Product Description

Genre: Suspense
Rating: R
Release Date: 10-JUN-2008
Media Type: DVD

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #11605 in DVD
• Brand: WATTS,NAOMI
• Released on: 2008-06-10
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 1.77:1
• Formats: AC-3, Color, Dolby, Dubbed, DVD, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: English, French, Spanish
• Dubbed in: French, Spanish
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: .25 pounds
• Running time: 107 minutes

Features

• In 1997, writer-director Michael Haneke (CACHE) made the controversial Austrian thriller, FUNNY GAMES, about two young men who terrorize a family on vacation. A decade later, Haneke was convinced by producer Chris Coen to bring the story to America, filming a nearly word-for-word, shot-for-shot English-language version, even re-creating the locations and sets as obsessively as possible. Shortly af

Amazon.com
Michael Haneke is a modern master, which his spellbinding films Cache and The Piano Teacher proved to an international audience. When it came time for a Hollywood remake of his ultra-disturbing 1997 picture Funny Games, who better than Haneke himself to helm the new version? And indeed, the second Funny Games bears the impeccable sense of control and technique that the Austrian version had: it is a horrifyingly precise account of a family terrorized by two psychopathic young thugs at a vacation home. For anyone who's already seen the '97 film, this new one--a nearly shot-by-shot transcription of the original--will seem superfluous, no matter how impressive the performances of Naomi Watts and Tim Roth are. (Michael Pitt and Brady Corbet are suitably creepy as their menacers, too.) For newbies, the movie might be as infuriating and thought-provoking as Haneke intends it to be. That's because Funny Games is an intellectual game itself, a direct rebuke to the audience that gobbles up gratuitous violence and cynical manipulation. Haneke sets up our expectations, and then refuses to provide the conventional catharsis… or the conventional anything. All of this was pretty bracing in the first go-round, but feels like gamesmanship in the remake. Even if you dig what Haneke's up to, this is a brutal movie-watching experience. --Robert Horton

Customer Reviews

'Funny' as in 'Strange', NOT as in 'Ha-Ha'
FUNNY GAMES is Michael Haneke's English language remake of his own German success from 1997 by the same name. While is takes some interesting twist and turns as far as technique of filmmaking goes, the story lies somewhere between repulsive and prolonged boring, and is not a film this viewer would watch again.

We first meet Ann (Naomi Watts), husband George (Tim Roth), and son Georgie (Devon Gearhart) as they drive to their vacation spot playing games of guessing arias and opera singer identities from CDs in their car. But immediately on arriving to their lakeside home they are visited by a strange young lad Peter (Brady Corbet) who asks to borrow eggs for their next-door neighbor. Soon Peter's mishaps are magnified when his friend Paul (Michael Pitt) joins him in a rather preposterous game of arguing over trite situations that result in Peter and Paul (malignantly sterile in appearance in white shorts and shirts and gloves) moving into the 'funny games ' that are aimed at total destruction of Ann, George and Georgie. It is not funny, it is not credible, and yes, it does become annoying in the manner in which the writing for Ann and George makes them into fools for going along with the 'games' as long as they do.

Watts and Roth are wasted in this film but Pitt and Corbet manage performances that kick us in the gut - as these oily creatures are meant to do. Not a film to be recommended for general viewing, but one that will please those who love the torture genre. Grady Harp, June 08

As Disturbing as it is Illuminating
Not since "Requiem for a Dream" have I left a theater as speechlessly disturbed as I did when the final credits rolled for this one, the blood-red letters splattered over the deranged face of Michael Pitt's character driving home the relentless cruelty I'd just sat through. And never before had I personally felt so responsible for it. If Michael Haneke's point is that we as an audience become active participants in the violence the second we purchase our ticket for a film like this, his point is made rather forcefully. In the hands of the abundantly talented Naomi Watts and Tim Roth, who evoke pain and humiliation with grimaces and tears so compelling that they turn to daggers aimed at the audience itself, the film strips violence of any glamor it may have possessed as entirely as possible in a culture that shovels out billions every year in its name. Toying with the audience's conflicted emotions--the desire to witness cruelty mixing with a desperate hope that its victims will make it out alive--the movie feels like a murder mystery in which YOU, the reader, are guilty of the crime. "You," by paying to sit with your popcorn and 50-gallon soda to watch a film you knew contained unmitigated torture and death, are responsible for the victims' plight. The lasting irony of this profoundly disturbing film is that, through its own indulgence of extreme violence, it makes the most impassioned plea to the better side of our nature to hit the silver screen since Harvey Keitel's "Three Seasons." I recommend the film with great reservation, but I recommend it no less strongly--this is a film every human being must find the courage to confront.

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Deserving of Negative Stars for Disingenuousness & Waste
First, I second the one-star reviews by Archmaker and Whittmeister. They summarize a lot of my thoughts about this film and demonstrate once again sometimes there are really great, thoughtful reviews here on Amazon.

First, as noted in many other reviews, Tim Roth and Naomi Watts, fine actors both, are totally wasted in this film. While the fact that such talent is let wander aimless on celluloid for two hours is enough to brand the filmmakers as either incompetent or incapable, this is the least of this film's problems.....

The director's condescending attitude towards the audience is the result of the supposed reason-for-being of this film: the film audience, in the director's view, has an almost amoral, unexamined, mindless craving for images of violence and cruelty, even in meaningless forms or contexts. The director views it as his job to make us re-examine this mindset by archly presenting what, I think he would try to justify as, a post-modernist torture-genre film transported bizarrely into the genteel, yet sterile, environs of contemporary high society. However, this is merely film-school-auteur self-righteousness that expresses an unbelievable contempt for the audience, and this contempt drips thru the very fabric of the film: he hates not only the audience, but also the characters in the film, yea, it seems he hates the very IDEA of the film. Needless to say, this makes this film vile and unwatchable due, not to its content per se, but due to its overall moral tone. I'm sure the filmmaker would justify this criticism with an "I meant to do that!" but this is the weak, feeble justification of the incompetent and undisciplined .....

Ironically, the filmmaker, for all the clever little moves and tricks, undermines his already tenuous stance through parallels between himself and the thugs at the center of the movie. The thugs, during one point in their dialog, try to explain their violence and cruel actions as the result of their feelings of angst and existential pain brought about by their being trapped and bored in a meaningless existence. This is, of course, the excuse of every adolescent nihilist that comes down the pike; in reality, some people just like pulling the wings off flies and torturing small animals. This doesn't mean they have more psychological or intellectual depth or insight than other people; it just means they are cruel, psychopathic pieces of human filth that need to be heavily medicated with psycho-therapeutic drugs, locked up, or preferably both. The meta-explanations from the filmmaker and his defenders about the worthiness of this film, that it makes us, the audience, examine and come to grips with our voyeurism and casual attitudes towards violence, are just as flimsy and puerile as the justifications presented by the two young psychopaths in the film. They should be dismissed as the solipsistic tripe that they are.

For this reason, this film, again ironically, ends up being far more dishonest than the straightforward "torture-genre" films (like Saw, Hostel, et al.) that it supposedly deplores and is trying to get us to examine. Personally, I also find these sorts of "torture-porn" films deplorable and a waste of time, but at least they do not really try to pretend to be anything other than what they are; "Funny Games" dresses itself up in so much pseudo-intellectual claptrap, but in the end, is equally bad or worse for all its struggles and pretensions. Particularly galling and disgusting is the films reveling in the terrorizing, torture (psychological and otherwise), and ultimate nearly execution-style killing of a child. Again, I think the filmmaker would chime in here with an "I meant to do that!"; that he really wants this reaction (for us to be disgusted and truly horrified) and that this was somehow his "point" or "objective", but again, this is all rubbish. The filmmaker wants to have it both ways: he deplores (and wants us to deplore) violence and torture-porn, but simultaneously wants the audience to be drawn in and titillated by it; he wants to indict and condemn the audience, while simultaneous trying to make us, by our very existence as an audience, somehow complicit in HIS choices, actions, and attitudes as expressed thru HIS film. Ultimately, even though the filmmaker would like to believe this film, and the fact that people watch it, says a lot about US, it really only says a lot about HIM. Our turning away from it is what says the most about US. And turn away from "Funny Games" we should......