Funny Games

Rating:
Summary: Tedious Faux-Masterpiece
Review: Having seen and greatly admired Haneke's "The Piano Teacher," I was curious to see "Funny Games," which has garnered such diametrically opposed comments. I expected to be either horrified or mesmerized, or perhaps both.

What I didn't expect was boredom. But that's what I got.

Imagine "The Desperate Hours" starring Laurel and Hardy as the criminals. Add a lot of sadism and take out all the suspense, since it's pretty clear from the start how everything will turn out. And that's about it. Highly unpleasant, but a snore.

Oh wait, I forgot. "Haneke brilliantly lets the criminals make meta-comments to the audience. With sly winks and remarks about 'putting on a good show,' they implicate the film's viewers in the violence taking place on screen, radically shifting the traditional perspective and forcing the audience into an admission of its own voyeurism. Astute viewers are compelled to realize that they, too, have become involved in the grisly proceedings: they *choose* to watch, even though they could use their remote controls to do otherwise, just as one of the killers uses this device to reconstruct his reality in a nonlinear fashion, destabilizing the hegemony of conventional chronology in this masterpiece of blah blah blah."

Double snore. Meta-commentary has been around forever. Check out some of Buster Keaton's films from the 1920s, in which characters comment on how much the stunt men are being paid for their pratfalls. "Sherlock Jr." (1924) shatters more boundaries between film and audience than a boatload of Hanekes.

On the positive side, the direction, acting, and cinematography in "Funny Games" are quite good, but only as far as the script allows. And that isn't very far.


Rating:
Summary: not funny; not scarry either
Review: According to Stephen King, scary movies fall into three categories, listed in descending order of quality:

1 - Terror movies. Movies that try to frighten the audience, to put them in fear. Hard to do.

2 - Horror movies. Movies that try to disturb and upset the audience with their subject matter. Not as hard to do.

3 - Gross-out movies. Self-explanatory. Even easier to do than number 2.

"Funny Games", the story of a family tormented, tortured, and ultimately murdered by two smug sociopaths, is viewed by some as a classic example of number one. But it is not a terror movie at all, it is a horror movie. It does not succeed in frightening the audience, merely in upsetting them. And it is an upsetting film. Unfortunately, upsetting people does not require artistic talent. The motives Haneke may have had for making the film are of no interest to me. Social commentary....whatever. My interest is only in what is on the screen, and what I saw was a torture film, pure and simple. The film has one purpose: to hit your emotional buttons with a hammer. To do this, Haneke adds gimmicks like "breaking the fourth wall" and the scene where the movie actually gets rewinded by the villain so he can "do over" a scene where his confederate gets his with a pistol. These moments are beyond gratuitous; Haneke is putting a megaphone to his microphone, just in case you couldn't hear him shouting. This man could take subtlety lessons from Oliver Stone.

Remember "Babe", the cute pig movie? As done by director Haneke, the movie would look like this. Babe is frisking along with his mate and piglets, minding his own business. Abruptly he is kidnapped and thrown in a meat truck, put in a slaughter pen, forced to watch his loved ones butchered, and is ultimately slaughtered himself. The last scene in the movie is of two smug butchers eating him for breakfast. If you have a shred of human decency, this would upset you. But does it require talent to make? No. And neither, in my opinion, did "Funny Games."


















Rating:
Summary: Creepy!
Review: This is a psychological thriller and not a slasher film. Virtually bloodless, it gets under your skin as the two protagonist's weave their deception and control against a family, vacationing for the summer. Almost an interactive film, it seduces the viewer into the film itself. Many unnerving parts. You'll never look at eggs the same way. Well acted and directed, this is Austrian horror cinema at it's best.

Rating:
Summary: German Nihilism
Review: This film seems to have no message, except the absurdity of unmotivated violence. In that regard, there is nothing original here.

Rating:
Summary: Definitely Different
Review: Could be satire, could be black comedy, could be lots of things. The film, however, is not a horror film, as some have said, nor is it gory (there's more violence in some cartoons), as others have said. It's the IDEA of violence that makes this so repugnant yet fascinating at the same time. Characters have no redeeming values whatever, and you learn to hate them with a passion early on. And the film remains relentless and frustrating, and stays with you. The only flaw: The "did the disc jam?" real-time segment went on too long. You'll know it when you see it.

Rating:
Summary: Euro-Trash!!
Review: I spent a great deal of time during the summer of 2002 watching the films of Michael Haneke. Why? I don't quite know. I think it was down to a combination of things really... availability (Film Four's excellent Eurovision season played a big-part), boredom and perhaps a touch of curiosity. Haneke is one of those filmmakers, like Bruno Dumont, Lars von Trier and Gasper Noé, who has the power to divide an audience as smoothly as the red sea, whilst creating works of cinema that seem to challenge the viewer to switch off, look away and find something more rewarding that the tedium of film. As an artistic concept, it's a rather hypocritical one... but you simply cannot deny the fact that when a film turns up with the label of "THE MOST SHOCKING FILM IN THE WORLD EVER" you simply have to sit up and pay attention.

In the past, I've found films of this ilk - you know, Series 7 the Contenders, Man Bites Dog, Natural Born Killers etc... works of cinema that use violent imagery to criticise the violence employed in other films and the mass media in general - to be deeply pompous, pretentious and, if I can return to a word I brought into play moments ago, highly hypocritical. Funny Games certainly is no exception to this, with the writer and director laying on the social conscious with a heavy hand, playing with out-dated notions of self-reflexity in a smug and obnoxious manner and, even worse, giving us a series of characters that we simply cannot relate to or sympathise with. For me, this rendered Haneke's message obsolete... like he's preaching to an audience already far too willing to go along with his meanderings, as apposed to subverting, or rather, perverting the notions and values of an audience more reticent to experience and buy into one of Haneke's films. Because of this, there is only one occasion in which we actually get a sense of real 'shocking' violence and for the rest of the film (which believe me, runs at a snails pace - this coming from a fan of Tarkovsky too!) we get mere pantomime buffoonery... or the kind of violence more at home in a Michael Bay action-flick (though I suppose, that too, could be some kind of statement... though I doubt it).

That said, Haneke does create a few instances of pure tension, even out-doing Hitchcock in the scene in which Susanne Lothar's character Anna is hiding out on a darkened country road... or those suffocating scenes of silence that occur following that central act of potent violence, but the director always blows it at the last minute by having his actors behave in an unbelievably inane way, leaving the viewer screaming at the screen as we would when partaking of a mid-seventies sleaze-fest (the New York Ripper, I Spit on Your Grave, Last House on the Left, et al)... this, as far as I'm concerned, was enough to silence Haneke's lofty cinematic ideals. Anyone who has experienced the work of Michael Haneke before (from his bleak early works, The Seventh Continent, 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance and Benny's Video... to his later, more polished endeavours, Code Unknown and The Piano Teacher) will be aware of his style; few camera movements, very few edits, and the continual punctuation from those interspersed black screens. This style, I suppose, is used to further the matter-of-fact approach that Haneke employs (even his version of Kafka was visually flat, which, for a text of such potent visual imagination, is a criminal offence), but the whole thing comes across so lifeless... it's as if everyone on the cast and crew is suffering from terminal boredom or malaise and really, can't be bothered putting in the extra effort.

This point takes us back to the earlier notion of 'no feelings' in that we really cant feel anything for the characters since Haneke doesn't make them appear real. Everyone in this picture comes across as a two-dimensional mannequin to further Haneke's ravings though, as a result of this very error, the ravings simply hold no weight and his argument falls down flat. Still, not that anything as trivial as that would matter... regardless of it's faults Funny Games seems to have attained a devout cult of followers (no doubt those new to the European cinema aesthetic), who applaud Haneke's cinematic diversions and hold them in high-regard as serious works of art. I find this opinion to be worrying and a little obtuse, largely due to the fact that, despite some interesting filmic subjects, Haneke has never proven himself to be a seriously great filmmaker... certainly not in the same category as the three auteurs I noted at the start of this critique.

If you are interested in Funny Games merely for it's reputation then perhaps you should see it just to satisfy your curiosity, though, coming as it does on a wave of positive expectations, it is almost guaranteed to disappoint. Similarly, if you are expecting to see a hard-core, gore-filled video nasty then you should really save your money and instead get those early Peter Jackson films or the Evil Dead/Dawn of the Dead trilogies that offer better violence, funnier situations and, in the case of Dawn of the Dead, a more intelligent argument.

Rating:
Summary: Great Movie. DON'T BUY THIS EDITION IF YOU SPEAK GERMAN
Review: Funny Games is a great film I had the chance to watch some year ago. The director has done a great job creating a threatening underlying ambient, while putting some nice artistic touches to it.

Unfortunately, I was very disappointed with the specific DVD. I speak some German and wanted to watch the film without subtitles (German subtitles would also be nice), but it only comes with EMBEDDED ENGLISH SUBTITLES THAT YOU CANNOT TURN OFF!!! Since English is not my native language, it was extremely annoying having the subtitles giving you the (not always correct) translation.

Even if I wouldn't speak German, I would never buy a DVD with embedded subtitles. To me, one of DVD's advantages is exactly the possibility to manipulate sound and subtitling choices.

Rating:
Summary: Way off
Review: Usually I read the reviews of IMDB and amazon.com before I even consider buying a movie. 98% of the time they have been on point. This case however was the 2% where they weren't. I was expecting to see the most hard to watch movie of all time. Give me a break. This movie was so boring that I couldnt even finish watching it. The acting was good, the plot was decent but the rest of the content of the movie was highly overrated and very disappointing. If anyone else is going to watch this. Watch it with a CLEAR mind. Dont go into the movie thinking it will be some horror masterpiece like I did because like me, you will be disappointed too