4 result(s) tagged “Michael Haneke”

Our Box Office Power Rankings have been grim in recent weeks. George Clooney’s Leatherheads tops this week’s rankings — breaking Horton’s three-week reign — and was the second-best-reviewed movie in the top 10 with mediocre Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic scores of 53 and 56, respectively. It’s a bad crop out there, people.

So it seems appropriate to get grimmer with Michael Haneke’s English-language remake of his own Funny Games. RogerEbert.com Editor Jim Emerson spent much of last month spilling its blood, but I think he expended far too much effort. It’s easy to prove: No matter how good Haneke’s movie is, it’s an abject failure — and it was destined to be.

In one interview cited by Emerson, Haneke said:

“Of course I’m a critic of the studio system. But that doesn’t mean that one can’t work within that system. Funny Games was always made with American audiences in mind, since its subject is Hollywood’s attitude toward violence.”

In another interview, Haneke said:

“I hope that the slap in the face that I’m trying to give works here as well.”

But for all the hullabaloo that Haneke’s shot-for-shot remake has inspired, the writer-director never got to deliver that slap. He might have gotten an American studio to finance the project, but it never gave the movie an opportunity to assault its audience. In four weeks of release, Funny Games has earned $1.3 million in the United States, and it topped out at 288 theaters in its second week.

All of Haneke’s big talk died with a whimper. He wanted to confront American audiences with their own ugliness, but Warner Independent ensured that nobody showed up. Perhaps next time his people should spend more time negotiating distribution.

Continue reading for the weeks’ full rankings and the methodology.

Writer/director Michael Haneke’s 1997 film Funny Games feels like a response to something that hadn’t happened yet. Sure, we’d had Natural Born Killers and other ultra-violent movies, but the fetishism of agony hadn’t yet become a crass trend.

The prospect of Haneke’s English-language remake — due in theaters in late winter and starring Naomi Watts and Tim Roth — is worrisome. (George Sluizer’s American botch of his own The Vanishing comes to mind.) But it’s also necessary; as unpleasant as it is, Funny Games deserves to be seen more widely because it forces introspection. I doubt you can watch it without seriously considering why you watch movies of this sort, and how you react to them.

And it’s more timely now than it was upon its initial release a decade ago.

For me, the film is most striking in the scene in which Anna (Susanne Lothar) is forced by white-clad, white-gloved psychopathic visitors Peter and Paul to remove her clothes, while her helpless husband (The Lives of Others’ Ulrich Mühe) casts his eyes down and her young son sits on a couch with a bag over his head.

What’s unfortunate about Michael Haneke’s Caché is that the writer-director has created a movie that requires such intensive decoding at its terminals that it’s easy to overlook the rest of the movie — to, in fact, miss its entire point. By spending so much time and effort on the beginning and the ending, we neglect essential questions: What is the film trying to say? Is this an effective way to communicate that message?

Gaspar Noé’s Irréversible is such a formal accomplishment that its already repellant content becomes even more so.