It all started with the eggs.... Oh god, the egg scene. How painfully awkward. How painfully ominous. How painfully nerve wracking.

Note to self: If a young blonde man with a Hitler youth haircut comes into my home wearing white gloves asking to borrow eggs, lock all the doors and windows. Or get the hell out while you still can.

Last night was my first viewing of the original German version of Funny Games and this morning, I'm still having trouble putting into words what I just saw. The plot is simple enough. A family of three is held hostage by two young men as they are forced to play their sick "game." This setup is already ripe for loads…

Having already seen the 2007 US remake, i knew the plot, i knew what was going to happen, i knew it was the same film shot-for-shot. Luckily, it was so long ago that the film didn't bore me, and my knowledge of upcoming events made the situation much more anxious and foreboding. It is just as smugly sinister as i recall, and the intro/ending scenes are still among my favorite parts. I enjoyed this a lot more than i remember the 2007 version, which pissed me off no end especially with the rewind scene, maybe the first one caught me off guard when i was not accustomed to Haneke and his antics. The way the two villains lure people in…

Impossible not to compare Funny Games with, for example, Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers and Kubrick's Clockwork Orange, as Tarja Laine did on her interesting but debatable essay about this film, link here.

The three movies have, in fact, lots of similarities, specially because they share the same motivation to criticize violence. Aesthetically, however, we have three very different films. Whilst Natural Born Killers makes you - ironically! - empathises with two sociopaths in order to use the media gun against itself and in Clockwork Orange violence is depicted more like a natural behavior encouraged by the stupidness of the State, in Haneke's masterful film you'll see violence in a more realistic way, with raw colors and exhilarating empathy with…

Director - Michael Haneke
Writer - Michael Haneke
Cast - Susanne Lothar, Ulrich Mühe, Arno Frisch, Frank Giering and Stefan Clapczynski

Trailer

Have you ever felt like you were being shouted at and patronised for something you haven’t even done? Worse still, have you ever been chastised by someone to whom you have no opportunity to defend yourself or your actions? Well, if you haven’t, I suggest you pull up a chair and watch Funny Games. You’ll soon know exactly how it feels…

Funny Games is one of those films that takes self-awareness to a whole new extreme. The concept is simple; audiences have become so desensitised to violence, thanks to American cinema, that they’ll sit through anything to get…

Es un día cualquiera. Quieres ver una película y, de todas las opciones que tienes disponibles, escogiste esta. La premisa es: una familia es torturada por dos jóvenes en sus vacaciones. Tú aceptas verla. Te llama la atención, te la recomendaron... sea cual sea el motivo, ya la estás viendo.

Hay violencia. Curiosamente, esta no es explícita. Tal vez eso la hace más inquietante. Te involucras. Te desconcierta lo desesperantes que son los antagonistas. Uno de ellos voltea a la cámara. ¿Te está retando? Parece que el juego es entre el director y tú,de una manera más directa que lo habitual.

Pensemos que el director está utilizando a estos personajes para decir abiertamente: "Tú quisiste ver esta película. Tienes ciertas…

In this cross between Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf and A Clockwork Orange, two insolent young psychopaths torment a vacationing family.

It was hard to organize my thoughts on this movie, never mind rating it. As a thriller, this is a tense, well-acted, and relentless experience, marred only by a contrived sequence two-thirds through in which characters behave in unbelievably stupid fashion. However, said sequence is preceeded by an incredibly effective ten-minute take. Unusually lengthy takes are often deemed self-indulgent, but this one is anything but.

As an ideological statement, though, this film is a failure. And there is no doubt that writer-director Michael Haneke is trying to make a statement. By having one of the psychos address the camera…