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    Funny Games

    I watched a movie yesterday called FunnyGames and I am going to review it for you.

    I saw the end of FunnyGames about three days ago on the thriller channel and I made a mental note to watch it the next time I saw that it was on. When I woke up yesterday morning I went and watched some tv and noticed that FunnyGames was coming up next on the thriller channel so I watched it.

    The reason I wanted to watch FunnyGames after seeing the ending was because at the end of FunnyGames there are these two guys in a boat and they have Naomi Watts with them - and she is tied up and she has tape over her mouth. I found it to be very interesting the way one of the guys pushes her off the edge of the boat into the water to die. Like she is nothing. So I was thinking - what is this? So I googled the movie and noticed that it had gotten very bad reviews and this made me even more interested in watching the movie because people that review movies for a living are all so pathetic and if they do not like something then there is a decent chance that it will be good.

    So, anything that has Naomi Watts in it interests me a lot. When I was about eleven years old one of my friends told me that I should watch this Australian miniseries called Brides of Christ. I was aware of the miniseries Brides of Christ because it was being shown on tv and I would see the commercials promoting it but I had never been interesting in watching a show about nuns. But my friend told me that the young girls at this Catholic convent in the show were using candles to masturbate themselves at night. So after being told that I wanted to see Brides of Christ a lot. So I borrowed the series off someone that had the video set of it and I watched it one weekend - and one of the young girls in the Catholic convent in the series was played by Naomi Watts. I remember thinking that Naomi Watts must be the most beautiful girl in the world after seeing her in Brides of Christ. And I have been a huge fan of Naomi Watts ever since. I remember seeing her in the movie Tank Girl and then she seemed to be in nothing until The Ring, and after that she seemed to be pretty famous - but I have been the biggest fan of Naomi Watts ever since seeing her in Brides of Christ -

    unnamed.jpg

    unnamed (1).jpg

    So whenever I see Naomi Watts I just want to ...... you dont want to know. I am a huge fan of Naomi Watts.

    Ok, so the movie FunnyGames was on the thriller channel but it is not exactly a 'thriller' whatever that is. FunnyGames is what movie review people like to refer to as 'torture porn'. Your average torture porn is mostly what I would describe as being a 'terror movie'. There is a difference between horror and terror. Here, Kingsley Amis does a good job of explaining it -

    I am not qualified to attempt a psychological dissertation and it would bore me anyhow. All I can and need do is draw certain distinctions. A child will enjoy hearing about witches or ghosts partly because he has the security of knowing that there are no witches living in his street and that his house is not haunted. He will not, on the whole, enjoy being told about a homicidal maniac currently on the loose. In the same sort of way , the normal adult, or the normal part of the adults mind, lies gladly open to terrors of a more sophisticated and possibly a more terrifying sort, to tales of delusion or demonical possession or hallucination. Here the enemy to be found, not out in the open like a vampire or werewolf, who can be dealt with decisively enough with a crucifix or intensified security on the night of a full moon. In this deeper kind of tale, the enemy is within, where no silver bullet can reach him.


    The macabre and the horror story ( or horror film ) are traditionally interchangeable terms. What is really meant by horror in this sense, though, is not so much horror as terror.


    - Detours Into The Macabre/Foreword/Kingsley Amis

    So to put it plainly - a terror tale is a scary story that could actually happen - and a horror story is more a scary story about something that is kind of silly and could not happen. We know that there are no such things as werewolves or vampires so even though these things may give us a bit of a scare in a movie we know that what is scaring us is not reality - but with a terror tale this is not the case - what scares you in a terror tale could actually happen and that is what makes the terror tale so terrifying. A lot of terror tales are labelled as being thrillers but if the terror tale is considered to be too dark then it is often labelled as being a so-called 'torture porn'. Some 'torture porn films' that everyone know are the Saw series and the Hostel series.

    I consider films like Hostel, The Human Centipede, Saw, Strangeland, etc to be sick, disturbed and demented. Take the Saw franchise for example. Scenes where a person wakes up wearing a reverse bear trap attached to their jaw that is on a timer is not terror but just plain sick and disturbed. Another Saw scene has a person being pushed into a concrete pit full of dirty needles. There is something very desperate and pathetic about most of these so-called 'torture films' and the people that have made them. These people do not seem interested at all in creating terror so much as impressing its target audience with shocks that are often so very ridiculous that they turn what should be terror into horror. I am not impressed and I think that people like Eli Roth that think up this kind of trash are supremely pathetic. It seems to be all about the big ridiculous money shots with these 'torture porn' people and they do not seem to understand that the lead up to the money shot is where we find the terror - not in the money shot itself. Do you know what I mean? And the more ludicrous the money shot - the less terror you get.

    I consider The Exorcist to be a terror movie because I believe in the Devil. My favourite slasher is Jason Voorhees from the Friday The 13th franchise. Jason is more a horror character than terror because he has the Freddy Krueger ability to come back to life for sequels but the scenario of a homicidal slasher maniac serial killer on a killing spree gives the Friday The 13th franchise a terror aspect - because serial killers do exist. Probably the most extreme terror slasher must be Leatherface from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre film. Breaking down in an isolated rural community and being terrorized by a maniac family of murderers is certainly not likely but it is possible which makes Texas Chainsaw Massacre a terror film more than horror. The Rob Zombie film House of 1000 Corpses is almost pop-terror and seems a light and comical homage to Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Behold......Fishboy! (:

    So now that you understand the difference between a terror movie and a horror movie - we can get to the review of FunnyGames

    So apparently Funny Games is a remake of 1997 Austrian film Funny Games -
    Funny Games is a 2007 psychological thriller film written and directed by Michael Haneke, and a remake of his own 1997 Austrian film Funny Games. Naomi Watts, Tim Roth, Michael Pitt, and Brady Corbet star in the main roles. The film is a shot-for-shot remake of the 1997 film,[2][3][4] albeit in English and set in the United States with different actors.[5] Exterior scenes were filmed on Long Island.[5] The film is an international co-production of the United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Italy.
    - wiki


    And apparently this director Micheal Haneke has made this film Funny Games as a 'reflection and criticism of violence used in media" -
    Haneke has stated that the film is a reflection and criticism of violence used in media.
    - wiki

    Now in my opinion this Michael Haneke guy is just %$%$ing with you when he says that Funny Games is a criticism of violence in media. I do not think that Haneke has made this film to be critical of violence in any way - I think he made this film to try to take film violence to new levels. Violence does not need to be physical - it can be psychological - and it is the psychological violence in Funny Games that soars. Unlike the desperate and pathetic Eli Roth - Haneke seems to understand that terror is not about ridiculous money shots - it is in the anticipation. The film Funny Games gives its audience a feeling of dark anticipation right from the start, and you really get the feeling that Haneke understands the perverse - and that he knows that this film will hurt the brains of the majority of people that see it - and you get the feeling that that is the point. Funny Games is openly hostile to the majority of people that are going to see it and you really get the sense that Haneke deeply understands his audience. Do you know what I mean?

    So like I said - when I googled Funny Games after seeing the ending the other day I noticed that all the reviews for the film were poor. I didnt read any of them but I saw that the google promoted reviewers - rotten tomatoes, IMD, metacritic and Roger Ebert had all given it low scores/ratings. And like I said - the fact that these people did not like the film made me more interested in seeing it than I was already after seeing Naomi Watts' death scene at the end of the movie. I generally do not agree with them but I often enjoy reading the reviews that Roger Ebert and his site give - so after watching the film Funny Games yesterday I thought that it would be funny to read the Roger Ebert review. And it was -

    The new Hollywood edition of "Funny Games," writer-director Michael Haneke's clinical reenactment of his Austrian torture-comedy experiment from 10 years ago, is an attempt to replicate the earlier study under English-language conditions.

    You (the lab rat) are placed in a Skinner box (the movie theater) and subjected to random negative stimuli (filmed violence, as a substitute for painful electrical jolts). Haneke, whose academic background is in psychology, philosophy and theater, assumes the role of empirical taskmaster. He hypothesizes that his box will shock you into a knee-jerk ethical dilemma. To pass the test, you must reject the false premise of the experiment itself (if only on the grounds of insufferable smugness) and walk out.

    An even better response, theoretically, would be to storm the booth and rip the film out of the projector, thus symbolically declaring your refusal to swallow the force-fed medicinal doses of synthesized abuse the film is administering. And if you really wanted to ace the challenge, you would just not see the movie.
    https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/funny-games-2008

    Ha. See I cant help but think that this is exactly the kind of response to Funny Games that Haneke was after when he made Funny Games. Like I said - Funny Games is openly hostile to the majority of the people that are going to see this film.

    But if you liked those pictures from Abu Ghraib, you'll love "Funny Games"! See the captors tighten a pillowcase over a young boy's head, force Mom to strip (no actual nudity shown) by the TV, smash Dad's leg with a golf club and play hide and seek with the body of the family dog they've just killed with the same driver! For the price of a ticket, you can choose the level and nature of your vicarious involvement with the sadism on the screen, and the masochism in your seat. Enjoy.
    https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/funny-games-2008

    (: Wait, it gets better -

    The game's narrative parameters are as follows: A dubiously American bourgeois family -- Ann (Naomi Watts), George (Tim Roth), their pre-teen son Georgie (Devon Gearhart) and their golden retriever -- arrive at their vacation home on Long Island. They are upper-class ciphers who stock soy milk in the refrigerator, feed their dog expensive Wellness brand kibble and keep a Tivoli radio in the kitchen. The attention paid to the details of their conspicuous consumption may or may not express the film's attitude: that these cardboard caricatures somehow deserve to be humiliated, tormented and killed for exhibiting Eurocentric yuppie tastes, including implicitly sinful predilections for golf, boating and classical music. Or maybe the movie is simply suggesting that you give yourself permission to feel that way.
    https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/funny-games-2008

    .... Would anyone that works for the site Roger Ebert really be able to give themselves that permission? ((: I think not. Would any person that reviews films for a living be able to give themselves that permission? Of course not. Can you give yourself that permission?

    Ok. So the two young men that terrorize this dubiously American bourgeois family are what many would describe as 'psychopaths'. A common characteristic of a 'psychopath' in my opinion is that they enjoy %$%$ing with you and for you to know that they are %$%$ing with you - and for you to be unable to do anything about it. It does not matter to the 'psychopath' if you understand what is going on or why - but it is important to the 'psychopath' that you understand that the 'psychopath' is %$%$ing with you. A 'psychopath' does not care what you think about them - your responses are only important so far as they give the 'psychopath' pleasure, or help the 'psychopath' get what he wants. The 'psychopath' isnt trying to give you a lesson or impress anything upon you - the psychopath just enjoys %$%$ing with you. The 'psychopath' does not want or seek your approval in any way like an Eli Roth type does. This is very important. Your responses are all about the 'psychopath' and your side of your responses mean nothing. Do you understand that?

    There is a very good part after one of the two 'psychopaths' have broken the American bourgeois husbands leg with a golf club - and killed the family dog - with the same club! And the two 'psychopaths' have the family in a sitting room - and they are all sitting down talking the situation through and Naomi Watts and her husband want to know why the two psychopaths are doing this. The two 'psychopaths' give a couple of funny explanations that are obviously not true. But they do end up offering that the value of entertainment is important.

    But if you really want to know why a 'psychopath' would brutalize others with physical or psychological violence - it is about the truth. Here, Erich Fromm makes a decent attempt at explaining it in his essay 'The Art of Loving' -
    There is one way, a desperate one, to know the secret : it
    is that of complete power over another person; the power
    which makes him do what we want, feel what we want,
    think what we want; which transforms him into a thing, our
    thing, our possession. The ultimate degree of this attempt to
    know lies in the extremes of sadism, the desire and ability to
    make a human being suffer; to torture him, to force him to
    betray his secret in his suffering. In this craving for penetrat-
    ing man's secret, his and hence our own, lies an essential
    motivation for the depth and intensity of cruelty and destruc-
    tiveness. In a very succinct way this idea has been expressed
    by Isaac Babel. He quotes a fellow officer in the Russian civil
    war, who has just stamped his former master to death, as
    saying: "With shooting — I'll put it this way — with shooting
    you only get rid of a chap. . . . With shooting you'll never
    get at the soul, to where it is in a fellow and how it shows
    itself. But I don't spare myself, and I've more than once
    trampled an enemy for over an hour. You see, I want to get
    to know what life really is, what life's like down our way."
    - The Art of Loving/Erich Fromm

    See unlike most of us - the 'psychopath' wants to know what life really is. See most humans are a lie that do not like or want the truth. One way of knowing a persons true self is to break down the lie by brutalizing them with physical or psychological violence. It is by breaking a person down with physical or psychological violence that you can really get to the soul of a person.

    Another film that I watched recently ( about a week ago ) was the batman movie Dark Night. I had never seen it before but I was kind of curious to see why so many idiots liked this movie. There seemed to be a lot of people that really liked the Heath Ledger Joker character in Dark Night and I have wondered why. I missed the start of Dark Night and I changed the channel before it ended - and in my opinion the Joker character in the movie was pretty stupid - but I really appreciated this line -

    "Do you want to know why I use a knife? Guns are too quick. You can’t savor all the… little emotions. In… you see, in their last moments, people show you who they really are. So in a way, I know your friends better than you ever did. Would you like to know which of them were cowards?" - The Joker (Heath Ledger) The Dark Knight

    See the Joker seems to get it. You are not going to get to the soul of a person by shooting someone with a gun. Unless you start at the feet and drag it out maybe. Or shoot their son in front of them. Do you understand?

    So like I said - Funny Games is very openly hostile to the majority of people that are going to see the film - and director Haneke seems to deeply understand his audience. Know what I mean?

    So with Funny Games it is the dark perverse anticipation that makes the film so great. It is not the money shot that makes the film - it is the anticipation - but Funny Games is not without its money shots. There is a part in the film where Naomi Watts is crying and she actually has snot coming out of her nose - and not a little bit of snot, a lot of snot - its just like hanging out of her nose - and the lead 'psychopath' wipes the snot away from her nose and then brushes her hair back out of her face with the same hand that he just wiped the snot from her nose with - wiping the snot into Naomi Watts' hair. I mean. You are getting very close to the soul of the Naomi Watts character at that point. And not long later the two 'psychopaths have Naomi Watts say a prayer to God. And .....

    unnamed (1).jpg

    It really is a fantastic scene. I honestly cannot believe that Naomi Watts agreed to be in something like this. It is so hot that she did. God. It is one hell of a performance from Naomi Watts I can tell you.

    So, like I keep saying - this film is openly hostile to most people that are going to see it - and the director seems to deeply understand his audience.

    The best example of the hostility that the film Funny Games has for most people that are going to see it are the times when the 'fourth wall' is broken. I will throw back to Ebert to explain -

    Every once in a while, Paul addresses the camera with a conspiratorial smile or a nudge-nudge, wink-wink joke. He guesses that "you [the audience] are probably on their [the victims'] side." He and Peter represent the film's side. What do you want to bet they will win the already-decided bet?
    https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/funny-games-2008

    I am just not so sure that most people that are going to see this film Funny Games should be described as "the audience". Do you know what I am saying? I am not so sure that our two 'psychopaths' are supposed to "represent the films side" whatever that is. In my opinion Paul is not addressing the audience when he breaks the fourth wall - he is addressing most people that are going to see this film. And he is not asking for your approval like Prospero in Shakespeares play The Tempest - the film breaks the fourth wall only to %$%$ with you, and to make fun of you - the film does not care if you are on the side of the victim - and it already knows that most of you are.

    Anyway - I wouldnt want to ruin it for you so I will leave it there. Roger Ebert only gave this film half a star - or 0.5/4. Maybe the half a star was for Naomi Watts' superb performance. Unlike Roger Ebert I really really enjoyed Funny Games and I am going give it two thumbs up.

    Have you seen Funny Games? What did you think of it? If you didnt like it then maybe you dont understand. Do you know what I mean?

    It is terrifying to think that there are actually people out in the world that think like Peter and Paul isnt it?

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    This should be the full length movie.



    I agree with what you said about movies like Saw. Those are not true horror or thriller movies.
    ΜOΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ


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    Thanks Peter - here is a link to Naomi Watts and another young lady getting paddled by a nun - https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1bhigi
    Last edited by TheOneOnly2; 06-18-2020 at 06:07 AM.

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    I watched it last night. It was frustrating, because the victims just let themselves become victims.
    ΜOΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ


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    Okay, on the OP's advice I watched it. I thought every actor/actress played their parts well. It was acceptable until the remote control/rewind thingy.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Perianne View Post
    Okay, on the OP's advice I watched it. I thought every actor/actress played their parts well. It was acceptable until the remote control/rewind thingy.
    That part was stupid.
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    Quote Originally Posted by Peter1469 View Post
    That part was stupid.
    I have absolutely no idea why that part was in the movie. It added nothing to the story.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Perianne View Post
    I have absolutely no idea why that part was in the movie. It added nothing to the story.
    May that "power" was how those two puffs were able to get the jump on everyone without getting their non-straight asses handed to them.
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    Quote Originally Posted by Peter1469 View Post
    May that "power" was how those two puffs were able to get the jump on everyone without getting their non-straight asses handed to them.
    Now that's a good point. If only we had redo in real life?

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