I can’t go see Funny Games with the pals this weekend, and since last night was Thursday and Marzipandrew was making lamb Philly cheesesteaks on pita (that’s what he called them, obviously there is no such thing as lamb Philly cheesesteaks on pita), I just watched Funny Games. The 1997 Austrian original, which I own? But have never watched? Because that’s how I do things. I own them for years and never watch them, and then I watch them with an imaginary sandwich.

I’ve been avoiding Funny Games for a really long time. My rule is one Michael Haneke movie every six years, that’s about all my brain can take without breaking. I’m still kind of recovering from Benny’s Video (the original Anton Chigur, son!), which I saw in 1998. But it just felt so right, you know? And guess what? Great movie. I don’t know about the shot-for-shot remake, but the original is top locker. It’s not arthouse torture porn, as its been described by whoever describes things. It’s upsetting and affecting and very very tense, but there aren’t rivers of blood. What makes it such a “disturbing” (blah. sound of cattle bolt, body hits the floor.) film are the lingering (and when Haneke lingers around the house, he really LINGERS AROUND THE HOUSE) shots of people’s reaction shots while violence is being committed to someone else. That plus the Brechtian (not my term, it’s right there on the box, but it’s accurate) techniques of breaking the fourth wall and addressing the audience, thereby making them complicit and forcing them to question their preconceptions and emotional reactions to the tropes of thriller cinema is unpretentious (maybe a little pretentious), but startling and original.

Still, I think the character of Peter, played so well by Frank Giering in the original:

Has been miscast with Brady Corbet. Should have been recast as Pavement.

In case you were wondering, though, the movie isn’t that good or important. Your favorite website is still the number one google result for “funny games”:

I will crush you at Ragdoll Avalanche, the way Paul crushes that NO SPOILERS.

UPDATE: I just read A.O. Scott’s review of the remake. I think he’s right in saying that if American audiences do not bear the guilt of taking pleasure in watching people suffer, then the guilt ends up being borne by the director, but that doesn’t mean he’s to blame for trying. I also take some issue with Scott’s facile dismissal of Haneke’s “post-modern” tropes of reveling in the film’s “meta” instants, like it’s a Dave Eggers memoir. I don’t think that Funny Games feels particularly clever or navel-gazy (as the navel has been torn open), but rather uses small moments to reinforce the audience’s complicity in these events. Then again, we can’t all be Grindhouse, right Mr. Scott? Apparently that movie’s funtimes depiction of murder, implied rape, spousal abuse involving a husband stabbing his wife’s hands with a syringe, and cetra, all under a lead-weighted conceit of being super shitty (success!) was apparently A.O.K.? Moreover, the final dialogue of the movie, at least in the original, makes a decent if tossed-off Cartesian point about the reality of fiction, as it becomes an entity of its own which if properly absorbed by the audience is as psychologically real as anything that happens in the actual world (blah blah there is no spoon.) Just as Scott dismisses Funny Games as “audacious to an undergraduate literary theory class in 1985″, it’s just as juvenile and emptily pretentious to dismiss something using your own undergraduate literary theory class of 1985 ideas. BLOG! FARt! BLEG>

UPDATE: J. Hoberman’s review in the Village Voice is equally damning, but more thoughtful and points out some definite weaknesses in the film (again, I have not seen the American version, only the Austrian, and so in some ways we are still talking about different things, even if this is a shot for shot remake, not to mention the fact that as an American viewer I’m immediately distanced from the family by the language barrier). In particular, I do take Hoberman’s observation that “the American audience whom Haneke seeks to address is less apt to see Funny Games as a critique of dominant cinema than an argument for personal handguns,” as when the movie ended last night the first thing I said to Marzipandrew was “now do you see why I need a gun?” Nevertheless, Hoberman’s chief critique seems to be that there isn’t any fun in watching this movie, which kind of seems to be the point. I suppose you can make an argument that you don’t like the point that someone is making, but it’s still within their rights to make it, and in this case I think Haneke does so quite well. I’m pretty sure a movie that operates under a pretty literal reading of “verfremdungseffekt” is going to be pedantic, as Hoberman calls it. Isn’t that the point?