Review // FUNNY GAMES - Actors are fucking weirdos

Case in point: Naomi Watts and Tim Roth. I would say both these actors are reasonably comfortable, sitting on some low millions, probably multiple house owners. They aren't at the top of the pack, but they aren't at the bottom either. They can pretty much do what they want at this point, taking a pay cheque in a run-of-the-mill studio picture, or doing an off Broadway play. So why in god's name would they choose to be in Funny Games?

I think the answer is that actors are not like you or I. And I don't just mean because they are telegenic and rich. No, I mean that they are like a mutated species of human who actively seek out the emotions and experiences that regular people live their entire lives hoping to avoid. The Actor Species are either brave, depraved or blank slates that need constant rewriting and aren't all that picky about what gets imprinted on them.

Beyond this explanation, I can't really figure out any other reason why Watts and Roth would willingly subject themselves to such torture in a project that seemed destined to be overlooked from the start. Funny Games is a reportedly shot-for-almost-shot remake of a grim and relentlessly mean "thriller" meant to shame the audience for feeling thrilled. It's made by the same director, Michael Haneke, who crafted the polarizing original.

I believe both actors are parents in real life. So when Watts' and Roth's characters completely break down emotionally and physically after watching the murder of their young son, I couldn't help but attribute their realistic performances to some actor-y method where you imagine how you would feel if your own child was murdered. WHY IN THE FUCK WOULD ANYBODY WANT TO DO THAT?

And another question that kept coming up for me: What kind of sick fuck wants to make a movie like this--twice?

The film itself is a very strange experience, memorable I guess in it's own awful way, but not something I could say is entertaining. Which makes sense, since Haneke seems to be telling us that finding entertainment in the perils of fictional characters is a shameful, twisted cultural pastime. I guess movies have some other purpose for him that I don't know about. There are some genuinely effective and disturbing cinematic choices here, and I don't mean the more blatant and experimental ones that come later in the story. I'm talking about the kinds of creepy shots that would be highlights in more traditional horror fare.

The most effective scene for me came right at the beginning. Roth pulls the family SVU over next to the high security fence of a neighbours summer house. He sees Mr. and Mrs. Johnson standing on their front lawn, two young men in preppy attire, white gloves, stand beside them. He just wants to confirm their tennis game for the next day, but Mr. Johnson's responses seem a little terse and Mrs. Johnson never speaks at all. Neither do the young men, they just stare. Knowing what we know about the movie, and what is going to the happen to the Johnson's as soon as Roth pulls away, makes it an exceedingly creepy, yet subtle opener. But the subtlety sorta ends there. Later on Haneke rubs our noses in any excitement or tension his premise may have wrung out of us by making us stare at the dead body of the boy and his blood splattered on the wall and TV for TEN MINUTES. Come to think of it, Nascar racing was playing on the blood splattered TV, I wonder if that means something?

I haven't seen the original Funny Games, in fact the only other Haneke movie I've seen is Cache (I didn't find it terribly tense) so I can't really comment with any certainty about the nature of his filmmaking. But based on what I've read about him, and my own joyless viewing of his Funny Games Redux, he seems like a really cheery guy. All of his movies seem to be about terrible people doing terrible things to upper middle class people. He seems like he doesn't have a very high opinion of humans and uses his films to put them through the wringer and exact some terrible judgement on us all. In this way he kinda seems like Roland Emmerich, who has taken a more CGI-route, but nevertheless thinks very poorly of the human race and as a result has been trying to murder us en masse in one disaster porn movie after another.

At what point does a director stop examining misery and start causing it himself?

Anyway, I can't reasonably review this film since it was another late-night watch with Harry in my lap, giving him his bottle. Really bad idea. The second half of the movie becomes quite quiet and consists of Watts and Roth communicating through whimpers and sobs, and Harry was taking turns whimpering and sobbing in my lap so I was very disoriented. I was basically experiencing whimpering and sobbing in 3D!

Holding my own son in my arms while watching this family get tortured by psychopaths added an extra layer of disturbance. What would I do in this situation? How would I react? What if Harry grows up to be an effeminate, white-gloved torture-freak dandy? Best not to think about such awful things, I mean it's not like I'm an actor.