Funny Games (1997 and 2008)

Like many, I saw the trailer for 2008’s upcoming Funny Games first:

And then I looked at the trailer for 1997’s Funny Games:

…and said “Wait a minute, this is the 2008 trailer,” until it cuts to the family in the car and it’s not Naomi Watts and Tim Roth.

Up to a certain point, the trailer for the 2008 remake remakes the trailer for the 1997 original. Awesome.

The 1997 trailer is shorter and nastier. There’s blood. There are weird things going on we can just barely glimpse. We get the sense that the trailer can’t actually show us very much. That there’s deviant shit in the movie that you can’t show in a trailer.

Same with the 2008 trailer. This one’s a bit longer, and is edited like the Clockwork Orange trailer (which inspired the Rules of Attraction trailer). The “action beats” of the 2008 trailer are weirdly…inactive. You see a lot of cuts to things that don’t look especially violent. Which suggests — to me, anyway — that the actual movie is pretty rough stuff. Why? Well, look at some of the Rotten Tomatoes blurbs for the 1997 film:

“Alternately infuriating and harrowing” … “Sadistic, insufferable, clever, and relentlessly compelling” … “A firestarter for post-screening arguments, alight with ghastly images and actions” … “A loathsome experiment in violence. Enter at your own risk.”

The 1997 film was directed by Michael Haneke. Who also directed the 2008 remake. Will the remake be as harsh as the original? Someone reviewed it for AICN, but who knows whether anything on AICN is legit? We’ll have to wait till February to see…

~ by Rob Gonsalves on October 10, 2007.