I saw this excruciatingly didactic flick at the 1998 Sydney Film Festival, and to say it made me mad is the understatement of the century! I would hardly describe it as a thriller or horror film, since these are the genres it seeks to deride; it's more a puritanical lecture than anything else.
What's going on in 'Funny Games'? Rich family goes to holiday house. Rich family is imprisoned, beaten, tortured and then some by contrived baddies devoid of any motive. These things are depicted graphically and usually in whatever is the most visceral fashion that the director feels he can get them across, with a particular emphasis on the lack of motive or happy closures, or any kind of relief for the audience. Now, toss in Postmodern self-referential stuff like having the killers wink at the camera (at US!!! OH MY GOD!!!) and talking about the audience getting enough entertainment - eg 'we'll keep beating em up cos there hasn't been a feature film's worth of violence yet' - blah blah blah, to say that we, all of the audience, are complicit in this violence, and you have a conservative faux-intellectual's fantasy.
The drawn out articulation of Funny Games' ideas is so blatant and methodological, that all I feel is this film's contempt for myself, and any other viewer who doesn't buy said ideas. And heck, probably just for the average cinemagoer who might see films to experience all kinds of feelings! It's getting up on a soapbox to attack what it would like to think of as gratuitously violent exploitation films, yet is itself an exploitation film in the worst sense. This film would have you believe that so-called 'motiveless' killings really are 100 percent motiveless. And if it's so progressive, why does it associate classical music exclusively with the family and extreme heavy metal with the bad guys? At every level, Funny Games likes to set up what it sees as high culture versus low culture in general (classical versus rock being just one instance) then says that all this low culture is junk culture and tied in with all this excessive violence that the film wants us to question in the cinema. Totally regressive!
It is probably also a film that's both hypocritical and preaching to the converted at once. As mentioned at the start, I saw this at the 1998 Sydney Film festival. Now, I know a lot of the people there wouldn't give a horror film, for instance, the time of day, believing that the genre was inherently inferior. Yet these same people were content to watch the didactic sadism of Funny Games, knowing that it's directed by an intellectual Austrian and will pat them on the back in the end and reinforce their viewpoint, which is that horror/violence in cinema is trash. I love horror films, and I think there's infinitely more humanism in feeling the fears they can elicit, in confronting your mortality, and in their sincerity and imagination, than in the one-note lecture and violence of 'Funny Games'.
I gave Funny Games my BLACK HOLE award for the film at that festival which SUCKED the most!!
What's going on in 'Funny Games'? Rich family goes to holiday house. Rich family is imprisoned, beaten, tortured and then some by contrived baddies devoid of any motive. These things are depicted graphically and usually in whatever is the most visceral fashion that the director feels he can get them across, with a particular emphasis on the lack of motive or happy closures, or any kind of relief for the audience. Now, toss in Postmodern self-referential stuff like having the killers wink at the camera (at US!!! OH MY GOD!!!) and talking about the audience getting enough entertainment - eg 'we'll keep beating em up cos there hasn't been a feature film's worth of violence yet' - blah blah blah, to say that we, all of the audience, are complicit in this violence, and you have a conservative faux-intellectual's fantasy.
The drawn out articulation of Funny Games' ideas is so blatant and methodological, that all I feel is this film's contempt for myself, and any other viewer who doesn't buy said ideas. And heck, probably just for the average cinemagoer who might see films to experience all kinds of feelings! It's getting up on a soapbox to attack what it would like to think of as gratuitously violent exploitation films, yet is itself an exploitation film in the worst sense. This film would have you believe that so-called 'motiveless' killings really are 100 percent motiveless. And if it's so progressive, why does it associate classical music exclusively with the family and extreme heavy metal with the bad guys? At every level, Funny Games likes to set up what it sees as high culture versus low culture in general (classical versus rock being just one instance) then says that all this low culture is junk culture and tied in with all this excessive violence that the film wants us to question in the cinema. Totally regressive!
It is probably also a film that's both hypocritical and preaching to the converted at once. As mentioned at the start, I saw this at the 1998 Sydney Film festival. Now, I know a lot of the people there wouldn't give a horror film, for instance, the time of day, believing that the genre was inherently inferior. Yet these same people were content to watch the didactic sadism of Funny Games, knowing that it's directed by an intellectual Austrian and will pat them on the back in the end and reinforce their viewpoint, which is that horror/violence in cinema is trash. I love horror films, and I think there's infinitely more humanism in feeling the fears they can elicit, in confronting your mortality, and in their sincerity and imagination, than in the one-note lecture and violence of 'Funny Games'.
I gave Funny Games my BLACK HOLE award for the film at that festival which SUCKED the most!!