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Funny Games

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Funny Games 2007 Violence and double standards / Funny Games 2007 La violencia y doble moral@yennysferm71872d
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  1. Funny Games (1997) - Movie Review@coldsteem2706d

    Funny Games is another film where I part from the crowd.  The film has a decent 7.6 rating at IMDb.  Those ratings make me scratch my head, because I found the film to be tedious and brooding.  The few twists that the film delivered were reality-bending scenes that did more to erode credibility than they did to add suspense.

    Funny Games is an Austrian film released in 1997.  The film opens with an apparently affluent Austrian family heading into the country to a vacation home.  They are greeted rudely by their long-time neighbors before settling into their own vacation home.  While the father (Georg, played by Ulrich Muhe) and young son (Schorschi, played by Stefan Clapczynski) are down at the boat docks preparing their sailboat, the mother (Anna, played by Susanne Lothar) has an unexpected guest named "Paul" (Arno Frisch).

    Anna lends four eggs to the teenage visitor, whose polite facade hides an insidious ulterior motive.  The eggs are simply the impetus to begin the "games."  After dropping the eggs, Paul asks for four more, which end up with a similar fate.  The youngster is joined by his friend "Peter" (Frank Giering) who immediately begins a "logical" inquisition into the situation leading to a confrontation with Georg.  Georg ends up experiencing the first blow of many when a golf club connects with his leg (doing more damage than the blow appeared to be capable of).  Thus begins the no-holds-barred game, whose rules are written (and re-written) by Peter and Paul.

    Although called a game, the concept is nothing more than a boring exploration of violence and terror.  The violence is intimate and does not spare sensitivities.  If you are an animal lover...prepare to be angry.  If you think violence against children is hard to stomach, find another film.  This film provides "equal opportunity" examples of violence that finds any target it comes in contact with.  A few clues are planted to provide the inevitable "sole survivor" with opportunities to be victorious.  But this film thwarts any opportunity for freedom that it allows.  In fact, the degree of chance that is permitted in this film made it even harder for me to accept.

    The script wasn't bad.  The dialogue included some interestingly deep (but twisted) discussions.  The film content was troubling, which is likely what everyone else liked about the film.  There were no neat bow-ties or fairy tale endings.  It breaks from the mold of this genre which might be refreshing.  However, the elements that challenged reality or even statistical likelihood nagged at me.  I felt as though the script was manipulative and protracted.  The writing had strong elements, but the characters were flat and it lacked cogency.

    Funny Games featured some strong performances.  I thought Muhe was incredible in his award winning film The Lives of Others.  He had another strong performance in Funny Games but was relegated to whipping-boy status.  Lothar was decent in the stronger role of the two.  I didn't really believe the chemistry between them, but individually they were good.  Frisch and Giering were menacingly good.  They had an interesting combination of country club etiquette and pure evil.  The acting was the redeeming quality I found in the film.

    I cannot watch a film based on acting alone.  How many flops have featured an all-star cast?  Too many to count.  Funny Games was well cast but squandered away an opportunity to be different and still be credible.  For the sake of marching to a different drum, the film stretched reality to the snapping point.  I was in disbelief when the film went that direction and felt as if one single scene ruined the entire experience for me.  The indiscriminate violence was disturbing, but I could live with that if the film had managed to stay closer to reality.  Because of the requirement to suspend belief, I have to non-recommend this film.  4/10.

    Trailer and images subject to copyright.

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  2. Funny Games (1997 Film): Do you enjoy watching violence on a screen? Then you should watch this movie.@martinmcfly2829d

    Michael Haneke, the director of the film, once said that if Funny Games became a blockbuster, it was because people had not understood it. He has also commented on numerous occasions that what was proposed with her was not to make a horror movie, but a reflection on media violence. An anti-horror movie, which is what it really is. It is a film in which the theme is above the narrative, and of course many times that ends up being more controversial than the representation of violence on screen, something of which there is very little.

    Source <<

    The film tells the story of a bourgeois family who drives by car, with the sailboat in the trailer, to his summer house, next to the lake. Parents play to guess what song sounds in the player, always putting pieces of classical music, in a stereotype of what is supposed to be bourgeois culture. The alteration of normality comes when Händel stops sounding to burst, like extradiegetic music, the thunderous chords of John Zorn, a group of thrash-punk. With that dissonance the film explains that a disturbing element is going to be introduced into the life of that peaceful and sweetened family, shaking its foundations, when a family that is preparing to spend a few days in their summer house next to the lake and, without any justification, they are abducted and tortured sadistically and cruelly by a couple of young people who say that they are guests of the neighboring family.

    The paradox is that everyone who sees Funny Games waiting to see a typical movie of suffering and psychopaths will not find what they are looking for, but it is precisely that type of viewer that should see this movie. This is so because the nonsense of the action perpetrated by the two young people is the perfect reflection of the nonsense of watching violence on the screen and enjoying it, thus sponsoring the fictional show of those things that we would reject outright in reality.

    Source <<

    Raw and direct, the film does not seek to be simple in its viewing and builds a narrative based on continuously challenging what the viewer believes it should expect. Long and tense plans dedicated to relatively banal activities replace violence, blood and blows, which always happen outside the screem and from which only the audio is given, leaving us with honey on the lips, facing our dark and violent desires but without pleasing those desires at any time.

    There are many coincidences between A Clockwork Orange and Funny Games. In the first place, the delinquents dress with clean white clothes, and the leader assumes a cultural leadership that leads him to express himself in a refined way and to adopt exquisite manners, such as offering to heal the leg of the victim after having struck him. Each request of the two aggressors is accompanied by a please, which contrasts sharply with the violence that lies behind their educated appearance.

    Breaking with all the conventions of the genre and depriving his audience of any kind of morbid satisfaction that the aggressiveness he sees on the screen offers, the director creates an intelligent argument against the representation of violence in the cinema and offers us a of the most wisely self-reflective films in the history of this art.

    Source <<

    It's a great movie. But it is also true that there are people who do not support it for several reasons. I love it and, in any case, I think it's one of those films that do not leave anyone indifferent.

    See you in the future!

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