Conan the Barbarian: bludgeoning the classics

Steel versus sorcery, self-reliance versus hegemony, cold brutality versus hot sadism: there’s plenty of dramatic conflict inherent in Robert E. Howard’s oft-revived and re-tooled Conan tales, yet the only discernible conflict in director Marcus Nispel’s new Conan the Barbarian concerns the battle between the forces of inspiration and those of crass cynicism. The latter triumphs utterly.





Neither spectacularly awful not awfully spectacular, this new Conan makes good on none of its promises nor builds any momentum. A protracted prologue (with narration from Morgan Freeman!), which follows our titular barbarian from the womb (I mean this literally) through to childhood trauma, attempts to infuse the story with some psychology yet fails to produce a Conan half as compelling as Schwarzenegger’s far more single-minded embodiment. Once adult Conan (Jason Momoa, sneering with conviction and plenty buff, though he’d surely look more at home jumping off the top rope than fencing with sand demons) sets upon on his quest to avenge his father’s gruesome death, the film shifts into a steady and mind-numbing series of fight sequences, none of which are very imaginative nor support a coherent set of rules regarding the magical powers of its baddies.





John Milius’ 1982 Conan the Barbarian was an economical fantasy that thoughtfully embraced the savagery of its milieu and made its hero an emblem for its director’s anti-authoritarian, neo-anarchist beliefs and its singularly self-adoring star’s superman self-image. It also featured a wonderfully seductive villain in wigged James Earl Jones, was extremely entertaining and well-structured (the script came from Milius and Oliver Stone), and functioned as an interesting foil to Apocalypse Now (which was scripted by Milius and features a similar trajectory and virtually identical climax).





With its somewhat different narrative thrust (“arc” is too dynamic a term... come to think of it so is “thrust”), the new Conan can’t exactly be called a remake (despite echoes of the earlier film in the score and some of the choreography), but neither can anyone familiar with Milius’ film help but compare the two. The only things to recommend it are supporting performances from Ron Perlman and Conan’s martyred dad and Rose McGowan as the goth sorceress daughter of Conan’s adversary. Her inevitable demise during one of the film’s umpteen endings is almost a disappointment, but hardly enough to invoke “the lamentations of the women.”

In high Gere, with nowhere to go: Breathless

There’s this scene in Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960) where Jean Seberg holds up a reproduction of a Renoir for Jean-Paul Belmondo’s approval. “It’s not bad,” says Belmondo. “Renoir’s a really great painter,” says Seberg. Belmondo doesn’t budge: “I said it’s not bad.” Not to put too fine a point on it, but that’s a little like my feelings about Breathless itself. It formed the crest of the French New Wave. It’s a landmark on several fronts. Godard’s one of our true geniuses. But once you know more of Godard’s work and comprehend his debut’s historical significance, Breathless is finally, by the high standards set by Godard and his peers, not bad. In any case it’s no horrifying sacrilege to me that it was remade some years later, in Hollywood, with way more money, and Richard Gere. Worse things have happened to the movies. And Godard's Breathless is still there for us to see whenever we want.

The other Breathless (1983) was directed by Jim McBride, whose David Holzman’s Diary (1967), was not without its own postmodern ambitions. McBride co-wrote it with Holzman star Kit Carson, who wrote significant parts of Paris, Texas (1984). This Breathless reverses a number of Godard’s configurations: the girl’s a Parisian in America, rather than an American in Paris; the mise en scène’s characterized by flamboyant, art-directed artifice (rear projection, gels that swath entire scenes in one primary colour) rather than guerilla-style filmmaking (which yields its own sort of artifice); it attempts (rather laughably) to justify its characters’ actions, to psychologize them, rather than chalk their violence and betrayals up to genre dictates. Yet it shocked and sort of fascinated me just how faithful the other Breathless is to the story (if not the spirit) of the original, with Gere’s compulsive criminal, now very clearly a sociopath, killing a cop, living on the lam, and even resurrecting several of Belmondo’s gestures, such as his uses for newspapers. Instead of Bogart, he idolizes the Silver Surfer, which I like if for no other reason than every time he reads a Silver Surfer comic Brian Eno and Robert Fripp’s magical, woozily beautiful Evening Star bubbles up on the soundtrack. These are for me the best moments in the movie.

But man, there’s something unnerving about Gere talking to himself (sometimes in funny voices, sometimes vaguely ethnic), or singing (Jerry Lee Lewis), or dancing, with such utter, blazing conviction. I mean it. You have to admire it. Gere's on fire here, and it can be tough to watch. You might say that something in his performance, along with aspects of the narrative itself, looks forward to Nicolas Cage and his Elvis-loving Sailor in Wild at Heart (1990), though the latter film is obviously far more focused and confident in its stylistics, even if its particular mania has proved equally divisive. It’s amazing how much of Breathless Gere manages to spend shirtless, the character’s narcissism dovetailing nicely with what would appear to be the actor’s. “I know I’m crazy,” he says. “I can’t help it.” Poor guy. But here's the sticky question: are we actually supposed to like him? It’s hard to tell, and it only gets harder as thing go on. And on, and on. There’s a bit where Gere and the girl get busy in a movie theatre while Gun Crazy (1950) plays behind them. I found myself wishing they’d get out of the way so I could just watch Gun Crazy. At one point we see a bus stop advertising the Hollywood Wax Museum. It’s very apt. McBride’s adoration of cinema’s past lacks the same level of critical inquiry or playfulness we find in Godard (that's a lot to live up to, I know), so his Breathless, however curious an artifact, however weirdly entertaining, feels only intermittently breathless and rather often lifeless.

Piranha 3-D: Beach blanket bloodbath, barf-bags may be required

Alexandre Aja’s third horror remake kicks off with Richard Dreyfuss getting sucked into an astonishingly lame-looking computer-generated whirlpool before being gobbled by two-million year-old killer guppies. Dreyfuss’ cameo is meant to remind the amnesiacs in the audience of Jaws, though wouldn’t it have been more in keeping with the monumental crassness of Aja’s Piranha to somehow digitally resurrect Roy Scheider and shove him into this innovative new product for inducing vomit? That’s not hyperbole, incidentally—there are at least two acts of vomiting in the movie itself, and only one is performed by a piranha.

Wasn’t the first third of Saving Private Ryan supposed to be a comedy? Apparently that’s the sort of “high-concept” that gets green-lit these days, resulting in this brazenly cynical, simultaneously tedious and upsetting beach blanket bloodbath, quite possibly the only summer fare that includes both Academy Award-winning actors and porn stars in its cast, not to mention the chubby kid from Stand By Me. Funny thing is, I’m not sure which camp gives the worst performances. At least valiant Elizabeth Shue looks like she’s trying, and Christopher Lloyd is nearly amusing in the Sam Jaffe expository scientist bit, though he doesn’t have to work as hard as Sperm Overload 3’s Gianna Michaels, playing a topless parasailing appetizer.

Scripted by Josh Stolberg and Peter Goldfinger, the story’s at once risibly sentimental and utterly heartless, winkily aware of its own irritatingly idiocy yet idiotic nonetheless. It concerns Sheriff Shue trying to evacuate an Arizona resort upon discovering swarms of hungry cannibal piranhas released from captivity while some mannequin who’s supposed to be her teenage son absconds from babysitting duties to hang on a boat with Jerry O’Connell’s insufferable moron with a movie camera, who’s supposedly making pornography. Of course Shue can’t get those pesky spring breakers to exit the water, and soon enough all those dozens of young women Aja worked so hard to get out of their bikinis are ripped to shreds, not only by piranha teeth but also the outboard motor of some scumbag foolishly trying to escape the massacre. After seeing Piranha you may want to undertake hypnosis to get its images out of your head.

It strikes me that O’Connell’s would-be director is actually a pretty obvious stand-in for Aja. While he’s clearly no match for Aja in the sadistic misogyny department, all O’Connell wants for the first half of Piranha is to shoot naked tits, yet his most vivid expression of amazement occurs when he sees one of his honeys consumed by piranhas, who possess the showmanship to penetrate her from below and exit through her mouth. Soon after O’Connell’s back on his boat, half-mutilated, paraphrasing Eric Roberts in The Pope of Greenwich Village. “They took my penis,” he gasps, as though he wasn’t impotent to begin with. But he’s impotent in 3-D! Feeling entertained yet?

The Thing: Fear the familiar face!

When Hollywood endeavored to remake The Thing From Another World (1951), the late screenwriter Bill Lancaster wisely opted for a radical re-imagining, going back to the source material for inspiration, a novella by John W. Campbell Jr. entitled Who Goes There? Chief among the distinctions between The Thing From Another World and what would simply be called The Thing (82) was the decision, very much in keeping the Campbell’s narrative, to render the titular alien not as an angry salad bar in human form but rather an interplanetary chameleon, a parasite able to rapidly assume the form of whatever host organism it came into contact with after being thawed out by a Norwegian research team in Antarctica. They say mimicry is the highest compliment.

However, Lancaster’s script also differs from the earlier movie in that it features not a single woman. While the presence of women in the earlier movie could be written off as pandering to a broader audience with the arbitrary injection of a love interest, an argument of equal merit could be made that a great opportunity was lost in the resolve to make this an exclusively masculine story. A feminine perspective could have pleasingly complicated the deeply uneasy, paranoid group dynamics of The Thing, and you have to wonder if the absence of women didn’t emerge above all from squeamishness on the part of the filmmakers, all of them men, who may have felt uncomfortable with desecrating female bodies with the same infamously ferocious and nauseating zeal applied to those of men and canines throughout.

The Thing begins with a pretty corny looking flying saucer crashing into Earth, leaving no ambiguity as to what we’re dealing with from the get-go. There’s only a short, divertingly portentous half-hour or so between this cosmic establishing shot and the first manifestation of the alien presence in the encampment’s Husky cage, with flesh flying off of this poor pooch’s skull like a self-peeling banana, and blood-smeared spaghetti whipping around the room to ensnare the other dogs. The alien’s use of familiar flesh as a sort of Trojan Horse reveals a similar tactic to that of the aliens in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (56), which was also imaginatively updated and remade in a version directed by Philip Kaufman in ’78. But in The Thing, directed by John Carpenter, the process of transfiguration is itself the central concern of the movie. It veers away from the concerns of science fiction and into that of horror, emphasizing repeatedly the body as a site of grotesque violence and chilling anonymity.

The Thing, when not making you want to vomit, is pretty fun, another Carpenter siege drama where evil is evil and the good guys do what it takes. But I can’t help but imagine a David Cronenberg version, a movie far more curious, speculative and precise in its biological exegesis and bearing greater pathos. Undoubtedly Cronenberg, like the scientist in The Thing From Another World, would be more sympathetic to the alien than Kurt Russell, who rarely puts on a hat in the –40 tempests and eagerly torches everything in sight. But maybe we should be imagining a Werner Herzog version. Early in The Thing a characters named Windows tries to get in touch with his colleagues at McMurdo Station, the setting of Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World (07). Would those endearing misfits at McMurdo, spanning many countries of origin and encompassing both genders, have been able to fight off the alien? Or might they have embraced it as just another fellow outsider, far from home and in search of communion?

The postman that just keeps ringing: Jeirchow

Thing about a past is the more of one you’ve got the less you need to talk about it. Thus Jerichow begins with tight-lipped Thomas (Benno Fürmann) leaving a funeral in the company of two men, who take him to an old country house. The deceased, we soon learn, is Thomas’ mother, the house his inheritance. The men, we gather, are old pals who probably won’t be pals much longer. Thomas owes them money and payment’s long overdue. The pals take Thomas’ savings and leave him sapped and abandoned in his own yard. He takes a long nap, woken by nuzzling fawn the next morning. We learn he was a soldier in Afghanistan, now dishonourably discharged. He’s broke, his prospects decidedly narrow. He takes a job harvesting cucumbers.

Until something a little better comes along. By chance, Thomas meets Ali (Hilmi Sözer), a supplier to a number of snack bars in the region. He seems to have a solid business, impressive capital, a significant drinking problem, and a much younger, pretty blonde wife named Laura (Nina Hoss). Thomas helps Ali out of a jam and is rewarded with a job as Ali’s driver. Despite Thomas’ reticence, the men develop a certain masculine camaraderie. It’s a little one-sided, but Ali needs a friend he can trust because he sure can’t seem to trust his wife. Ali’s consumed by jealousy, yet, strangely, he also seems to almost encourage Thomas’ attraction to Laura, who’s even less voluble than Thomas. The three spend more and more time together. Ali drinks far too much. We wait, wondering how long it will take for lust to sprout fangs.

The only other film I’ve seen from German writer/director Christian Petzold is his 2007 feature Yella, which shares interesting similarities with Jerichow: an uneasy relationship between automobiles and water; an unexpected business opportunity on offer with a minimum of questions asked; a steady narrative progression built upon just the right number of expository clues to keep us intrigued; and Hoss, whose striking beauty is odd enough to encourage our interest and whose mere gaze feels at once vulnerable and guarded. The most distinguishing trait these films share however is extra-filmic. Other than the fact that it’s a personal favourite film of mine, I won’t tell you what the source material is for Yella here, since there’s a great pleasure to be found in recognizing it yourself, and anyway if you really want to know you can find out easily enough elsewhere. But I will tell you that the inspiration behind Jerichow is one of the great hard-boiled crime novels of the 20th century, one that’s been explicitly adapted into two Hollywood movies and surreptitiously drawn upon by many, many more.

Jerichow takes as its blueprint James M. Cain’s enduring and infinitely malleable 1934 novel The Postman Always Rings Twice, shaking it to life by focusing on different aspects of it than previous incarnations. The doomed scheme undertaken by the lovers out of desire and a healthy dose of greed occurs far later in the proceedings. There’s less time spent generating the sexual connection between Thomas and Laura—whose name even rhymes with Cain’s Cora—and more spent nurturing the peculiar pathos of Ali, who’s outsider status as a dark-skinned, rather unsavoury immigrant matches that of Cain’s Greek truck stop proprietor. Thus Petzold imbues Jerichow with a subtle commentary on modern German multiculturalism, making Ali seem destined to always be regarded an Other, a lonely man far from his homeland with a wife he essentially purchased—Laura, like Thomas, has a shady past that we’ll learn just enough about to help us understand what she’s willing to do to escape it. In an especially sly nod to Cain’s text, the first explosion of physicality between Thomas and Laura is so intense as to draw blood. Yet in one of numerous twists on Cain’s text, Petzold swaps which gender fissures the flesh of the other.

Petzold has crafted here a satisfying neo-noir, mining a seminal proto-noir narrative for his set-up while rigorously exploring the alternate routes it might take. His cool, unobtrusive style avoids expressionistic flourish and is not invested in any noir or neo-noir traditions. It seems to arise from an individual worldview and an affection for genre only exceeded by an investment in finding variations that speak to a new audience. Where it all ends is clever and unexpected, though it’s so terse it may leave some hungry for a denouement on par with Cain’s gritty end of the line. For others, the final scene might just feel like the perfect cliff to drop off of, a vertiginous plunge into the abyss that may itself inspire yet further ventures into this fecund territory of sordidness and longing.

12 men, voluble, tired, not so angry

“Everything here is very Russian somehow,” muses one of the 12 in 12, Burnt by the Sun director Nikita Mikhalkov’s reconvening of 12 Angry Men in contemporary Moscow. The boy on trial for killing his father is now a Chechen and saddled with all the unfortunate baggage that entails. The jurors are still all men, though, as the truncated title implies, they’re not all that angry anymore. This is Russia, after all, and postwar American presumptuousness and obliviousness has been replaced by post-Soviet cynicism and fatigue. Even the lone initial holdout on the required unanimous decision of guilty bares only the vaguest hint of the righteousness, endurance and authority that characterized Henry Fonda’s character in Sidney Lumet’s 1957 sorta classic.

The ostensible Russianness of 12 is compounded by the film’s epic duration, which stays in session for well over an hour longer than its predecessor. Yet the gist of the story’s developments—the airing of racial or classist prejudices, the unearthing of negligent representation of the defendant, the revelation of personal agendas, the swaying of one juror after another—is remarkably faithful to the source material. What makes 12 so long, and what makes it at times feel longer, is a lot of overly elaborate choreography in the school gymnasium that serves as makeshift jury quarters; overlong, melodramatic digressions and tangents on the parts of nearly everyone present; ongoing cutaways to the defendant stoically waiting in his cell; and flashbacks to urban war zones to help us reflect on the sort of unforgiving world the kid comes from. All these elements seem designed to “open up” what was essentially a chamber piece playing out in real-time, but they really just sap the film’s urgency, distract from the issues at hand, and confuse the film’s sense of purpose.

Rather than focus on the ambiguities of justice and the looming threat of infection from reasonable doubts, 12 makes partial attempts to give the audience the trail the jurors never saw—the one the defendant deserved. But the evidence as displayed is wildly inconclusive. All that really matters, or should matter, is what happens in the room. The true tension arises from our inability to know anything more about what really happened than they jurors know, to gradually understand that uncertainty is inescapable, that even if the kid did kill his dad he cannot be lawfully convicted based on what the jurors have been able to glean during the trail.

Of the dozen performers, it’s interesting to note that the strongest, most welcome presence is that of the man quietly controlling everything, onscreen and off. Malhalkov himself plays the jury’s foreman, his large, round shoulders and philosopher’s beard rendering him a grounding force at the head of long table. His character holds a trump card close to this chest until the stretch, a tricky surprise alteration on the original film that’s a curious commentary on the filmmakers’ lack of faith in the Russian legal system and social mores, though it is finally of little consequence with regards to where our story finally falls.

Remake/Remodel: Last House on the Left, Assault on Precinct 13

There are remakes and there are remakes. Remakes, renovations, revisits, re-imaginings. The terms mystify. Some sequels are actually remakes. Some remakes simply regurgitate foreign language hits into English. Some remakes, like Psycho (1998) or Funny Games (07) are close to Xeroxes, yet are often most interesting for revealing all those things in movies that can’t be Xeroxed. There are movies, such as Solaris (02), that we call remakes but are actually going back to the literary sources rather than the earlier movie. There are movies, such as Cat People (82), that we call remakes yet share very little with the earlier movie aside from its title. Some remakes aren’t initially presented as remakes at all, but are. These can be extremely interesting.

Adapted by novelist Ulla Isaksson from a 13th century ballad, Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring (60) is a bracing study in crime and punishment, revenge and repentance. Against Sweden’s larger paradigm shift from paganism to Christianity we see Karin’s transition from childhood to womanhood, a transition brutally interrupted by rape and murder. Soon after discarding her body stripped of valuables in the woods, Karin’s vagabond assailants take refuge in a nearby home. The home, it turns out, belongs to Karin’s family. The parents learn of their daughter’s fate and exact their wrath methodically and without mercy. It could almost be a horror movie.

Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left (72), newly reissued to coincide with the theatrically released remake, is itself a remake of The Virgin Spring. Its source material is uncredited, but justly so: it serves as a skeleton for something genuinely fresh, distinctive and autonomous. Craven’s Mari is, like Karin, pretty, somewhat spoiled, and blooming into a woman. The cultural paradigm shift depicted here however is a sort of reversal of that of 13th century Sweden, with Mari’s womanly awakening coinciding with the sexual revolution and the movement away from Christian values to neo-pagan ones. Craven accounts for the shadow side of this revolution by injecting  elements of violence that vividly recall the Manson murders.

Only a dozen years passed between The Virgin Spring and Last House on the Left, but standards of acceptable content went through their own sort of paradigm shift. Mari appears during the opening credits through an opaquely dappled shower door. She’s clearly naked, but we can’t yet see her nakedness, as though Craven is granting her one final moment of innocence before extinguishing it in a flurry of corruption and butchery. Craven’s rapist/killers force their victims to pee in their pants. They denude and disembowel them, and we see about as much of it as the low-budget camera and effects work provides for. Yet curiously, while Last House on the Left is more shocking than The Virgin Spring in the explicitness of its violence, it never even comes close to reaching its predecessor’s level of soul-chilling brutality. Craven skips Bergman’s final sequence of repentance, opting instead for an abrupt ending, signaled simply by the completion of the killing. Something is missing here, and you don’t need to know The Virgin Spring to feel it. But this absence is itself indicative of something happening in the post-hippie, teen exploitation milieu Craven’s movie inhabits. It is a far sleazier, clumsier movie, and I’d argue there’s something to that. It speaks to its age.

Howard Hawks’ late western Rio Bravo (58) drifts across the screen with an hugely pleasurable lack of urgency. The siege drama unfolds in long breaths, with many arrivals and departures, a slow-building romantic subplot, a musical detour, some elegantly choreographed wordless sequences and a wealth of character development extending out from the more boldly captivating shoot-outs. John Wayne’s Sheriff John T. Chance has to fend off a troupe of well-equipped adversaries who want to free his prisoner, and he only has the truly marvelous Dean Martin’s Dude, a boozer attempting recovery, and Walter Brennan’s Stumpy, a cantankerous old cripple, for deputies. Yet Chance never seems too worried. He’s John Wayne, and this a movie about tough men who don’t apologize, men rendered vulnerable yet incapable of self-pity. The old cliché about courage under fire is embodied here with elegance and depth.

John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13 (76), which was remade a few years back and has recently been reissued in a special edition, is itself a remake. Its roots are not as obvious as Last House on the Left’s, but Carpenter’s sense of indebtedness is made clear from the outset, when the opening credits inform us the editor is someone named John T. Chance. The reconfiguring is more radical, with Rio Bravo's sleepy Texas town traded in for a Los Angeles ghetto, the band of outlaws replaced by what seems like an army of suicidally determined gang-bangers, and, most importantly, Hawk’s relaxed amble is forgone in favour of tautness and severity. Assault is a clipped, decidedly unfussy action movie, which also makes direct nods to Sam Fuller—the child killing—and Akira Kurosawa—the silent waves of baddies closing in—while cementing Carpenter’s particular directorial voice. It’s pretty terrific.

There are goofy, low-rent cop show aspects to Assault you’d never associate with a studio-backed, star-studded class-act like Rio Bravo: Carpenter’s ninja movie all-synth score, the Charlie’s Angels-like cutaways to a plastic speaker during a radio conversation, the sometimes corny lines, ie: “There are no heroes any more; only men who follow orders.” (That line, incidentally, comes from the speaker.) Yet collectively, these elements brim with modest charisma and quiet individuality, traits perfectly in keeping with Hawks’ men and women. And Carpenter’s insertion of a woman into the quartet of cornered, insufficiently armed protagonists who must hold their own against the urban ambush is inspired, simultaneously maintaining a tough-talking, Hawksian spin on heterosexual courtship and infusing their dialogue with an active, modern female presence. Overall, Assault will never be confused with the sort of classical majesty of Rio Bravo, but it’s exemplary of another era and another approach to genre filmmaking, a paragon for anyone trying to breath new life into an old idea.

Know what? Not that funny...

Peter and Paul, the young antagonists in Funny Games, Aryan, clad in stark white, exuding a sort of studied, robotic idea of politeness, seem to spread through the isolated world of the film like some chillingly disaffected infectious disease. These boys move from one country house, one family, to another, each time seeking to exact a more or less identical program of horrifically violent disaster. They begin by penetrating the home through feigning innocence and asking an innocuous favour. They then disarm the resident patriarch and engage the entire clan in a game of terror whose rules are childishly simple yet hopelessly fixed in the assailants' favour. Watching their campaign unfold is like bearing witness to a nightmare of such deadening inevitability as to be, above all, wearying.

For those who’ve followed the work of Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke, watching Funny Games will also provoke considerable, perhaps undesirable, déjà vu. Haneke is not only remaking his own 1997 Austrian film of the same name, but delivering a shot-by-shot duplication: the story, characters, even the lighting, props and layout of the house and surroundings where it all takes place, everything has been lovingly recreated, only this time in English and with English-language actors. The duplication is so precise that while watching the new film the viewer can’t help but become distracted by the most incidental shift in detail. (Hey, there’s soymilk in the fridge this time!)

With regard to the performances, as someone who doesn’t speak German it’s hard to gauge what’s largely a matter of linguistic familiarity. While the characters are virtually unrecognizable as human beings, even sociopathic human beings, Peter and Paul, here played by Brady Corbet and Michael Pitt, do seem slightly more textured. Their victims, Ann, George and little Georgie, likewise have one or two moments that caught me off guard. Executive producer Naomi Watts, who seems to possess a special interest in horror/fantasy remakes (see The Ring, The Ring 2, King Kong and, coming soon, The Birds) is certainly committed, and begins the film with a bit more vulnerability than Susanne Lothar, her 1997 counterpart. Tim Roth, in a role previously played by the late Ulrich Mühe, creates what for me is by far the film’s most affecting moment, the scene in which George, suffering unimaginable shock, barely able to stand, asks his wife to forgive him for not being able to somehow prevent the catastrophe that’s beset their family. Overall however, both versions prompted exactly the same response in me: intrigue, followed by a period of extreme anxiety and repulsion, followed by utter, exasperating boredom, and, once the film was through, a degree of grudging intellectual appreciation.

The ostensible point of Funny Games, in both versions, is to function as a critique of the commodification of violence in movies. The critique filters into the film through numerous, highly calculated attempts at subverting audience expectations. We might expect to see exciting, dynamic violence; we might expect suspense; we might expect to see the antagonists undone by some mixture of ingenuity on the part of their adversaries and unpredictable forces from the world beyond this house under siege: Haneke denies us all of these things. The problem is that what he’s put in their place are the sort of winky alienation techniques you might expect from some annoyingly smarty-pants film student, such as having the antagonists condescendingly talk directly to the camera or, in the film’s most tiresome scene, pick up a remote control and rewind back a few minutes so they can correct events in a way that suits them better. There are simply no identifiable rules, no interior logic, to Funny Games, a fact which no doubt upsets our bourgeois notions of cathartic drama, but nonetheless does little to implicate us any further in what’s unfolding, because to implicate us we’d need to care a lot more.

Let me be clear: I greatly admire the films Haneke’s made since the first Funny Games. Code Unknown, The Piano Teacher, Time of the Wolf and Caché all seem to succeed where both versions of Funny Games fail: they make a deeply troubling spectacle of violence and withhold certain pieces of what would normally be crucial information as a way to coerce our more active participation with the narrative and the many layers of significance inherent in it. In his Cineaste review of the film, Robert Koehler suggests that Funny Games “is best addressed not in terms of whether it actually works on screen, but as an object that spews out ideas.” I agree that you do indeed need to actually see Funny Games to be able to appreciate the ideas it has to offer. But do you need to see it in two languages? Do you even need to see it twice? And furthermore, does a thriller or horror film need to be so loftily schematic and relentlessly cold in order to engage us in questioning how we consume and/or become disaffected by violence? If viewers are required to be self-reflexive anyway, could they not be just as provoked by a smart genre film, say one by Hitchcock, Verhoven or Cronenberg, that’s infused with ideas, auto-critiques and still delivers the goods with regards to emotional investment in story and characters?