I'm surprised no one here has posted about this remake yet, although it seems to be bombing. The sadist in me had hoped to see it with a packed audience of cheering and screaming teenagers who thought they were seeing something more akin to SCREAM, but I caught it an arthouse with an audience of a dozen. No mass walk-outs or applause at {REDACTED} scene occurred.

I was torn between finding the film as scary and disturbing as it was intended to be and resentment at Michael Haneke for pushing my buttons so successfully. Despite the director's stated intentions, remaking the film in America with almost the same script turned out not to be such a good idea. The early scenes are dependent on a formality of speech and behavior - which gradually breaks down - that's far more common in Europe than Long Island. The original film might have been prescient of the rising acceptability of torture in American cinema and life, but the remake makes no further references to this. Also, the Brechtian touches - direct address to the audience from the killers, the killers relating a science fiction story about the difference between reality and fiction - seemed really sophomoric the second time around. This didn't occur to me when I saw the original, but it struck me that there's a strain of covert homophobia underlying this story of a nuclear family's destruction at the hands of a Leopold and Loeb-style male couple.

I haven't posted about it because it had essentially the same impact on me as the original - little to none.

While I get what Haneke's up to (and, like many, find it all a little facile and condescending), I'm a bit nonplussed that others tend to find the experience disturbing, whatever their misgivings. I find the approach so dry and diagrammatic that I'm never tempted to empathize with the characters enough to have the rug pulled out by that one particular funny game Haneke is so proud of himself for playing.

For what it's worth, I reacted very much the same way to CACHÉ, the only other 'Haneke joint' I've gotten around to.

I agree with you that there's something a bit facile and condescending about FUNNY GAMES. Neither version is close to being my favorite Haneke film - I much prefer THE SEVENTH CONTINENT, CODE UNKNOWN and CACHE. However, despite my misgivings, it did really shake me up. I think the acting is the key. Naomi Watts' portrait of a woman in agony is really convincing, as was Susanne Lothar's. The ten-minute stretch in the middle of FUNNY GAMES where the killers leave the house concentrates on the victims' pain with a ferocity that few films have even attempted to match. I wouldn't describe this segment as dry or academic at all.

It's not even playing in my area, so that may be a small indication of why it's bombing against other films with a much wider release. I'm just surprised that it took so many years to do a remake.

I've seen the Austrian version, even own the DVD, but don't expect to re-visit it anytime soon. Give me CACHE, HOUR OF THE WOLF, THE PIANO TEACHER instead. I have no interest in seeing the re-make.

Eh. It's well-made, punishing, and cold and clammy, dead to the touch. It's...eh...and pretty much straight-to-video given a nothing opening. But it's so damned depressed and depressing it may win a sheaf of Oscars next year. :)

EDIT: SOME VAGUE SPOILERS BELOW!!!





I was resistant on seeing this after reading so many scathing reviews from the national critics, but I did still go see it earlier today. The 'Sunset 5' art-film theater I saw it at showed Troma's "Poultygeist" trailer before the film. What a piece of crap that looks like! Why are they playing that before this film?

Anyway, I found the "FUNNY GAMES" remake to be quite good. Unnecessary, probably yes, especially considering the "American audience" it was intended for is not going out to see it anyway. I do like the original film better, though, as the actors felt more like authentic real people, but this remake was not a disaster as something like "THE VANISHING" was. It is basically a shot-for-shot recreation, but in English.

I also got to reappreciate the style Haneke used as most of the violence is off-screen (one of the most heinous moments in the film is only shown by having one of the bad guys makng a sandwich in the kitchen as we only hear the sounds of the terrible things going on in the other room). The minutes-long static shot in the living room after that incident is also one of my favorite scenes from the original film and it is recreated quite well here. I found it to be quite powerful.

I do understand some people being turned off by Haneke's intent or his "pretension" in telling us how violence-hungry we American moviegoers are, but when the remote-control scene happened again here, his opinion seems even more true than before to me. Yay, the bad guy gets shot and the audience cheers! I've seen this happen a million times in Hollywood-thriller moviegoing. That said, if Haneke's pretensions and preaching turn people off, that's fine, no problem. It seems a lot of the critics (of both versions) have felt the same way, but it also appears many of those critics' comments seem to be trying to cover up their hate of the film just because they don't like that it IS EFFECTIVE and they don't like that feeling of real violence. They feel it is reprehensible for a director to try to show true violence and they are resentful that Haneke wants to push this grueling horror on an audience and telling us "we asked for it" and that's not really reviewing the film at hand. I don't like comedies, but if I laugh at one - great! A lot of critics don't like to feel bad in a movie that attempts to make you feel bad, but when they do, they resent it for doing what it attempts to do. Don't like the message either, then that's just too bad.

But what if you just don't find it all that effective? I do rather reject his approach, as it fairly screams patronizing, but ultimately I'm just not gut-punched by any of it like I'm apparently meant to be.

Now, were it IRREVERSIBLE under discussion...

I completely agree - if someone just doesn't find it effective, then that's a completely valid opinion. It just seems most of the reviews of the critics I scanned about this remake seem to indicate that they actually were disturbed by the film's take on real violence, but simply disliked the film because of the pretension or message being pushed down their throat at the same time. That's a valid reason to dislike it, of course, but I do find it odd that some critics mention the reprehensible nature of the violence and that it felt too real when that's the whole point of the film.

I find IRREVERSIBLE to be quite effective as well. It may be even moreso because its pretensiousness is not so obvious, and it's not as preachy or condescending. Still, IRREVERSIBLE is also trying to convey a point and message through an extremely violent situation (in much more graphic detail than anything shown in FUNNY GAMES, by the way).