Funny Games US.

"The hate this movie will generate is the kind that will persist for decades," predicts Paul Maywychuk. "It's a hate that will bind married couples together and cause couples who see it on their first date to break up for good. I'm talking hate that will define a generation."

"Buñuel died before video killed the radio star but Haneke, a great architect of sustained movie tension, shares with the late master an obsession with disrupting bourgeois complacency," writes Ed Gonzalez in Slant. "What separates them is that Buñuel's funny games were actually funny and whenever he pointed his finger, it pointed everywhere, including at himself. Haneke's admonishments are disturbing only in the sense that they're never self-critical, and while watching one of his films, there's always a sense that he thinks he's above his characters, his audience, and scrutiny."

Updated through 3/17.

"In either incarnation, Funny Games is a profoundly unpleasant experience," writes Kathy Fennessy, who raises a series of questions in the Siffblog. "[T]he new movie hits the States in the wake of Saw, Hostel, and their sequels and knock-offs. Does the popularity of such torture-fests render Haneke's provocation more relevant than ever - or more redundant? Further, did it help to influence them?"

"I would absolutely defend Haneke's right to relaunch his broadside on our voyeuristic vices, but he's not keeping up with the times; he's behind them," argues Anthony Lane in the New Yorker.

"The problem is that even if one fell for Haneke's limp tsk-tsking the first time around, ten years later his nasty little games of viewer barbarism seem musty, even quaint," concurs Michael Koresky at indieWIRE. "What's worse, the entire project suffers from the gall Haneke shows in not only remaking his own film for the 'edification' of a wider audience, but in trusting his own original vision so fundamentally and without question that he has chosen not to append or alter it in any significant way."

Earlier: Brian Darr on both versions.

Updates, 3/12: "Professional obligations required that I endure it, but there's no reason why you should," writes the Voice's J Hoberman. And in an earlier parenthetical, he notes that "the American audience whom Haneke seeks to address is less apt to see Funny Games as a critique of dominant cinema than an argument for personal handguns."

"Throughout the picture, Haneke demonstrates an imperial hauteur that completely undercuts his already dubious point," writes Premiere's Glenn Kenny.

"An art-punk lecture gone weirdly wrong, the film works in ways the director presumably never intended," writes Sean Burns. "But the nasty thing works all the same." Also in the Philadelphia Weekly, Matt Prigge on "Six Remakes Made by the Director Who Made the Original."

For Michael Joshua Rowin, writing in the L Magazine, Funny Games US "signals no less than a lazy and cynical career regression."

"It's worth noting that perhaps Haneke's most ingenious (and frequently overlooked) gambit is that there is almost no onscreen violence," writes Dennis Harvey in the San Francisco Bay Guardian. "As much as Funny Games feels like particularly merciless, graphic torture porn, the actual moments of assault are almost always cut away from or just out of frame. The one exception turns out to be Haneke's single cruelest joke - and naturally, it's on you."

For Filmmaker, Nick Dawson talks with Haneke "about resurrecting his prescient 1997 movie, cinema as truth or lies, and bawling in terror at Olivier's Hamlet."

"Call him the high priest of Finger-Wagging Cinema," suggests Nick Schager.

Updates, 3/13: Scott Foundas meets Haneke for a longish profile for the LA Weekly: "Not surprisingly, the influence of Bresson looms large over Haneke's own movies - in their visual austerity, in the absence of original music and, most of all, in their asking of a great many more questions than they answer about the motives of human behavior.... For all his indebtedness to Bresson, he possesses the canny pop instincts of a Hitchcock or a Kubrick - directors who knew that before you could implode an audience's expectations, you first had to get them into the seats."

"It's a cliché to chalk his temperament up to his Austrian nationality, but I couldn't help thinking of Pauline Kael's review of A Clockwork Orange, which she said might have been 'the work of a strict and exacting German professor who set out to make a porno-violent sci-fi comedy,'" writes Sam Adams, reviewing Funny Games US for the Philadelphia City Paper. "The difference is that you'll never catch Haneke cracking a smile."

"Code Unknown, The Piano Teacher, Time of the Wolf and Caché all succeed where Funny Games fails: they make a deeply troubling spectacle of violence and withhold information as a way to coerce our active participation with the narrative and the layers of significance inherent in it." Josef Braun in Vue Weekly.

"Slasher movie fans exhibit better taste and higher standards when they scream or cheer at horror fare than Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke does," argues Armond White in the New York Press. "By transferring the setting of his 1997 film Funny Games to the United States, Haneke makes a tasteless and revolting miscalculation."

"This provocative, confrontational, and, yes, sadistic thriller has, as it proceeds, a lecturing quality about it, a hectoring quality, a scolding quality," writes Duncan Shepherd in the San Diego Reader. "Either way - as a generic suspense film or as a lecture on the genre - it is a punishing experience. A no-fun game. And it is difficult to shake off afterwards."

"At once both brilliant and nihilistic, the real paradox is that while Funny Games demands a second viewing, you might not want to give it one," writes Neil Morris in the Independent Weekly.

"[H]e's still putting the screws to his viewers," sighs Alonso Duralde (MSNBC). "What's terrible and irritating about the film is that Haneke isn't doing it to tell a story. He just wants to punish us for wanting to see this movie in the first place."

"It's akin to gently being invited into a room, then the door slam behind you locked tight and all you can hear is maniacal laughter." The Playlist.

ST VanAirsdale hears that Haneke will be directing the New York City Opera's production of Così fan tutte 2012.

Sara Cardace talks with Michael Pitt for Vulture.

Funny Games US is "interesting more than it is affecting and there's pretty much no chance in hell that the audience that most needs to see it will either enter the theater or care about what they experience there if they do," writes Todd Brown for Showcase.

Updates, 3/15: "You may try to dismiss what [Haneke's films] are saying (which is basically that you, bourgeois cultural prestige-monger that you are, should congratulate yourself for having purchased a dose of Mr Haneke's contempt), but their unsettling effects are not so easy to shake," writes AO Scott in the New York Times:

Like Peter and Paul, who wear immaculate white gloves as they go about their awful business, Funny Games tries to insulate itself from its own awfulness in the fine cloth of self-consciousness. On a few occasions Mr Pitt turns to address the audience directly, mocking us for rooting for Ann and George's survival, deriding our desire for neat resolutions. At these moments, using techniques that might have seemed audacious to an undergraduate literary theory class in 1985 or so, the film calls attention to its own artificial status. It actually knows it's a movie! What a clever, tricky game! What fun! What a fraud.

"Defenders of Funny Games repeatedly point out that it shouldn't be fun," notes Michael Joshua Rowin for Stop Smiling. "But if it isn't, then it should at least be subversive. That's where Funny Games US is supposed to justify its existence, and where it least achieves its conceptual goals."

"The closest antecedent for Haneke's new Funny Games might be Gus Van Sant's widely panned 1998 color remake of Psycho, which almost completely replicates the script and shot sequence of Hitchcock's black-and-white original," writes JR Jones in the Chicago Reader. "Yet even that project has more integrity than Haneke's."

"The unspoken idea behind the remake might be that, while Funny Games remains the same, the world around it has changed," writes Fernando F Croce at the House Next Door. "Since the original's release, we have witnessed Kosovo, Columbine, 9/11 and Iraq, to say nothing of the box-office success of Saw and Hostel. Can people still be shocked? What hasn't changed, unfortunately, is Haneke's smug feeling of superiority toward his characters and audiences."

"No matter what virtues of craft one can find within, no matter what themes lie beneath, Funny Games is aesthetically indefensible," argues Andy Klein in the LA CityBeat.

"[I]f you liked those pictures from Abu Ghraib, you'll love Funny Games!" Jim Emerson at RogerEbert.com.

"[E]ven with a new cast, a new language, and a decade's distance from the original, the film's hostile brilliance has not been muted by this uncanny facsimile," counters Scott Tobias at the AV Club.

"It would be easy to dismiss Funny Games as a sadistic, self-important piece of garbage were it not for the superb artistry that went into its construction," writes Slate's Dana Stevens.

"It gives you what you want and asks why you want it in the first place, and it does both those things superbly," writes James Rocchi in Cinematical. "It is cruel, cold and darkly thrilling."

"In a generous mood, one could argue that Haneke is going for a truer portrait of violence by relinquishing the usual freaky Freudian, society-made-me-do-it baggage," writes Peter Rainer in the Los Angeles Times. "But his solution is also a cop-out. He is saying that the causes of violence, at bottom, are not only unknowable but not worth knowing."

"If this remake of Funny Games proves insight into anything, it's the degree to which Haneke's work had steadily advanced since the original, gaining resonance and complexity," writes Bilge Ebiri for ScreenGrab. "Better to forget about this tired regression and move on."

"[P]ositioning Funny Games as a critique of a specifically American cinema may win Mr. Haneke the usual plaudits from the usual suspects, but it risks diluting its impact," writes Andrew Stuttaford in the New York Sun.

Adam Nayman talks with Haneke for Eye Weekly.

Updates, 3/17: "[A]ny movie that's causing this much bile to spew from the critics' pens is doing something right," argues Chicagoist's Rob Christopher.

"The last thing I expected was to walk out of a theater showing Funny Games with a smile on my face," writes Bryant Frazer.

Posted by dwhudson at March 11, 2008 10:00 AM