Product Description

Movie DVD

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #11704 in DVD
• Brand: Warner Brothers
• 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
• 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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What a contribution!
I have a son headed for another tour in Iraq soon. Living with that, I get sleepless sometimes, have to get up and read, and need the TV on for, well, you all know what the TV is for in the middle of a sleepless night.

I have Showtime, HBO, and TMC provided free with the rental cottage I live in year-around, along with a lot of other channels. Despite that, there is often nothing on TV late at night. So I landed the other night around three a.m. on "Funny Games." A family was being terrorized by two wormy males acting like teenage preps but looking more like aging twenty-somethings who've become type-cast as glistening pink ropes of exposed animal intestine (Michael Pitt...your career has veered permanently off of any other kind of track). Still, the important characters (the family) were convincing. So convincing that I stuck my thumnail between my teeth and could not even blink, let alone go to bed or change the channel. Then, of course, the movie ended the way we all know it ends.

I'm as permanently sickened and depressed by what I saw as Michael Pitt is doomed to be cast as The Wormy Dude in any movie thereafter. But see, some "director" thought I needed A Lesson Regarding My Avid Hunger For On-Screen Ugliness, Atrocious Cruelty, and Violence For Its Own Sake. Personally, I have no such hunger, but this director did his work with a cannon, sloppily, the easy way, making sure he wouldn't miss. It was a lot like the way we refuse to do away with capital punishment even though sometimes the innocent are executed by mistake. Who cares, just so the guilty are fried, and society stands both protected and corrected? This movie's director would be able to explain that concept to anyone who asked, I'll bet. Maybe he'll make it the message of his next brilliant film.

Shot from a cannon, this isn't art, not even bad art. It isn't even "I Spit On Your Grave," although with a bit more class, it might have risen to that bottom rung of infamy.

Anyway, Mister Director, thanks for the event. I suffered pointlessly, I did not ask for it, but in a world ablaze with wars and misery, I am surely better for it, right? So glad someone is out there making these judgments for me, and imposing them on me. More of that is exactly what the whole world needs.