Argh fucked up the first link. New film

well?

i don't know Funny Games.

tell me what you think happened at the end of Hidden?

Warning. discussion of movie ending coming up. Spoiler alert. spoiler alert **

Was it the two sons in cahoots? Cos you see them talk to each other outside of the school. Or is someone still watching him and his family? The final scene indicates that the surveillance is ongoing etc.

I really don't see the point of remaking this. Especially not with Naomi 'Wooden' Watts as the main female lead.

i just did a search on funny games. I haven't seen it but vaguely remember some brouhaha over it.
Can we talk about Hidden?
this is the Michael Haneke thread.

it's about as pointless as remaking nikita as the proffessional

Ahhh, Knomadix, don't you mean remaking Nikita as The Assassin (as in John Badham’s remake)?

The Professional is the US name for Léon, the film starring Jean reno and a 12-year-old Natalie Portman. I think the yanks may have done a remake of it too, but can't remember what it was called (if it ever existed)

But yes, Gorn, Funny Games is one of the most harrowing films of all time. And yes, remaking it is a stupid, sychophantic idea, kinda like remaking The Vanishing.

Damn parochial, insular yanks.

What a pointless exercise. Watching Funny Games was one of the most intense, and at the same time enjoyable, movie experiences ever. Just thinking about the movie creeps me out a bit.

i can't imagine haneke doing a straight remake - it's not his style. i think the remake of funny games is a front for a film he wants to do subverting amercian politics/values.

you'd never get haneke making the same film twice.

hmmm, yes I may have mixed up two films there.

i agree with djb. it might have the same premise and some naked city music, but it'll be about the american ruling class not the european bourgoisie.

and i think the professional was a remake of john casavetes' "Gloria."

tell me what you think happened at the end of Hidden?

Sister, I think both of the ideas that you listed could have happened. Haneke wanted to make it ambiguous. There's just something about this film that I can't pinpoint that I love very much. Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche both are stunning. I love how the past just keeps creeping up on Auteuil's character in such a creepy way, and how he is forced to deal with his innate middle-class arrogance.

Naomi 'Wooden' Watts

I actually really like Naomi Watts. This film would test her though!!!

i can't imagine haneke doing a straight remake - it's not his style. i think the remake of funny games is a front for a film he wants to do subverting amercian politics/values.

I agree. Might have been the only way for him to get American funding or something. He won't do a straight remake. It's going to shock the fuck out of a lot people who don't know what they are in for!

i love the way his character is similar to the French tv intellectual Bernard-Henry Levy who was born in Algeria in the late 1940s.
Hidden is like a veiled threat.

here's a little bio of him from some who's who of France. I want to find out if the French have written about their similarities and what that means.

Bernard-Henry Levy (born 1948) is a typical example of French "intellectuels" ; once a "new philosopher" with a couple of rather brilliant books ("la barbarie à visage humain), he is now somewhere between a writer and a show-biz hero, with his wife, the glamourous actress Arielle Dombasle. In 2005, his book "American Vertigo" was quite controversial.

but no-one else on the internet seems to have seen the connection.

Interesting theory. I'll have to read up on Levy.

big Vanity Fair piece a couple of years ago.

but they don't have a working archive unfortunately.
here's wikipedia on him

Often referred to today simply as BHL, Lévy was born in Béni-Saf, Algeria on 5 November 1948. His family moved to Paris a few months after his birth. His father, André Lévy, was the multi-millionaire founder and manager of a timber company (Becob).

After attending the Louis-le Grand lycée in Paris, he enrolled in the elite and highly-selective Ecole Normale Supérieure in 1968, from which he graduated with a degree in philosophy. Some of his professors there included prominent French intellectuals and philosophers Jacques Derrida and Louis Althusser. Lévy is also a pre-eminent journalist, having started his career as a war reporter for Combat, the famous underground newspaper founded by Camus during the Nazi occupation of France. In 1971, he traveled to the Indian subcontinent, and was in Bangladesh covering the war of independence against Pakistan. This experience was the source of his first book, Bangla-Desh, Nationalisme dans la révolution ("Bangla-Desh, Nationalism in the Revolution"), which was published in 1973.

Returning to Paris, he became famous as the young founder of the New Philosophers (Nouveaux Philosophes) school. This was a group of French intellectuals who were disenchanted with communist and socialist responses to the near revolutionary upheavals in France of May 1968, which articulated a fierce and uncompromising moral critique of Marxist and socialist dogmas years prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union.[1] In contrast to the neo-conservatism of ex-leftist anti-Marxist American intellectuals, however, neither Lévy nor the New Philosophers embraced capitalist ideology on the rebound.[citation needed] Throughout the 1970s, he taught a course on epistemology at the Université de Strasbourg and philosophy at the Ecole Normale Supérieure. It was in 1977, on the television show Apostrophes, that Lévy was presented, alongside André Glucksmann, as a nouveau philosophe. In the very same year he published Barbarism with a Human Face (La barbarie à visage humain), arguing that Marxism was inherently corrupt.

In 1981 he published L'Idéologie française ("The French Ideology"), arguably his most influential work.

He is married to French actress Arielle Dombasle. His eldest daughter by his first marriage, Justine Lévy, is a bestselling novelist. He is a member of the Selection Committee of the Editions Grasset, and he runs the La règle du Jeu ("The Rule of the Game") magazine. He writes weekly a column in the magazine Le Point and chairs the Conseil de Surveillance of La Sept-Arte.

As his father André died in 1995, Bernard-Henri became the manager of the Becob company, until it was sold in 1997 for 750 millions francs to the French entrepreneur François Pinault.

[edit]
Philosophy, social criticism, and personality
Lévy was one of the first French intellectuals to call for intervention in Bosnia in the 1990s, and spoke out early about Serbian concentration camps. In 2003, he wrote a compelling account of his efforts to track the murderers of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who had been executed by Islamic extremists the previous year. At the time of Pearl’s death, Lévy was visiting Afghanistan as French President Jacques Chirac's special envoy.[2] He spent the next year in Pakistan, India, Europe and the United States trying to uncover why Pearl's captors held and executed him. The resulting book, Who Killed Daniel Pearl?, argues it was because Pearl knew too much about the links between Pakistan's secret service, nuclear scientists and al-Qaeda. The book won widespread praise, not least for Lévy's courage in investigating the affair in one of the world's most dangerous regions.

Lévy is, with his third wife, actress Arielle Dombasle, a regular fixture in Paris Match magazine, wearing his trademark unbuttoned white shirts and designer suits. Lévy's reputation for narcissism is legend.[3] One article about him coined the dictum, "God is dead but my hair is perfect."[4] He once said that the discovery of a new shade of grey left him "ecstatic." [citation needed] He is a regular victim of cream pie flinger Noël Godin,[5] who describes Lévy as a vain, pontificating dandy. In 1997, Lévy directed Dombasle in his first feature film, Le jour et la nuit: she starred opposite Alain Delon, who played a writer clearly based on Lévy himself.[citation needed]

In March 2006 a letter Lévy co-signed entitled MANIFESTO: Together facing the new totalitarianism with eleven other individuals (most notably Salman Rushdie) was published in response to violent and deadly protests in the Islamic world surrounding the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy.

Critics of Lévy are not limited to pie-throwers, however; French journalists Jade Lindgaard and Xavier de la Porte, in a biography of the philosopher, claimed that "In all his works and articles, there is not a single philosophical proposition." The book is contested, however, and Lévy sought legal action against the authors.[6]

Trailer for the remake of Funny Games

It looks OK but I still don't understand why he's done what looks like a scene for scene remake of his own film.

Yes, odd, but at least it aint Gus Van Sant...

I meant seen Amour already, 2 posts ago.

Amour is incredible.

Flawless direction. Stunning performances. Haneke is basically the greatest filmmaker alive today.

Agreed Gorn. Beautiful film. Amazing stuff.

fuck i'm annoyed that i missed out on this.

Woolfat, in my experience just about every sold out film pops back to 'selling fast' at some point, if you keep your eyes on your wishlist. It'll quite possibly fill a ''Surprise Screening'' slot too. Think I'll get along if I can too.

Loved 'Amour'. His films really stay with you for days after, hey?

I want to see Amour!

Just finished Seventh Continent - jeepers! Think it really benefited from the fact it was my first Haneke film since Time of the Wolf that I went in with no prior knowledge aside from the title. Such a harsh film, but the radical-renovation montage two thirds in is really oddly satisfying. On to White Ribbon!

I loved the Seventh Continent - probably my favourite Haneke.

is the white ribbon any good?

is the white ribbon any good?

Yes, it's great

Saw 'Amore' tonight.

Most boring and depressing film I have seen in a long time. I walked out after 45 minutes and went skating. It's incredibly dull. The skivvy-wearing MIFF shmoofters probably liked it but they love pretentious European guff. Disappointing because The White Ribbon was a good film.

Oops, spelling mistake. 'Amour'.

Have to take you to task on calling 'Amour' pretentious guff. Exactly the opposite. Found it to be an almost too real in its depiction of a situation sadly I've seen many people go through. It's a shame you thought it dull and depressing but that seems a little reductive. Calling it depressing is easy to say that given the subject matter when really its not really about sickness and dying at all. I think the way Haneke deals with the movie makes it into something that in lesser hands might have been schmaltzy and laid on thick with sentiment.

there was no nangs, steveholt.

Saw 'Amore' tonight.

just as well though... for the embrace of dean martin's (or for that matter, jerry lewis' via the caddy) crooning refrain would've been the cushioning finality no stuffy austrian could have foreseen ...

he is basically the best director of the last 20 years.

i plead hungarian, russian, and portuguese on this matter, but the world is definitely a bigger place than i remember it to accommodate :)

everyone's different, dzerz. i don't necessarily agree either but i do think he's an incredibly important director.

Late to the game, just saw Amour. Phew. Haneke sure is one of the most brilliantly brutal directors around. For some reason I was reflecting on how broad the field of cinema has become. An experience like this and, say, Iron Man 3, seem about as closely related as a human and a millipede.