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Remakes Run Rampant: Funny Games (1997)
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Dr. Royce Clemens   |  

Remakes Run RampantFace it, my geeky brothers and sisters, remaking movies has been the new black so long now that it’s turning gray. This apparent complete lack of originality has created a huge trend in the movie industry as of late resulting in an upcoming movie schedule that looks more like 1978 than 2008 — Prom Night, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th, Hellraiser… the list goes on. There’s a lot of R-words you can use to describe them: Redux, Reboot, Rehash, Reimagining, but a few things that are for sure are that the Hollywood machine is FAR from being done with this practice, so in a effort to shine our geek-tinged light on all of the original films that these big dog movie studios are attempting to capitalize on, we give you Remakes Run Rampant — an ongoing series in which Geeks of Doom takes a look at the original films that are the basis for the do-overs.

This series will continue for as long as they keep unnecessarily remaking films…

—Editor

Funny Games DVD (1997)Funny Games (1997)
Directed by Michael Haneke
Starring Susanne Lothar, Ulrich Mühe, Arno Frisch, Frank Giering, Stefan Clapczynski
Unrated

Upcoming Remake: Funny Games (2008)
Directed by Michael Haneke
Starring Naomi Watts, Tim Roth, Michael Pitt
Release date: March 14, 2008
Geeks of Doom review

“This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It is to be thrown with great force.”
— Dorothy Parker, on Atlas Shrugged

Michael Haneke‘s Funny Games, which has been remade shot-for-shot by Haneke himself and is out this weekend, isn’t a horror movie or A Clockwork Orange-style expose into nihilism and youthful violence. It is not a black comedy and it most certainly isn’t “torture porn.” And now that I’ve gone through a majority of the opening paragraph telling you what Funny Games isn’t, let me tell you what it is”¦

A term-paper by a kid who loves to hear himself talk.

A normal person would make a violent movie. A slightly smarter person would make a violent movie a slightly satirical edge to make you look at the violence a different way. A person with the same intelligence and an unhealthy dose of self-righteousness would make a violent movie and add a level of irony to make it about the violence. But apparently only Haneke would add yet another layer to make a movie about movies about violence featuring smiling killers that LITERALLY wink at the camera.

Self-awareness is all well and good, but how much is too much, until it comes off as one man’s act of smug masturbation? Until the pretense of making a movie for others to reflect upon vanishes and it becomes pure intellectual vanity? Thank you, Funny Games, for finally providing an answer.

In this 1997 German original, Susanne Lothar and Ulrich Muhe play Anna and Georg, a happily married upper-class couple with a son and a dog who go to their vacation home in one of the nicer parts of Germany. While they’re just settling in, their home is invaded and preyed violently upon by two demented children’s show hosts.

Or at least that’s how they come off. The two nameless young men (Arno Frisch and Frank Giering) are relentlessly cheery, impeccably clad in white and talk to the camera every once in a while, ever so genially. They helpfully told me that this film was brought to us by the letter “A” and the number “three.”

I’m wondering what kind of house Haneke lives in, being as he has a strong aversion to fourth walls. There are myriad physical and mental tortures visited upon this family by these two young men and next to none of it is shown on screen. It apparently isn’t about the violence or the sexual degradation of Anna, so much so as our reaction to it. It’s so obvious that a point is being proven that any emotional or intellectual investment by the viewer is completely moot.

Being as Haneke is going through great pains to tell us that this is a pure Brechtian intellectual exercise and nothing more, it stops what would be an interesting experiment by anyone else with the slightest sympathy or goodwill towards the audience and starts becoming tedious and annoying. When it becomes apparent that the fates of these characters rest not with themselves but with the man behind the typewriter, nothing is risked and little is gained. The ten-minute take of Anna and Georg struggling to get free and dealing with the shock of the situation actually becomes excruciatingly painful to watch for all the wrong reasons knowing that the whole enterprise is just a mirage provided for us by Haneke. We’re not watching two people who are slowly coming to terms with a horrific event. We’re watching two actors sit there and do nothing.

It is with no small amount of irony that I report to you, saying that the smarter and braver choice would have been to play straight with the audience as opposed to playing, well, funny games. If anything, it would have gotten the point across.

And I know that Haneke has a lot of admirers and I know that this is the only film of his I’ve seen. So I know someone, at some point in time, is going to try and convince me that I am somehow wrong in my assessment. Any reaction I have is undercut by the prospect that the whole film is ABOUT my reaction. This doesn’t make the movie any better. It just proves that the pit of intellectual fraud is a bottomless one, and that some people have no shame when leaping into it.

Funny Games has been labeled with the adjectives “disturbing” and “brutal.” These are words Haneke’s film would have earned had it a heart and a brain, instead of a hollow void and a massive ego. And now we are confronted by a remake. This new one is photographed by Darius Khondji and stars Naomi Watts. It will be worse because at least this German version has some air of reality (however virtual) to it. With the Hollywood sheen, it will look like the world’s most fucked-up Chanel ad.

It may interest a couple of you that I was the one who was scheduled to review the remake. And that I practically begged one of my colleagues here at Geeks of Doom to take it off my hands should surprise no one.

Good luck, Cinema Junkie. I done been fooled once”¦

2 Comments »

  1. I couldn’t have said it better myself. We are reviewing the exact same film.

    Comment by Jerry — March 15, 2008 @ 7:40 pm

  2. Wow! A fantastic articulation of what’s wrong with this film. My god, YOU are a real writer of film criticism, as opposed to the jackasses who write for most of the major publications in this country. I’m glad I stumbled upon this site.

    By the by, I think this film and the remake should be called “Two Useless White People Get Killed By Two Other Useless White People.” Not like it matters, because I know it’s not the point, but for the sake of logic there are about twenty different instances in the movie where Roth and Watts can do SOMETHING, ANYTHING to save themselves, and they don’t. Mind you, the antagonists are two snotty teenagers with a knife and a golf club. Not exactly the Terminator. Haneke’s intellectual masturbation would have frustrated me less had his protagonists proved somewhat independent and resourceful. Que Cera…

    Comment by Robert Wyatt — March 16, 2008 @ 2:07 am

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