2008 Favorites: Michael Haneke's/Funny Games

I was so taken with this movie that I will never recommend it to anyone. Haneke American-ized his decade old Austrian mindfuck and by doing so strengthened it's impact instead of diminishing it. Funny Games is about American movies and American audiences, and the subtitles and Euro-centricities of the original distanced the film from it's subject. Now with the barrier removed it plays even more as intended: a meditation on the festering wound of the American film going psyche. The film's detractors call it didactic and exploitative. Perfectly true, but precisely the point. The moralizing tone Haneke adopts is a perversion of prestige film pretension (see: Ed Zwick and Paul Haggis), while the manipulation of space and time are no more extreme than your average summer tentpole - only here it serves to undermine the audience's expectations instead of gratifying them. The rise of the torture porn genre and other various grotesqueries in the years between the original and the remake merely underline Haneke's argument. There is no audience for this film in America.