19th
funny games
i just rented the Seventh Continent which means I’m back in the Haneke cycle (in which i watch about three a week). it’s kind of a run up to the release of the shot-by-shot Funny Games remake, which i’ve been wondering an awful lot about lately. the movie was basically the thing that both predicted torture porn and was its first critic. what’s the movie going to mean now? in america? i suspect, like the original, it’ll be taken as criticism, but with the scalple of the original replaced by hysteria — this time around, the movie will be viewed as a reaction. the best case for Funny Games is that it gets wide release in America, and the ticket buyers will be buying tickets for another torture porn movie (and probably a very dissappointing torture porn movie given that Funny Games is pretty soft-core compared with Saw and the like). given that most of Haneke’s movies are based around some variation of Our Cold Dead Place criticism, that reception would make the American Funny Games far and away his most successful film ever.
