George and Martha on a bad night

Funny Games

Crit

An interview:

Cheese: I understand you considered giving this one a pass.

Blab: Yes, everything about it just seemed so repellent. Then when both Lane and Scott essentially said, "What's the point? Haneke already did this once!" I thought about just Netflixing the original, so at least I could stop it and go wash my hands if I got to feeling really dirty. Or at least fix another drink.

C: So?

B: Two things: it was downtown, where the bar is lower, and I don't skip things 'cause I expect 'em to make me uncomfortable; I skip things 'cause I expect 'em to be stupid. Haneke had given me every reason to believe, with The Piano Teacher and Caché, that he's capable of making me squirm but no reason to believe he's stupid. So.

C: And?

B: Well, I don't wish I hadn't gone, exactly--I wasn't ever tempted to walk out, as the woman a few rows behind me did about a half-hour in--but renting the original might indeed have been a better solution. This might be one of those times when it would pay to be watching unfamiliar faces speaking an unfamiliar language that you have to decode by reading titles rather than hearing English plainly spoken by actors with countless associations. To take the readiest example, when Tim Roth is wheezing in pain, it's hard not to think of Mr. Orange lying on the floor in Reservoir Dogs, and once your mind goes there, it's impossible not to compare tortures there and here. To the extent that this film is going to work at all, I think you need as much distance from the familiar as you can muster.

C: And what constitutes its "working"?

B: The two reviews I've read (well, read one, glanced at beginning and end of the other--I rarely read a full Times review for fear of spoilers, and because I can get from the lead and the close all I need to help me decide) agree that Haneke is trying to work a sort of anti-Saw (no link for that: I don't want to seem to be encouraging its consumption), to comment on sangoporn. I wouldn't disagree with that, but I think in fact something far more interesting is going on here: call it victoporn. In slasher movies, I guess we're supposed to be somehow implicated into rooting for the perpetrator; in FG, that doesn't happen: we identify with the victims, but we still want them victimized.

C: Sick, dude.

B: I know, right? But let me say a few more words about the demographics of the "crowd" (six of us at the start, attritting to five). There was the couple behind me, that became the guy behind me, and then there were either youngish grandparents or oldish parents of a boy about twelve. I actually considered asking whether they had any idea what they were getting into, but the myob gene won out over the my-father-Sam gene. And they stayed to the end. Hell, I don't know: maybe the kid's mature enough to deal with this shit; maybe he won't have nightmares. Which may put him one up on me.

Trailer

• Redbelt--A trailer that from beginning to end screams "not your kind of film" except for two words: David and Mamet. Gee, that's a bareknuckled gladiatorfest of a different color.