975 Funny Games

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mteller
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Re: 975 Funny Games

#51 Post by mteller » Sun Feb 17, 2019 12:50 am

No film that gets anyone to pontificate this much can be a bad film.

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Mr Sausage
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Re: 975 Funny Games

#52 Post by Mr Sausage » Sun Feb 17, 2019 6:19 am

mteller wrote:
Sun Feb 17, 2019 12:50 am
No film that gets anyone to pontificate this much can be a bad film.
Don't be ridiculous.

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tenia
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Re: 975 Funny Games

#53 Post by tenia » Sun Feb 17, 2019 6:40 am

It's actually quite an interesting discussion, though I still do believe both the family and the killers are specifically painted so the viewers can't root for any of them and remain confused and stuck in the middle.
But true, with only the viewers in on the cruel game, the rules within the movie aren't fair.
Last edited by tenia on Sun Feb 17, 2019 8:31 am, edited 1 time in total.

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colinr0380
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Re: 975 Funny Games

#54 Post by colinr0380 » Sun Feb 17, 2019 7:52 am

In some ways I see the two lads here as having much less agency than the family (families) that they are tormenting, even whilst paradoxically they are the ones with the most control over the structure of the film. At least those families give the impression of having a life that pre-existed before the film as well feelings of love and emotion about the situation that they are trapped inside of, even if the film in its shift to focus on them is now setting about systematically destroying them. Which itself raises its own questions about the difference between characters who exist 'within' or 'without' of their societies (after all every character, aggressor or victim, exists only within the framework of the film, even if the family has been given the trappings of an manufactured upper-middle class background to flesh out their lifestyle more). A lot of Haneke's films feel to be about characters viewing events from an outside perspective and one which might be both antagonistic to and in the process of destroying the current world to bring about a different one, though not necessarily a better or more enlightened one: Benny in Benny's Video, mediating his life (and the suffering of others, even that which he causes himself) through the lens of technology; the journalist and actor couple in Code Unknown; the kids in The White Ribbon; sexual desire itself in The Piano Teacher.

But while the victims die (like the family deconstructing their lifestyle and eventually themselves almost into the sweet release of death in The Seventh Continent) those lads never are able to escape. They are forever trapped and while they can have seemingly have the power over the rules of the game for the little things (like rewinding the film, or ending the final game 'early' to go get some breakfast) they can never actually leave a job unfinished or have the ability to stop repeating the cycle over and over even if they want to. Maybe that's their own form of purgatory.

EDIT: There is also the way that the two young men are never shown doing any physical action or performing any of the acts of violence.
SpoilerShow
The nearest is probably hitting the father with the golf club at the opening (mirrored by knocking the mother off the boat at the end), but we only see that in a shot of the father falling to the ground. Similarly the shotgun murder is offscreen, along with the knifing of the father. And especially the capturing of the mother on the road and dragging her back into the house.
It is as if the film is consciously omitting or otherwise not showing the moments when the terrorisers actually have to put some effort into putting their victims into the situation, keeping them as calm and unruffled above it all, patiently explaining their actions in a slightly condescending manner. Which of course is what makes the unplanned shotgun sequence hit with more impact, since that is something that goes against the 'rules of the game' and actually does get shown, as well as being when the torturers do briefly lose their cool (because such a thing should not be happening in this film) and have to rewind to do another take of the scene after these over emotional victims have 'messed it up' the first time around!

But I also think it disturbs the torturers too for undermining their sense of confidence that both they and the film are acting together in complicity, only for the film itself to allow one of them to die and the family to get the upper hand, even if it is only momentarily! (How many torturers in how many different regimes have felt that they have been acting dispassionately on behalf of their government(s), only to find themselves fully in the firing line later on?)
Last edited by colinr0380 on Thu Jun 13, 2019 1:28 am, edited 7 times in total.

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Mr Sausage
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Re: 975 Funny Games

#55 Post by Mr Sausage » Sun Feb 17, 2019 9:57 am

tenia wrote:
Sun Feb 17, 2019 6:40 am
It's actually quite an interesting discussion, though I still do believe both the family and the killers are specifically painted so the viewers can't root for any of them and remain confused and stuck in the middle.
But true, with only the viewers in on the cruel game, the rules within the movie aren't fair.
Oh, I'm really enjoying this discussion. For me it's more about the high quality of the posts than the movie, but I'd be lying if I said my sheer irritation with the film wasn't also keeping me going.

But the idea that a movie is good because some people decided to talk about it is a pile of nonsense.

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tenia
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Re: 975 Funny Games

#56 Post by tenia » Sun Feb 17, 2019 11:00 am

Oh, I agree with you. Popularity has never been a consistent marker for quality. But I quite enjoy the quality of the posts too (even if we can disagree about the movie itself) and thought it would have been too bad if the thread was derailed.

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Brian C
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Re: 975 Funny Games

#57 Post by Brian C » Sun Feb 17, 2019 9:26 pm

I've enjoyed this discussion too, although I find myself running out of things to say. But I want to tie up a couple of loose ends.
Mr Sausage wrote:
Sat Feb 16, 2019 11:42 pm
The reality may differ from our conceptions, but I think you'd agree that this movie wouldn't work in Winter's Bone's setting.
Well, I dunno. And I don't say that to be coy or to dodge the question, it's just that I really couldn't say. My familiarity with Appalachian/Ozarks culture honestly doesn't extend much beyond having watched Winter's Bone.

But with that caveat, in general I don't think people are really all that different from one cultural context to another and, rightly or wrongly, I think you're attaching far more significance to the setting that I am.
For me the key difference is: everyone in Funny Games is performing a role in a preordained structure, but only the killers know they're performing a role, and they spend the movie giving various performances for the audience. They're in on the game, but they also let you know that you are in on the game, and therefore complicit in it.
I don't know that "complicit" is the feeling this generates for me. It's more like I'm being taunted along with the family but am even more helpless than they are to affect the outcome. I think it causes me to relate more strongly to the family.
You're not really taking it on its own terms, tho'. You're ignoring its raison d'etre in favour of appreciating it for everything it wishes to critique and condemn. Haneke isn't trolling when he says continuing to watch this movie means you're dearly in need of its lessons. Finding it effective as a horror movie is precisely the problem in his eyes, and he's made a whole movie that tries to sicken and repulse you into turning it off, or barring that, lecture you until you give up this perversity. Or so he'd like you to think. Personally I suspect he wants it both ways, to cater to your perversities but retain moral superiority over you as well.
Well, I think this is the biggest difference you and I have on this film - I don't really give a fig what Haneke thinks about the film or what he intended it to do or what he thinks about the audience's reactions to it. I just don't care! It's less than relevant to me. I'm more than capable of watching it and thinking about what I saw and forming my own takeaways without his help.

And so my response to you would be that I feel like I am taking the film on its own terms, but it may well be the case that I'm not taking it on Haneke's terms. But those are not the same things! And I admit that it's slightly frustrating to me that so much of the critical commentary on the film unquestioningly accepts his framework for discussion.

It's why I chimed in here in the first place, because MichaelB had said that he's avoided the film because of what Haneke's said about it, and I feel like that's a bad reason not to watch it because I think that Haneke's comments are ridiculous. But I don't feel that way about the film.

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knives
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Re: 975 Funny Games

#58 Post by knives » Sun Feb 17, 2019 9:52 pm

Just to add in a small voice I would like to agree with Brian in that I don't think Haneke fully appreciates what he has made. The text of the film if limited to his statements is dreadfully out of touch with the genre he is supposedly critiquing (in general his statements sound more appropriate as a critique of action cinema than horror). I'm not a fan of death of the author type discussions, but in this case the text so poorly reflects the author's statements that ignoring him seems for the best.

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zedz
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Re: 975 Funny Games

#59 Post by zedz » Sun Feb 17, 2019 11:11 pm

My take on the film, which I liked at the time (haven't watched it since, but did see the remake, which was a somewhat pointless viewing exercise) is that it's a mediocre post-modern arthouse film, but an excellent horror film. As a pure genre exercise, it works for all the expected technical reasons (the Hitchcockian clockwork element), but its real success is that it has protagonists that behave rationally and resourcefully (which makes the critique of them in this thread as idiots seem really weird to me) - and that isn't enough. There's absolutely no reason for them to suspect the motives of their tormentors until it's far too late to do anything about it, and once they do realize their predicament, they do everything reasonable in their power to get themselves out of it. As an exercise in terror and suspense, it's superb, even though Haneke's gimmicky conceits undermine that whenever they crop up. To me, what Haneke claims about the film isn't just shallow and disingenuous, it doesn't even make much sense. But I tend to disregard what he says about his work anyway. He's always been a sensationalist provocateur of a distinct arthouse stripe, pushing the rote animal cruelty button whenever he needs to get attention, for instance. He doesn't have any claim to the moral high ground: he's been down in the muck with Lars Von Trier (and, horror of horrors, his dreaded audience) all along.

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Feego
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Re: 975 Funny Games

#60 Post by Feego » Sun Feb 17, 2019 11:44 pm

Brian C wrote:
Sun Feb 17, 2019 9:26 pm
For me the key difference is: everyone in Funny Games is performing a role in a preordained structure, but only the killers know they're performing a role, and they spend the movie giving various performances for the audience. They're in on the game, but they also let you know that you are in on the game, and therefore complicit in it.
I don't know that "complicit" is the feeling this generates for me. It's more like I'm being taunted along with the family but am even more helpless than they are to affect the outcome. I think it causes me to relate more strongly to the family.
I think the idea of being "complicit" with the killers is that you as the viewer have the ultimate power in being able to just stop watching the movie. The family cannot escape the situation, but the viewer can and is thus not helpless. It's actually fascinating that in some ways this is more explicitly true (and might play out better) when watching the film on home video rather than in the theater, where walking out doesn't stop the film from playing! My own experience with this movie is that I reacted to it pretty much exactly as Mr. Sausage did and share his viewpoint. I knew nothing of the film before watching it and sensed Haneke's moralizing even before reading his thoughts on it. For me, the film was far too cold and calculated, too clearly a sermon/experiment/trick on the viewer to engage with emotionally as I would a regular horror film. But I also agree that a work of art reaches beyond its creator's own narrow viewpoint and touches every viewer in different ways. I certainly don't want to take that away from anyone else who might have found this a more rewarding experience than I did. Like others here, I have very much enjoyed reading this discussion, even if I have no personal use for the film!
Brian C wrote:
Sat Feb 16, 2019 9:16 pm
Mr Sausage wrote:
Sat Feb 16, 2019 5:52 pm
Frau Blucher makes a good point: whose "real life" are we talking about? What you say is true for people of a certain socio-economic status, people for whom violence and desperation and chaos is pretty alien. The naturalism people perceive in the film comes from how we understand the family's social status. Their blue blood signifiers are also signifiers of their vulnerability. If you were to suggest setting the film in rural Texas, everyone would chime in with jokes about the killers being shot within the first five minutes.
Sure but that's just a stereotype about Texans (that is, to be sure, gleefully perpetuated by Texans themselves). People can make jokes about whatever they want but that has no more bearing on what rural Texas is really like than jokes about how dumb teenagers are in horror movies reflect what teenagers are actually like.
Not that this really matters to anyone, but as an urban Texan who has never even fired a gun, I can say that I know several people (some in my own family) who are not only equipped for such an intrusion but who I genuinely believe would welcome the opportunity to defend themselves.

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Mr Sausage
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Re: 975 Funny Games

#61 Post by Mr Sausage » Sun Feb 17, 2019 11:51 pm

Brian C wrote:But with that caveat, in general I don't think people are really all that different from one cultural context to another and, rightly or wrongly, I think you're attaching far more significance to the setting that I am.
I find the film to be attaching a lot of significance to its setting, yeah. You seem to be treating many of the elements of the film as incidental, whereas they seem to me to be calculated parts of the design.

I haven't been arguing how people are in general. I'm echoing Frau Blucher's good point that how people treat strangers and how they conceptualize and react to the threat of violence can differ widely among socio-economic statuses. It makes a difference that the family is rich because that makes them vulnerable in specific ways. The biggest one is they're not acquainted with violence, they're not equipped to deal with it, and they're not the least suspicious of strangers or their motives. They're people who think you can slap a larger, aggressive male and then turn your back on them. Part of this is those males are dressed like rich people themselves, so the husband mistakes them for being similarly unacquainted with violence. But walk down to the projects and ask people how they'd react to someone in their home invading their personal space and threatening to "break [their] face". I bet they won't say they'd slap him and turn away. They won't necessarily react violently themselves, but I doubt they're slapping anyone and turning their backs.

There are sections of the populace that are more suspicious of strangers, more acquainted with violence, and more territorial. It's a very different film if those two boys are trying to intimidate a very large working class father who's been in a few fights instead of a small, upper class rich guy who probably abhors violence. That's as it should be: horror movies do themselves no favours if they can't make their victims seem vulnerable.

But please don't mistake me for one of those people who thinks he knows exactly how the family should've reacted. I don't. I mean, I know the father shouldn't have slapped the guy and turned his back, but that's it. This is not a situation I have any experience with. I'm from a middle-class background and have little experience with violence. But I still think the film is courting contempt for its family up until the golf club comes out. I didn't personally feel contemptuous towards them, but that's neither here nor there.
Brian C wrote:I don't know that "complicit" is the feeling this generates for me. It's more like I'm being taunted along with the family but am even more helpless than they are to affect the outcome. I think it causes me to relate more strongly to the family.
Whether or not it succeeds in making you feel complicit, I think the film is aiming for that. When the killer turns to the camera during the dog search, he doesn't give a taunting smile. It's a conspiratorial one.

One of the premises of the film is that you came here to enjoy this game. You enjoy horror movies where people are tormented, and here you go, watch people be tormented while I periodically remind you that you came here to enjoy a movie of people being tormented. Of course, Haneke's pretty naive if he thinks this movie's audience is actually going to be comprised of gore hounds, torture porn devotees, and other hardcore horror lovers. It's actually going to be art house cinema-goers. So he's hectoring the wrong audience. But anyway.
Brian C wrote:Well, I think this is the biggest difference you and I have on this film - I don't really give a fig what Haneke thinks about the film or what he intended it to do or what he thinks about the audience's reactions to it. I just don't care! It's less than relevant to me. I'm more than capable of watching it and thinking about what I saw and forming my own takeaways without his help.

And so my response to you would be that I feel like I am taking the film on its own terms, but it may well be the case that I'm not taking it on Haneke's terms. But those are not the same things! And I admit that it's slightly frustrating to me that so much of the critical commentary on the film unquestioningly accepts his framework for discussion.

It's why I chimed in here in the first place, because MichaelB had said that he's avoided the film because of what Haneke's said about it, and I feel like that's a bad reason not to watch it because I think that Haneke's comments are ridiculous. But I don't feel that way about the film.
I guess I've given the impression I've been resorting to the intentional fallacy. My bad. I'm not basing my interpretation of the film on Haneke's statements; I've been saying that, based on my own experience watching the film, Haneke's statements are indeed what the film is doing. I don't think it's successful at it, but the film's intentions read loud and clear to me.

I can fully understand an admirer wanting to take the film out of Haneke's hands, given the just awful things he says about it (he once said his aim here was to "rape the viewer into autonomy", which, you know, holy shit). But for me, what Haneke says he's doing is pretty much what his film's doing--not because it has to be, but because it happens to be.

I'm glad you like the film, but I think it has much shittier motives than you're allowing yourself to see. But what do I know.

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Brian C
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Re: 975 Funny Games

#62 Post by Brian C » Mon Feb 18, 2019 12:30 am

Feego wrote:
Sun Feb 17, 2019 11:44 pm
I think the idea of being "complicit" with the killers is that you as the viewer have the ultimate power in being able to just stop watching the movie. The family cannot escape the situation, but the viewer can and is thus not helpless.
To be frank, I don't have much patience with this kind of thing. I was talking earlier about confusing fantasy and reality, and I think this is a good example of what I mean. We can empathize with fictional characters, but the horror that I feel is a tiny fraction of what I would feel if I was watching something like the events in the film happening in real life. And that's how it should be! Because their pain and horror are not real. I am not "escaping" anything if I decide not to watch the film, and I have no power over what happens to them, and so I cannot possibly be complicit in it merely by watching it happen.

But even if I accept this for the sake of argument, this still seems far too broad to me - it would suggest that as a viewer I'm complicit in everything that happens in any movie I watch. Which may be the case in some theoretical or metaphorical sense, but if so, it's not a very meaningful critique of this movie specifically. I can always turn any movie off, characters don't need to break the fourth wall for that to be an option.

But I think you've hit the nail on the head in terms of why I reject Haneke's statements - it's inane for an artist to make a moral judgment against their audience simply because the audience has decided to engage with the work.

[slightly edited for clarity]

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Re: 975 Funny Games

#63 Post by colinr0380 » Mon Feb 18, 2019 4:31 am

zedz wrote:
Sun Feb 17, 2019 11:11 pm
My take on the film, which I liked at the time (haven't watched it since, but did see the remake, which was a somewhat pointless viewing exercise) is that it's a mediocre post-modern arthouse film, but an excellent horror film. As a pure genre exercise, it works for all the expected technical reasons (the Hitchcockian clockwork element), but its real success is that it has protagonists that behave rationally and resourcefully (which makes the critique of them in this thread as idiots seem really weird to me) - and that isn't enough. There's absolutely no reason for them to suspect the motives of their tormentors until it's far too late to do anything about it, and once they do realize their predicament, they do everything reasonable in their power to get themselves out of it. As an exercise in terror and suspense, it's superb, even though Haneke's gimmicky conceits undermine that whenever they crop up.
I certainly agree with this. In some ways the whole family do do enough to rationally and resourcefully attempt to get themselves out of the situation (The father fights with one of the tormentors to give the son a chance to escape. The son gets the shotgun from the neighbours and even attempts to use it unsuccessfully. The mother uses it successfully) and succeed in fighting off their aggressors only to be fundamentally betrayed by the film itself reversing to erase their triumphant act of violence from the timeline. Mostly because the film would end too early otherwise!

Maybe in some ways that keeps the family 'pure' though in that they do not degenerate into performing violent acts themselves. Which are, perhaps problematically, suggested to be the only action that could potentially have any effect on their pre-defined victimhood role in the narrative (a 'kill or be killed' world in which familial affection is heartbreakingly powerless in the face of dispassionate cruelty imposed onto it. In some ways that could suggest that the two torturers here are the equivalent of the stroke in Amour), but so extreme an action that the mother's brief triumph destroys the fabric of the film and even the thematic motif of acts of violence occurring mostly offscreen!

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Re: 975 Funny Games

#64 Post by FrauBlucher » Mon Feb 18, 2019 8:29 am

Mr Sausage wrote:
Sun Feb 17, 2019 11:51 pm
Brian C wrote:But with that caveat, in general I don't think people are really all that different from one cultural context to another and, rightly or wrongly, I think you're attaching far more significance to the setting that I am.
I find the film to be attaching a lot of significance to its setting, yeah. You seem to be treating many of the elements of the film as incidental, whereas they seem to me to be calculated parts of the design.

I haven't been arguing how people are in general. I'm echoing Frau Blucher's good point that how people treat strangers and how they conceptualize and react to the threat of violence can differ widely among socio-economic statuses. It makes a difference that the family is rich because that makes them vulnerable in specific ways. The biggest one is they're not acquainted with violence, they're not equipped to deal with it, and they're not the least suspicious of strangers or their motives. They're people who think you can slap a larger, aggressive male and then turn your back on them. Part of this is those males are dressed like rich people themselves, so the husband mistakes them for being similarly unacquainted with violence. But walk down to the projects and ask people how they'd react to someone in their home invading their personal space and threatening to "break [their] face". I bet they won't say they'd slap him and turn away. They won't necessarily react violently themselves, but I doubt they're slapping anyone and turning their backs.
First off I have enjoyed this discussion as well. It has almost made me want to revisit this film. Sausage has nailed it for me and that
is exactly why I had such a visceral feeling towards this film as I was watching it. They seemed out of touch with warning signs, which is probably because of their status and what they have never encountered, and also a bit of arrogance in thinking a slap was going to put the would be torturers in their place.

I know my families situation with an intruder is a little different than what happened in Funny Games. But you never know how situations can end up. Why wait for things to get out of hand by trying to "deescalate" the situation, whatever that means. My family was not from any rural area but from a mostly middle class, blue collar neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York that was heavily influenced by the mafia for decades (not so much anymore as a new immigrant population has taken over that neighborhood). So, the way my family's reaction went down would've largely been the norm in this neighborhood if the same happened to others.

As for Haneke himself and other directors, I usually don't pay attention to hyperbolic comments they make for reasons of not A) wanting to be influenced by them before watching the film and B) not really sure of what their motives are.
zedz wrote:
Sun Feb 17, 2019 11:11 pm
but its real success is that it has protagonists that behave rationally and resourcefully (which makes the critique of them in this thread as idiots seem really weird to me) - and that isn't enough. There's absolutely no reason for them to suspect the motives of their tormentors until it's far too late to do anything about it, and once they do realize their predicament, they do everything reasonable in their power to get themselves out of it.
Less that they were idiots and more that they were naive and gullible toward total strangers that just appear with no real reason, from what I can remember, I guess I should rewatch this. Haha

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Re: 975 Funny Games

#65 Post by colinr0380 » Mon Feb 18, 2019 9:05 am

There is a bit of explanation provided for that, in the way that at the beginning of the film the family call hello to their (nervous looking) neighbour standing off in the distance in his garden with the two young men and presumably reaching the end of his own narrative. Our main family assumes that they are friends of the neighbours, which is why the whole 'egg borrowing' situation is able to go on for as long as it does, turning from polite request to clumsiness to entitled demanding more eggs to actual golf club based violence, before the question about where the family dog has gotten to comes up.

This then comes up again later on, as about mid-way through the next neighbour along meets the father and one of the young men at the dock, and informs them that she is staying further upstream, and then the two young men use their relationship with the main family as the opening gambit in the next situation, even if they are immediately met with more suspicion due to turning up so early in the morning!

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Mr Sausage
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Re: 975 Funny Games

#66 Post by Mr Sausage » Mon Feb 18, 2019 10:01 am

It's pretty believable. I bought the family's reaction. Even if the family hadn't seen the killers with the neighbours but were told they were relations or acquaintances of them, I'd buy their reaction. It's two baby-faced prep-school-looking boys, the picture of harmlessness. If you're not a suspicious or cagey person, as people from the family's status tend not to be in situations where networking, socializing, and hobnobbing are the norm, this is more or less how you're going to act. The film is pretty believable. But it's not because this is a universal situation. The specifics play a real part.

Even so, there are warning signs, some of which the wife reads accurately, if instinctively (almost playing on an outdated women's intuition thing). The husband is very dismissive of her reaction, tho', in a way I didn't find sympathetic. I read his dismissal as part of the naivety that comes with the high level of security and stability afforded by their lifestyle. It might also be he was compelled to uphold a set of manners. I used to live in a poor neighbourhood, and I saw guys act aggressively, even violently, when someone upset their partners, even when the other party was innocent in my eyes. That coloured how I read the moment. I know the type of people who'd second guess their partners and the type who'd get protective.

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Re: 975 Funny Games

#67 Post by colinr0380 » Mon Feb 18, 2019 12:18 pm

While its about the remake, pretty much everyone on the Newsnight review panel would agree with many of the above comments! I'm mainly attaching this because while I would disagree with Natalie Haynes' comments, I kind of love her "Daily Mail's horror film" zinger (though Matthew Sweet's comparison to Guy Ritchie is more cruel and upsetting in many ways!) which reminds me that the remake came out early on in the late 2000s trend of "Hoodie Horror". I have many more problems with the films which tackle this material 'on face value' such as Eden Lake or Ils (aka Them) (plus The Strangers of course) that play much more straightforwardly and often with a much more obvious layer of class (and generational) anxieties. I'm particularly upset by Ils for blanketing its thrills in a 'based on a true story' garb.

Haynes also gets towards the more 'synthetic' quality of the remake with her comments about Naomi Watts in the role.

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Re: 975 Funny Games

#68 Post by Magic Hate Ball » Mon Feb 18, 2019 1:41 pm

Oh, I adore this film. The activity of the film is thrilling in its own way - as others have noted, the characters act logically within their fairly well-developed personalities and are methodically torn apart for it, which is terrifying. It's also a fun way to approach fascism!

But I particularly like how boldly Haneke applies his sort of goofy, juvenile misanthropy to the actual metatextual elements. If the film wasn't so gung-ho about it, it wouldn't work for me, but it succeeds at being both winking and nasty. I don't think the film should be taken as any kind of game-changer for people who "need it", but it does work well as a self-contained commentary. Here we go, here's a group of people being murdered, with no way out - much like Walter says to Erika in The Piano Teacher (before raping her), isn't this what you wanted? Don't you want to see these people be stripped of all choice and forced to suffer? I mean, we do, and that's why it's so much fun to be tormented by it.

I don't take it necessarily as finger-wagging, though I also totally ignore anything Haneke has to say because he's a misanthropic crank, but more of an exploration in terms of brutal too-muchness and a kind of stripping down to the naughty, giggling elements.

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Re: 975 Funny Games

#69 Post by FrauBlucher » Sun Apr 28, 2019 12:27 pm


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Re: 975 Funny Games

#70 Post by andyli » Sun May 19, 2019 8:19 pm

caps-a-holic. To my eyes the TF1 has much better grains and slightly less ringing.

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tenia
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Re: 975 Funny Games

#71 Post by tenia » Mon May 20, 2019 4:01 am

The Criterion also seems to blow highlights up.

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schellenbergk
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Re: 975 Funny Games

#72 Post by schellenbergk » Tue May 21, 2019 3:11 pm

zedz wrote:
Sun Feb 17, 2019 11:11 pm
My take on the film, which I liked at the time (haven't watched it since, but did see the remake, which was a somewhat pointless viewing exercise) is that it's a mediocre post-modern arthouse film, but an excellent horror film.
Sounds about right to me. I "liked" it well enough when I saw it - (is "like" the right word for this film? Thought it very effective for what it was trying to do... let's put it that way) but I'm not really up for seeing it again. Ever.

Didn't hate it, but not re-watchable for me. Skipable in my book.

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mfunk9786
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Re: 975 Funny Games

#73 Post by mfunk9786 » Tue May 21, 2019 3:17 pm

I'm not sure you and zedz are saying the same things at all, really

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zedz
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Re: 975 Funny Games

#74 Post by zedz » Tue May 21, 2019 3:42 pm

I was thinking the same thing. Maybe he quoted the wrong post?

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mfunk9786
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Re: 975 Funny Games

#75 Post by mfunk9786 » Tue May 21, 2019 3:48 pm

I watched it through your lens, by the way zedz: and I straight-up love the film now. Haneke's own words made that too difficult for too long because of my lack of outright revulsion from the film and my wrestling with why in the world I should be taking this high minded approach toward it. As an eerily banal horror film, it is aces. Terrifying, cruel, and like the best horror centering around innocents being punished for crimes both perceived and imagined - coldly arbitrary.

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