2008 Movie Titles
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2008 Movie Titles
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Funny Games
Starring: Naomi Watts, Tim Roth, Michael Pitt, Brady Corbet, Boyd Gaines, Siobhan Fallon, Devon Gearhart
Directed by: Michael Haneke
Screenplay by: Michael Haneke
Release Date: March 14th, 2008
MPAA Rating: R for terror, violence and some langauge.
Box Office: $1,294,919 (US total)
Studio: Warner Independent Pictures
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Tagline: You must admit, you brought this on yourself.
Michael Haneke (Caché) remakes his own 1997 horror-thriller about two psychopaths who kidnap a mother, father and son in their vacation cabin and make them play sadistic games with each other into English.
In this provocative and brutal thriller from director Michael Haneke, a vacationing family gets an unexpected visit from two deeply disturbed young men. Their idyllic holiday turns nightmarish as they are subjected to unimaginable terrors and struggle to stay alive.
Remade from his own acclaimed 1997 film, "Funny Games" is written and directed by Michael Haneke ("Caché"), and stars Naomi Watts, Tim Roth, Michael Pitt, Brady Corbet and Devon Gearhart.
Two families go to their summer homes and make a date to play golf the next morning. The neighbors' guest shows up at Ann and George's home requesting some eggs for Eva. Ann is not sure about the guest and things seem strange.
The vacation begins with Ann, George and their son Georgie on their way to their summer home. The neighbors, Fred and Eva, are already there. They make a date to play golf the next morning. It's a perfect day.
Ann begins to make dinner, while her husband and son are busy with their newly restored sailboat. Suddenly, Ann finds herself face to face with a polite young man, the neighbors' guest Peter, who has come to ask for some eggs because Eva has run out. Ann is about to give Peter the eggs, but hesitates. How did he get onto their property? Peter explains that there's a hole in the fence - Fred showed it to him.
Things seem strange from the beginning. Soon, violence erupts.
Remake
Recently a friend and critic who recently watched FUNNY GAMES said to me "now the film is where it belongs." He is right. When I first envisioned FUNNY GAMES in the middle of the 90s, it was my intention to have an American audience watch the movie. It is a reaction to a certain American Cinema, its violence, its naïveté, the way American Cinema toys with human beings. In many American films violence is made consumable.
However, because it was a foreign language film and because the actors were not familiar to an American audience, it did not reach its audience. In 2005, British producer Chris Coen approached me with the idea to do a remake in English. I agreed under the condition that Naomi Watts star in the movie.
Review 1
So sadistic and disturbing, Games (* 1/2 out of four) is easily the toughest movie to sit through since 1994's Natural Born Killers. Lured in to spy on the discreet terrors of the bourgeoisie, viewers don't just watch — they viscerally recoil.
We are made to watch the mental and physical torture of a family (played by Naomi Watts, Tim Roth and Devon Gearhart as their 10-year-old son) by preppy psychos clad in tennis whites (Michael Pitt, Brady Corbet). The film lacks character development and motivation or any sense of psychological examination of the casual cruelty inflicted by the pair. The family's only sin: that they are moneyed and own a lakefront vacation home that is relatively remote.
It's a sick and twisted tale intended to provoke and disturb. Austrian writer/director Michael Haneke, who adapted this from his 1997 German-language film, has said it's a commentary on how violence is made consumable in American movies, swallowed easily by naive audiences. It's an interesting rationale, but what he puts on the screen feels much more exploitative than reflective. While Haneke is attacking our culture for being drawn to violent fare, he is also relishing in presenting it to us, in prolonged and detailed fashion.
The audience feels like a co-conspirator in this sadomasochistic excursion into extreme cruelty. One can't help but leave the theater angry to have wasted time on this despicable, conscience-free exercise in pointless horror. --- By Claudia Puig, USA TODAY
Review 2
Disappointed that his didactic, German-language thriller FUNNY GAMES (1997) didn't reach the audience he felt needed to see it most -- doltish Americans who take an insufficiently philosophical view of movie violence (and apparently don't like subtitles) -- Austrian provocateur Michael Haneke (CACHE) gave us a second chance to get the message: He remade the entire movie with an English-speaking cast and an American distributor. It's virtually a scene-for-scene replica of a movie that wasn't so great to begin with.
With their beautifully crafted wooden sailboat hitched to their shiny Range Rover, Ann and George Farber (Naomi Watts, Tim Roth), along with their young son Georgie (Devon Gearhart) and their golden retriever Lucky, are en route to their gated waterfront home for a two-week summer vacation. How bourgeois are they? They're so bourgeois they play "Name That Classical Tune" in the car, a game interrupted by a rude blast of John Zorn's hardcore skronk, which accompanies the blood-red title credits in a none-too-subtle intimation of the brutality to come. They're so bourgeois that when they spot their next-door neighbors, the Thompsons, on the front lawn with two white-clad young men neither Ann nor George recognizes, they shout a friendly reminder about an upcoming game of golf.
When George asks if Fred Thompson (Boyd Gaines) wouldn't mind stopping by later to help launch his sloop, Ann can't help but notice how nervous Fred seems. When he arrives a short while later, he's accompanied by one of his guests, a disconcertingly polite young man whom he introduces as Paul (Michael Pitt), the son of a business associate. With his angelic face, neatly parted blond hair and immaculate tennis whites, Paul could have stepped out of a Ralph Lauren ad, except for one small detail: those weird, white cotton gloves he never takes off. Meanwhile up at the house, Ann opens the front door to Peter (MYSTERIOUS SKIN's Brady Corbet), a stranger who could be Paul's more slovenly younger brother, right down to the gloves.
Peter claims Mrs. Thompson sent him to borrow four eggs for something she's baking, but after he drops them in the front hallway, then "accidentally" knocks Ann's cell phone into the sink, rendering it useless (a major inconvenience when you don't have a land line), she gets the feeling this strange young man is toying with her. When Paul shows up, calls Peter "Tom" and then asks to take one of George's expensive golf clubs outside for a few practice swings (he does, and that's the last we hear of Lucky), Ann tries to get them both out of her house. They won't leave, Ann's respectable veneer finally cracks and when George returns to the house demanding to know what's going on, all hell breaks loose. Peter and Paul are hardly the nice boys one might unthinkingly invite into one's home -- they're sadistic thrill-killers up for a bit of fun. Suddenly everything designed to keep the Farber family safe -- the front gate, the security fence, the motion-triggered floodlights -- turns their luxuriously isolated home into a death trap.
No thinking person ever came away from Wes Craven's brilliantly savage LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT with less of an understanding of his or her role as a spectator than the one Haneke spells out with a heavy hand, and Craven didn't resort to such obvious devices as having a character directly address the camera and mock the audience's perverse expectations. It is the viewers, whom Haneke invites in and then condemns if they don't walk out, who bear the full brunt of his contempt; filmmakers, not to mention distributors who attractively package and market violent spectacles, get off scot-free. That said, the film is merciless in its depiction of death and suffering, Pitt and Corbet are perfectly cast, and Watts, who also served as executive producer, gives a disturbingly raw performance. But it's awfully hard to see what the film does right on account of that giant Austrian finger wagging in your dumb American face.
--- By Ken Fox (TV Guide)
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Naomi Watts as Anna in Funny Games.
