Funny Games (2008)
Directed by Michael Haneke
When Ann, husband George, and son Georgie arrive at their holiday home they are visited by a pair of polite and seemingly pleasant young men. Armed with deceptively sweet smiles and some golf clubs, they proceed to terrorize and torture the tight-knit clan, giving them until the next day to survive.
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41 films that influenced Funny Games
What critics say influenced Funny Games
2008’s remake is a nearly shot-for-shot effort, not unlike Gus Van Sant’s misunderstood “Psycho” rant from 1998.
In 2005, Gus Van Sant told an interviewer about his shot-for-shot 1998 remake of "Psycho," "You can't copy a film.
The new film, which had its United States premiere on Wednesday night at Sundance, is not quite a shot-by-shot, line-by-line facsimile, in the manner of Gus Van Sant's "Psycho."
"Funny Games" doesn't seduce you with conventional storytelling and character development and then turn them around on you -- like, say, Alfred Hitchcock's " Rear Window " and "Psycho."
This isn’t like Hitchcock having another crack at “The Man Who Knew Too Much,” as he did after an interval of twenty-two years, and conjuring a very different result; it isn’t even like Gus Van Sant reheating “Psycho” in color, as he did in 1998; it’s like Hitchcock himself shooting “Psycho” all over again, in 1970, somewhere off an Autobahn outside Graz.
No matter how much the ad campaign promises "come see the torture!" this was ever only going to be a film for the art house crowd; I certainly don't know, but I expect most of the people who have seen the new film also saw the original at some point, and are motivated by curiosity, not unlike Gus Van Sant's Psycho from 1998 (a film that's really a terrible analogue for Haneke's remake, the more you think about it).
As a media-dominated (or decimated, take your pick) society, we've rocketed way past A Face in the Crowd, beyond Haskell Wexler's Medium Cool, and into some creepy, white-hot, prechopped, overshot, stage-managed hyperversion of world and national events.
They're towing a sailboat behind them so that, presumably, we can be reminded of Polanski's "Knife in the Water" (a psycho terrorizes a married couple aboard their yacht; it also inspired the Australian oceangoing thriller "Dead Calm").
It has many antecedents, from the mocking cool sadism of A Clockwork Orange to the pressure-cooker intensity of Peckinpah's Straw Dogs to the house-party torture games of Roman Polanski's 1966 classic, Cul-de-Sac.
Etching in the character, Pitt borrows a little from A Clockwork Orange, just as Haneke borrows a little from Kubrick's signature amalgam of fire and ice.
His white gloves are strikingly odd (the entire pure white getup and Nazi youth haircut immediately calls "A Clockwork Orange" to mind), yet go unmentioned (far later a more direct neighbor, Betsy (Siobhan Fallon Hogan, "Holes," "Dogville"), who pulls up at dock will ask Paul if he is cold).
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Today's media-saturated "reality" is inching, for the average American, alarmingly close to what Canadian filmmaker/provocateur David Cronenberg predicted with 1983's Videodrome (not to mention 1999's eXistenZ) and which Haneke echoed, from a pre-EU perspective, via Funny Games.
As a media-dominated (or decimated, take your pick) society, we've rocketed way past A Face in the Crowd, beyond Haskell Wexler's Medium Cool, and into some creepy, white-hot, prechopped, overshot, stage-managed hyperversion of world and national events.
"Funny Games" is a postmodern variation on William Wyler's once famous 1955 movie "The Desperate Hours," in which a middle-class suburban family is held hostage and brutalized by a gang of escaped convicts led by Humphrey Bogart (Michael Cimino remade it in 1990 with Mickey Rourke).
German director Michael Haneke (precisely remaking a European movie he did 10 years ago) isn't out to update "The Desperate Hours."
It wasn't the movies, Michael - no matter how nice the parades came to look in Leni Riefenstahl's 1935 film, Triumph Of The Will.
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But there's another layer to the movie -- one that is hinted at early on, when one of the thugs (Pitt) makes an aside to the camera, enlisting the viewer in the crimes unfolding before them -- that makes Funny Games something trickier and more interesting than a post-modern Straw Dogs.
It has many antecedents, from the mocking cool sadism of A Clockwork Orange to the pressure-cooker intensity of Peckinpah's Straw Dogs to the house-party torture games of Roman Polanski's 1966 classic, Cul-de-Sac.
It has many antecedents, from the mocking cool sadism of A Clockwork Orange to the pressure-cooker intensity of Peckinpah's Straw Dogs to the house-party torture games of Roman Polanski's 1966 classic, Cul-de-Sac.