption and chaotic displacement of Haneke's intentions become clearer. These effects act in antagonistic opposition to our familiarity with these faces, their star presences and what that automatically tends to denote. Our automatic, presumptive or de facto orientation toward this kind of narrative and our implicit desire for latent expectations to be realized is more meaningfully thrown into disarray. With this film Haneke effectively sinks the notion of the supposedly unassailable authority and consolations of Hollywood's hegemonic model, leaving us all flailing in the water, looking desperately for reassurance in the form of clarity and signifiers of reliable certainty.

Also, and this is why the effectiveness of the performances is ultimately hard to determine, the language contributes to this effect as well. Though I'm sure I assumed that this was all highly stylized dialogue in the original there is an additional disruptive element when hearing it in one's native tongue. So keeping it the same was a great choice. Because it escapes our attempts to easily comprehend the essence of it--is it internally coherent as a kind of codified Wittgensteinian "private language" or does that fatally miss the point? The language never comes across like that of Alex and his droogs for instance. It doesn't feel like self-applied style in that way. It feels already long since determined, an essentially embodied component of being totally integrated and fused into a larger performative matrix. It isn't showy or flamboyant but rather accepted as the proper language for this behavior if you see what I mean. Haneke aligns a style removed from us with an attitude we don't want to recognize but then goes beyond this to intimate that, in a social anthropology sense, this is not just some vile "Other" but a fully embodied reality, cast on the firm foundations of a long established ground of philosophical understanding. The film then is all about documenting the clash between opposing notions of philosophical legitimacy. Are Paul and Peter evil or immoral or even wrong? Not in the way we'd like to be able to think. They are not so easily dismissed and in actuality represent our haunted imagination, the looming threat of whether ultimately we ourselves are wrong or facile or purely sentimental. As with Nietzsche, Haneke is not advocating nihilism as much as faithfully describing its contours and demanding that we take it seriously as an opposing philosophical force or, if you'd rather, a threat.

In this way, by giving us a grueling scenario but not some pedantic recreation of "real crime" bullshit, Haneke forces a moral question, but a subtle one, similar to the thread running trough No Country for Old Men: is brutal, "meaningless" violence simply to be expected or has our capitulation to that expectation finally worked to normatize it in a way that could not have happened without our cultural assumptions and acceptance? Our participation in other words. For these reasons and others Haneke's remake emerges as his finest new film since
Code Inconnu.

John Cope wrote:The problem with this whole "experiment" as far as I can see is that Funny Games is not getting a very wide release after all. Here in Milwaukee it's only playing at the Oriental and even in Chicago it's playing very few screens. Toiletduck, are you seeing this at the Century Centre? If so, I'm not sure if you'll get much of a gauge of "mainstream" reception; unless, of course, we mean the mainstream of people on Clark Street.

I'm not so sure that "Funny Games" was intended for a mainstream audience of people lacking a film education. Haneke is not a stupid man, and anybody with a drop of industry experience would've known that this film would get an arthouse release. Personally, I think that he intended it for the critics. If viewed contextually, the piece is a jab at present American cinematic culture. Speaking to one's audience is a basic understanding of society; one doesn't quote Brecht to pre-schoolers. Haneke's film is presented in an intellectual way, I'd argue that it's intended for intellectuals.

The critical hostility isn't that surprising. A European filmmaker is making a picture specifically for Americans, to criticize Americans. I believe that some degree of the hostility is a reaction of, at the very least, national pride. The same thing happened to "Munchausen" in Germany, for instance; a white American->Brit is going to make a movie about one of -our- beloved figures?

Personally, I think that it's a shame that Haneke ever remarked on what he considered the film. His comments have been snapped up and have defined the dimensions of discussion regarding the picture, rather than letting us come to our own conclusions. I doubt that they would've been far off, but they surely wouldn't have been as venemous.

On a side note, the review on Ebert's site, that essentially equates "Funny Games" to a psychology experiment, was not written by nor contributed to by Ebert. It was writting by the website's editor, Jim Emerson.

moviscop wrote:Personally, I enjoyed the English version better because since the film is so visual, being able to concentrate on the movement and framing instead of reading the subtitles seemed to benefit me.

I realize that this may seem a somewhat arbitrary and untimely post, but how exactly is the film visual at all? Apart from the gloves and the wink, and the few other obviously metafictional visual elements, the film is barren of any visual creativity whatsoever. The fact that it makes a point of accentuating that nothing interesting is happening outside the frame in every shot (which people wishing to use esoteric language often refer to as "economical") doesn't mean anything interesting is happening in them either.

I rented both from Netflix; watched the original first and immediately watched the American version after and ended up fast forwarding through a lot of it, just seemed like what's the point, it's pretty much the exact same movie. Maybe I shoulda let some time pass between the two.

Having said that the thought popped in my head, what if Haneke did a third version in Japanese, and a fourth, etc. and suddenly I think I would be real keen on watching those...

lacritfan wrote:I rented both from Netflix; watched the original first and immediately watched the American version after and ended up fast forwarding through a lot of it, just seemed like what's the point, it's pretty much the exact same movie. Maybe I shoulda let some time pass between the two.

Having said that the thought popped in my head, what if Haneke did a third version in Japanese, and a fourth, etc. and suddenly I think I would be real keen on watching those...

the us is a "shot for shot" remake, watching them back to back, except to compare and contrast performances, is pointless. let some time elapse between viewing the us version.

There really isn't a point to seeing both. I saw the US version because I wanted to see how the grey hairs at Angelika would take to it. Afterwards a couple friends I saw it with mentioned they wanted to see the original. I said don't bother.

chaddoli wrote:There really isn't a point to seeing both. I saw the US version because I wanted to see how the grey hairs at Angelika would take to it. Afterwards a couple friends I saw it with mentioned they wanted to see the original. I said don't bother.

Well, if you liked Lives of Others, you can see the late Ulrich Mühe play the father. Also Susanne Lothar is not as attractive as Naomi Watts and consequently not as distracting (to me).

lacritfan wrote:

chaddoli wrote:There really isn't a point to seeing both. I saw the US version because I wanted to see how the grey hairs at Angelika would take to it. Afterwards a couple friends I saw it with mentioned they wanted to see the original. I said don't bother.

Well, if you liked Lives of Others, you can see the late Ulrich Mühe play the father. Also Susanne Lothar is not as attractive as Naomi Watts and consequently not as distracting (to me).

I don't like The Lives of Others but I like the performances in both versions of Funny Games. I just don't think it's worth putting yourself through that movie twice.

I've searched everywhere online, but have not been able to find a comparison of the image quality between the R1 and R2 DVD releases of US remake.

The DVD Times review of the R2 disc reports the image is a little soft; although it does have an half-hour interview with Haneke.

Comments and findings are welcome.