Funny Games

It was summer 1999 and I was living in Park Slope and working on my MA in Film and Media Studies. I was wandering around the Foreign Films section of Tower Video in the East Village, when I came across Funny Games. I had seen a preview for the film on some other video I had rented, and thought that it might be a wild ride. It was also a German-language film, which is always a good way to practice listening-comprehension skills. Whatever. I took it home.



Wild ride my ass. Funny Games was a complete and total skullf**k.

I watched it repeatedly that weekend, then tried to force everyone I knew to watch it, too. I shudder now to think how some of them must have scurried in the opposite direction when they saw me coming, to avoid hearing me go on and on (yet again) about Michael Haneke's masterpiece.

I first heard about the remake a couple years ago, and my first thought would have been, "What kind of fuckery is this?" had Amy Winehouse been out back then, but she wasn't. So my actual response was denial, since I was loath to process such a ridiculous piece of information. My previous experience with a European director going to Hollywood to remake (and seriously f**k up) his own film was George Sluizer, who directed The Vanishing. Just thinking about that mess he made with Jeff Bridges, Kiefer Sutherland, and Nancy Travis gives me a headache. The brilliance of the Dutch version is the absolute horror of the ending. Desperate to know the fate that befell his missing lover, the protagonist unwittingly allows himself to suffer the same fate. Thus, his end is all the more chilling, and The Vanishing (OV) remains one of the most quietly terrifying films I have ever seen.

The Hollywoodification of that film lies somewhere in the belief that Americans need happy endings. This is perhaps true, and if so, very telling. As the conventional wisdom goes, the folks who flock to the multiplexes for entertainment, aren't there to see their heroes fail. And since Hollywood doesn't make films to lose money, the multiplex crowd must be kept as happy as possible. This wasn't always the case, but to save me the trouble of explaining why the movie industry in the US began to suck after the phenomenal success of Jaws, buy a copy of Easy Riders and Raging Bulls: How the How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock 'N' Roll Generation Saved Hollywood, by Peter Biskind.

In any case, I digress...

I checked out the trailer for the new version of Funny Games and from what I can see, it sucks.



While it does appear (at least from the trailer) to be a shot-by-shot reconstruction of the original, Naomi Watts is not going to go where Susanne Lothar went in this role, and the places she does go are problematic. As for the Tim Roth-Ulrich Mühe comparison, there is none. Look, I know I'm being unfair, but that's the way it is. If you've seen it and disagree (but only if you've seen the original at least twenty times as well) drop me a line and let me know.

As for future remake madness, I will continue to pretend that I didn't read this article in the Guardian last year that claims that The Lives of Others is going to be remade. Apparently, Americans are too stupid to read subtitles, so the entire film has to be remade. In terms of the Americanization of this film I'm sure they could add a scene featuring Ronald Reagan in front of the Brandenburg Gate imploring Mr. Gorbachev to "tear down this wall."

Sigh...

On the bright side, however, it appears that Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck won't be tasked with screwing up his own film. That job has apparently been given to Sidney Pollack.