funny games
I had a week off, and spent some time at the London Film Festival. On my return on the first day Dave asked me if I’d been watching films about ‘gay bumming’. It didn’t help when I protested that no, in fact I’d seen Funny Games.
Funny Games is about two eerily polite young men terrorising a couple and their little boy in the couple’s lakeside holiday home. Why do they do it? Well, as various asides to the camera and one fairly audacious sequence make clear, it’s because YOU the viewer want them to: it’s a film that’s meant to make you question your attitude to screen violence. Mark Kermode says it’s like being ‘told off’. The original 1997 film was Austrian but now the director Michael Haneke has remade it, shot-for-shot, in America with Naomi Watts to reach out to a wider audience… and tell them off.
It must be odd for a creative person to remake their own movie shot for shot. What if you suddenly change your mind halfway through remaking it and realise that, after all, it would have worked better as a musical? Or get the uncontrollable urge to send Arnie in to save the heroine at the end? The first and only time I watched the original I found it really powerful; this time round I was interested but not really moved, thus proving Haneke right: I’d been desensitized.
‘Enjoy the film’, said the usherette on the way in. I could have slapped her. Didn’t she know you weren’t meant to?
Just for the record, the best film I’ve seen at the festival so far is La Influencia, a Spanish movie about a single mother’s slide into depression in which very little happens. So I’m sure you’ll all be rushing out to see that when it’s released.
I stayed one night at my aunt’s in Suffolk. For some curious reason, she has Zone Horror, the dedicated horror channel (sponsors of Frightfest), which enabled me to see a fragment of The Invisible Dead, about a creepy castle haunted by, as far as I could tell, budgetary constraints - hence the monster’s invisibility. In the bit I saw, however, it does become briefly visible as… a man in a gorilla suit. And not a very convincing gorilla suit at that - Abbott and Costello met scarier ones. You can see the eyeholes and everything. It is a genuine shock, however: you thought the movie was cheap, but not that cheap. The film does have it’s enduring mystery, which is: why didn’t they just give up, go into town and blow the budget on a couple of rounds of drinks?
I just hope that one day I’ll get to see the whole thing.
On Saturday we went to the Green Man to greet Hannah on her return from Australia. Yes, she survived. So did Australia. Although her ear 'exploded' on the plane. Mat regaled us with his account of owning two Gordon the gopher glove puppets as a child, one for formal occasions, the other for more intimate moments. Well that was the idea I got anyway: that he had elaborated on the concept of putting your hand up a glove puppet’s arse. He was talking about digging Gordon out some day. About time, I should think.
Funny Games is about two eerily polite young men terrorising a couple and their little boy in the couple’s lakeside holiday home. Why do they do it? Well, as various asides to the camera and one fairly audacious sequence make clear, it’s because YOU the viewer want them to: it’s a film that’s meant to make you question your attitude to screen violence. Mark Kermode says it’s like being ‘told off’. The original 1997 film was Austrian but now the director Michael Haneke has remade it, shot-for-shot, in America with Naomi Watts to reach out to a wider audience… and tell them off.
It must be odd for a creative person to remake their own movie shot for shot. What if you suddenly change your mind halfway through remaking it and realise that, after all, it would have worked better as a musical? Or get the uncontrollable urge to send Arnie in to save the heroine at the end? The first and only time I watched the original I found it really powerful; this time round I was interested but not really moved, thus proving Haneke right: I’d been desensitized.
‘Enjoy the film’, said the usherette on the way in. I could have slapped her. Didn’t she know you weren’t meant to?
Just for the record, the best film I’ve seen at the festival so far is La Influencia, a Spanish movie about a single mother’s slide into depression in which very little happens. So I’m sure you’ll all be rushing out to see that when it’s released.
I stayed one night at my aunt’s in Suffolk. For some curious reason, she has Zone Horror, the dedicated horror channel (sponsors of Frightfest), which enabled me to see a fragment of The Invisible Dead, about a creepy castle haunted by, as far as I could tell, budgetary constraints - hence the monster’s invisibility. In the bit I saw, however, it does become briefly visible as… a man in a gorilla suit. And not a very convincing gorilla suit at that - Abbott and Costello met scarier ones. You can see the eyeholes and everything. It is a genuine shock, however: you thought the movie was cheap, but not that cheap. The film does have it’s enduring mystery, which is: why didn’t they just give up, go into town and blow the budget on a couple of rounds of drinks?
I just hope that one day I’ll get to see the whole thing.
On Saturday we went to the Green Man to greet Hannah on her return from Australia. Yes, she survived. So did Australia. Although her ear 'exploded' on the plane. Mat regaled us with his account of owning two Gordon the gopher glove puppets as a child, one for formal occasions, the other for more intimate moments. Well that was the idea I got anyway: that he had elaborated on the concept of putting your hand up a glove puppet’s arse. He was talking about digging Gordon out some day. About time, I should think.
posted by martin at 3:54 PM
1 Comments:
those who have holiday homes at Lakeside deserve to be terrorised.
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