Not so Fun(ny) Games
Ash and I wanted to relax with a movie last night because it was kind of a stressful day for both of us. There wasn't really anything we were dying to see at the RedBox self-serve movie dispenser at Safeway, but we decided to take a chance on a "Funny Games." It was listed as a horror movie and the concept sounded vaguely like the plot of the "Saw" series, which I am a fan of.
Turns out, that's not really what the movie was about at all.
I won't be spoiling anything by telling you this, but the plot revolves around two soft-spoken, psychotic blond-haired blue-eyed Nazi poster boys who proceed to pick off every member of a well-to-do waspy family on vacation, starting with the dog. As it is made clear within 10 minutes of the film's start time, they aren't going to make it and almost the entirety of the nearly two hour frustration-thon is the slow decent into this.
"I wanted to wring Haneke's neck—a reaction he no doubt would have taken as a sign of his movie's success," wrote David Ansen in his Newsweek review of the flick. "Haneke, you see, means this exercise in cinematic sadism as a critique of the typical way Hollywood movies exploit violence on screen and turn the viewer into a bloodthirsty consumer of cheap thrills. It's this moralistic finger-wagging—scolding us for lapping up what he's serving—that makes 'Funny Games' so infuriating."
And infuriating is the exact word I began applying to this movie while I was waiting for it to finish. Don't get me wrong I am not a prude, I just didn't see the point behind making a movie where the main characters have no chance of making it and never do. The movie is shot extremely well and after having a few hours to digest what I've seen I think I understand what he's trying to say. It doesn't mean I enjoyed it or will ever want to watch it again. Honestly the entire could have begun and concluded in the space of a short film as most of the run time is taken up by the real-time squirming of the embattled family. Yuck.
My favorite Coen Brothers movie is "The Big Lebowski," but I'd still have to say "No Country For Old Men" is their masterpiece. I was haunted by "No Country" and it will be a long time before I revisit again, but I've seen "Lebowski" probably close to a hundred times and it's still a welcome guest to my DVD tray any time.
Well done does not always equal fun.