"Funny Games" is a new film from the Austrian director Michael Haneke .I say it's a new film, but it is actually an almost shot-by-shot remake of a 1997 German language film of the same title that he directed.
The story is fairly straightforward. Naomi Watts and Tim Roth play Ann and George, a couple , quite wealthy from the look a bit who arrived at their beautiful gated country house in some Hampetons-like/ place with their young son and their dog and they sail boat. And they are almost immediately taken hostage by a pair of very well-spoken well-mannered young sociopaths played by Michael Pitt and Brady Corbet.
These two fellows proceed to abuse, torment, torture, threaten/ and otherwise make a life very precarious and unpleasant in the course of one very long, uncomfortable evening.
“Funny Games” is one of the more repellent and disturbing movies I've seen in / quite some time. I suspect that Michael Haneke might take those words as compliment, or at least as affirmations that he is doing what he's set out to do. /
In some way/,this is a straightforward slasher film. You have a bunch of attractive, innocent people who are tied up, abused ,tortured , beaten/,made to beg for their lives. But this movie also has ,or I would say, pretends to have a much loftier and more critical ,intellectual and artistic agenda. It doesn’t want to just reproduce dread and horror, but it wants to rub our faces in it and expose our, I mean in particular in American movie audiences, moral complicity, our voyeurism, the relish which we consume/ spectacle of suffering and pain in violence brutality. And he wants to make us feel ashamed and guilty and wheezy about that appetite.
I don't think Haneke really lends very many of his criticisms. This movie I don't think succeeds in really disturbing the audience/ and getting us to think about what we are looking at. Instead, it just functions as a kind of high broad exploitation film that allows you to enjoy what it's doing while also pretending that, you know, you’re doing something more serious or self-reflective.
I'm not big fan of movies like the Saw movies or the hostile franchise that what sometimes is called "torture porn". But I have to say that, those films have a lot more integrity, a lot more honesty about their intensions, and maybe a lot more self-awareness self-critical potential/ than Michael Honeke's Funny Games, which is a very smug, complacent, arch, superior movie that tries to rub our noses in our own experience other than make us somehow responsible for it. But we are not in fact responsible for it. Michael Honeke's responsible for it. And he's responsible for perpetrating, I think/ one of the bigger cinematic frauds of the year.
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